You might not think stout would be good in a cake but combine it with grapefruit, orange, and cocoa and you get a moist, dense cake that’s not too sweet. The Grand Marnier cream cheese frosting adds just the right amount of sugar to make Citrus Chocolate Stout Cake a perfect dessert
When I think of St. Patrick’s Day, I think of shamrocks, Irish songs, Irish stew, potatoes, cabbage and, of course, green beer. I’m not much of a beer fan. In fact, I don’t like beer at all and I especially don’t like dark beers. But I was intrigued when my friend Julianne over at Beyond Frosting made a Chocolate Stout Cake that looked out of this world.
Julianne’s cake required chocolate stout. We don’t have much of a beer selection here in Cambodia so there was no chance of incorporating chocolate stout into a cake but I did find Nigella Lawson’s Chocolate Guinness Cake recipe and a chocolate orange Guinness cake recipe. Julianne’s cake looked much more moist but I liked the idea of adding some citrus to balance the beer flavor. So I decided to take the best parts of both recipes for this one.
The chocolate orange Guinness recipe said that using Seville oranges complemented the stout better than regular oranges. While there is a ton of fruit here in Cambodia, I’ve not seen Seville oranges and Cambodian oranges are much sweeter than American ones. They’re so sweet that tourists often think Cambodian orange juice is an artificial fruit drink. Since the local oranges are too sweet and I opted for grapefruit instead.
Flavorings are also difficult to find here in Cambodia but hard liquor is abundant and some liquors make excellent flavorings. I’ve made my own vanilla but there was no chance of finding orange extract here. I substituted Grand Marnier for vanilla to give my Citrus Chocolate Stout Cake a bit more citrus punch. Lastly, I reduced the sugar in the frosting and added a teaspoon of Grand Marnier to that as well. You can use orange extract instead of Grand Marnier.
Then came the beer. I didn’t see Guinness on my first trip to the grocery store but I was surprised to find a local stout called Black Panther. It was $0.70 per can so the price was right. I looked it up on Rate my Beer and their experts gave Black Panther pretty mediocre scores for a stout. Since I had no intention of drinking it, I figured it was OK for cooking. Citrus Chocolate Stout Cake might come out even better with a good stout but I wouldn’t know a good stout from a bad one anyway.
My springform pan is just under 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter. The recipe calls for a 9 inch springform pan. Since I was worried the batter would overflow the smaller pan, I put most of the batter in my large springform pan and put the rest in a 4 inch springform pan – big mistake. I could have put all of the batter in my 8 inch pan and it would have been fine. The 4 inch pan over flowed and made a mess. It did give me a chance to taste-test the cake before the large one was done but I need to clean my oven today.
Citrus Chocolate Stout Cake
Ingredients
Citrus Chocolate Stout Cake
Grand Marnier Cream Cheese Frosting
Instructions
Grand Marnier Cream Cheese Frosting
Or these Guiness Stout Chocolate Brownies from ATreatsAffair
Wishing I had a slice of this right now!