A few weeks ago,
this beautiful, chocolate cake on one of my favorite food blogs caught my eye and I knew it would be my birthday cake. Since I've baked my own cake the past two years, I thought, hell, maybe I'll make this a tradition. So, I baked myself my birthday cake again a few days ago.
This was a massive cake: 4 eggs, 4 sticks of butter, 4 cups of flour and 4 cups of sugar in addition to a pint of stout or dark beer. I'd never baked with beer before and I was curious to see how it fared against the usual cake ingredients (I used a chocolate stout beer I found at Whole Foods).
The result: the chocolate cake actually had a beer, yeasty flavor to it, which was balanced well against the ganache frosting. However, since the cake layers were so massive, I didn't do the best job of adding enough frosting between the layers, for fear I wouldn't have enough to decorate the outside of the cake (I almost didn't have enough!). But it was a moist, tasty chocolate cake that wasn't too sweet and was also the most cylindrical cake I've ever assembled.
The recipe: Chocolate Stout Cake from King Arthur Flour
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