Chocolate Guinness Cake

This year, for our annual B/F family St. Patrick's Day parade and dinner party, I chose to make a chocolate Guinness cake. This recipe, different from the one I made a couple of years ago, comes from Nigella Lawson's website. The longest part of the recipe was using her converter tool to convert her metric measurements to our American/English standards (I've done the work here for you). However, it was otherwise a piece of cake (all puns intended) to make. Once it's baked and iced, it looks just like a pint of Guinness!

Note, the batter looks WAY too runny to be cake batter. Don't freak out. It comes out FANTASTIC. Just be sure to butter AND line your pan with parchment!

You need:

FOR THE CAKE

• 250ml (1 cup) Guinness
• 250g (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 75g (5 tbsp) cocoa
• 400g (1 3/4 c) caster sugar (granulated sugar)
• 1 x 142ml pot sour cream (2/3 c)
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon real vanilla extract
• 275g (1 1/8 c) plain flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

FOR THE TOPPING:

• 300g (10 oz.)Philadelphia cream cheese
• 150g (2/3 c) icing sugar (confectioners' sugar)
• 125ml (1/2 c) double or whipping cream

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C (350 F), and butter and line a 23cm ( 9 in.) springform tin.
2. Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, add the butter - in spoons or slices - and heat until the butter's melted, at which time you should whisk in the cocoa and sugar. Beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and then pour into the brown, buttery, beery pan and finally whisk in the flour and bicarb.
3. Pour the cake batter into the greased and lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack, as it is quite a damp cake.
4. When the cake's cold, sit it on a flat platter or cake stand and get on with the icing. Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and then beat them both together. Or do this in a processor, putting the unsieved icing sugar in first and blitz to remove lumps before adding the cheese.
5. Add the cream and beat again until it makes a spreadable consistency. Ice the top of the black cake so that it resembles the frothy top of the famous pint.

Inspired by Nigella Lawson