Chocolate Stout Cake

In honor of the fact that Philadelphia is much more filled with beer than New York seemed to be--at least for us, NYC was all about wine (have I told you about the awesome wine store we used to live near? I still miss it)--Anthony and I are now all about beer. In addition to drinking beer and attempting to brew beer (still in progress in our basement), we have also been baking with beer. I made a nice beer bread, which I didn't photo-document...but even more excitingly, beer-related desserts!

In this case, chocolate stout cake with chocolate stout icing. It's all about the beer and the chocolate, which are a delicious combination. The bitterness of the beer makes the cake not-too-sweet, which I think brings out the chocolate flavor instead of hiding it behind a wall of sugar as chocolate cakes often do. I adapted a Bon Appetit recipe for the cake (via Epicurious and Smitten Kitchen) and a random internet recipe for the icing:

Chocolate Stout Cake

(enough for one 9" or two 6" round cakes)

2/3 c. stout
2/3 c. butter
1/2 c. cocoa (dutch processed is best)


2 eggs
1/2 c. greek yogurt (homemade!)

1 1/3 c. flour
1 1/3 c. sugar
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt


bake ~35 minutes at 350 degrees

Frosting

1 stick butter
1/3 cup cocoa
1/3 cup stout
powdered sugar
(enough to make the frosting the right texture. My base recipe called for 3 1/2 cups, I have no idea how much I used. Measuring how much sugar goes into frosting is just a recipe for feeling guilty about eating too much sugar, in my opinion)

To begin, slowly heat 2/3 c. stout and 2/3 c. butter in a small saucepan, and bring to a simmer. Add the cocoa powder, whisk to combine, and cool while you work on the next steps.

Whisk together the eggs and yogurt (sour cream works too, that's what the original recipe called for) together in a large bowl. Once the Chocolate/butter/stout mixture is cooled, add it to the egg/yogurt mixture. I like to be paranoid about the temperature in this step, to avoid the possibility of some sort of disgusting scrambled egg mixture being created with the addition of too much heat.

At this point the batter should be a delicious chocolatey-looking mixture, pretty smooth-looking. Don't worry about mixing too much, it should be well-incorporated.

Next, mix all of the dry ingredients together, then combine with the wet ingredients. Recipes often tell you to use separate bowls, but I usually find it works to mix the dry ingredients gently on top of the wet ingredients--then you have one less bowl to wash. At this point, don't mix too much. Beat the whole mixture together a couple of times with the whisk, then switch to a spatula and fold it together as gently as possible. Nobody likes a tough cake!

Next, pour the batter into your cake pan(s). This recipe fills two 6" round pans, which is what I used, or one 9" round. I like to butter the pans, line the bottom with a circle of parchment paper, and then put some more butter on top of that. It's sad when you have to mangle your cake just to get it out of the pan, and the layer of parchment really makes a big difference.

Place the pans in the center of the over, pre-heated to 350.  Bake until a toothpick or knife comes out clean, until the internal temperature reaches approximately 210 degrees, or for 35 minutes, whichever results in a cake that's done to your liking. Hey, despite all of the chemistry involved, baking is really more of an art than a science!

Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes or so, then remove from the pan and cool to room temperature on a wire rack.  Finally, layer and frost your cake!  I like to cut each cake into two layers, using a bread knife. If you're careful, you can end up with fairly even layers--as you might be able to tell from this picture, I was not very careful. Obviously I should have had Anthony cut it instead, like I usually do.

To make the icing, simply soften the butter and mix with the rest of the ingredients.  This time you don't have to worry about over-mixing! Adjust the amount of powdered sugar as needed, depending on the humidity, how well you measure the wet ingredients...or how "soft" your butter ends up. I accidentally melted the butter completely, so I added a lot of extra sugar to try to make the frosting stiff enough to actually put on the cake without it oozing off. One of the advantages of having to add more sugar was that we ended up with some extra frosting at the end, which was delicious spread on graham crackers.

Then eat and enjoy! I would say that the reason there's no "finished" after picture is that the cake was so delicious that we ate the entire thing before I could take a picture, but that would be kind of disgusting. In real life I was just too lazy to take a picture at any time during the week and a half or so that we spent eating this cake.

Someday I'm going to post an actual healthy recipe on this blog, but dessert recipes are so much more exciting! Anthony and I actually do eat a lot of vegetables, generally. So far the Green Tomato Pie is still winning for the most vegetable-y recipe on this blog (if you count tomatoes as a vegetable not a fruit...), which is really a little sad. So stay tuned for some nutrition in the near future! Maybe.

Easing back into the food blog...

So after a long hiatus (during which time I finished grad school classes and moved to a different city) it is the triumphant return of the food blog!  My camera is full of pictures of food, and sadly at this point I have no idea what any of the recipes were.  I can't even reliably remember which ones were delicious and which ones were not.  Except for the lamb stew, which will make an appearance sometime in the future if for no other reason than I want to cook it again.

So, to ease back into blogging, and to be lazy and avoid having to type out ingredients and measurements, this post will not be a new recipe. Instead I'm going to refer back to Jeff's post: A Salad Named Tuna, from June.

Pretty much immediately after reading that post, I had to try this tuna salad.  I'm not always a fan of tuna salad (or egg salad, or some potato salads...) because I find mayonaise is often inherently disgusting.  But not in this case!

So we pretty much followed Jeff's recipe, except we used fresh dill instead of dried dill (because we had it and it is delicious).

Jeff was definitely right, removing the water from the tuna was important.  I seem to remember that we bought some sort of fancy canned tuna, possibly because that was the only thing we could buy at our weird Manhattan grocery store, possibly because I was swayed by the fact that it promised I wouldn't be eating dolphins.  Who knows! But it ended up nice and dry (in a good way) and delicious.

This really is some sort of magical tuna salad recipe, because it is full of things I don't like on their own--mayonnaise, hard boiled eggs, celery...canned tuna.  But somehow combined it becomes magically delicious!

We decided to butter up the bread and add...some sort of cheese, maybe swiss? and make tuna melt/grilled cheese sandwiches.  This can be a messy process, as you can see the tuna tried to escape from the bread.

The end result was incredibly delicious. Writing this post and looking at the pictures makes me want to make it again...and I think I have some fresh dill in the refrigerator...