Chocolate Guinness Cake for St Patrick’s Day

It’s only a couple of days now until St Patrick’s day my friends!  I’ve baked a cake for us to celebrate the occasion.

Since I’m not a huge fan of green food colouring, this Chocolate Guinness Cake came to mind.  The recipe is a favourite of mine, straight from my copy of Nigella Lawson’s Feast: Food to Celebrate Life.

While the recipe may not be closely tied to Irish traditions, it does contain the nation’s famous black stout.  If you use your imagination a little, you might agree that topped with the cream cheese frosting this cake also loosely resembles a pint of it’s namesake…  no?

I hadn’t come across a recipe for Chocolate Guinness cake before discovering this one, and while there are now a huge variety of interpretations of this recipe,  I still stick to Nigella’s,  partly because I’m a creature of habit, but also because it consistently produces a gorgeously moist chocolate cake with a nice subtle hint of stout… so why mess with a good thing?

It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a really simple cake to bake.  In fact, the preparations are not too dissimilar to my all time favourite Boiled chocolate cake. 

If you don’t own a copy of Nigella’s Feast: Food to Celebrate Life, you can find a copy of the recipe for this Chocolate Guinness Cake on her website here. 

I hope you have a happy St Paddy’s Day.