Skip to main content

Boozy chocolate cakes

Over the last few years I have been involved in testing the idea that you can put virtually anything in a chocolate cake. Prunes, cinnamon, ginger, even mashed potato. (The mashed potato one is really good, actually, but involves about six separate bowls. Definitely a special-occasion recipe.)

Thus far, however, I had never entered the realm of alcoholic chocolate cakes. A recipe in Food & Wine magazine and a half-bottle of leftover wine in the fridge changed all that. I present to you Chocolate-Red Wine Cake, with apologies to my UK readers for the American measures. 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces. Use a measuring jug.

Chocolate-Red Wine Cake2 cups all-purpose (plain) flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/4 tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1/2 tsp salt
2 sticks (8 oz) unsalted butter
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups dry red wine

Preheat oven to 350F / 180C. Grease and flour a 12-cup bundt pan (I used a 9" springform tin with a ring insert).
Beat the butter with the sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and beat until incorporated. Ad vanilla and mix for 2 minutes longer.
Sieve together the flour, cocoa powder, soda and salt. Alternately fold in the dry ingredients and the wine, until just incorporated.
Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake 45 min until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool in pan 10 min, then turn out onto wire rack.
When cool, dust with icing (confectioner's) sugar and serve with whipped cream.

I don't, unfortunately, have a photo, but this is good. It has a decided reddish tinge and winey flavour. Rent a rom-com and invite some girlfriends over.


For a more masculine cake, it's gotta be Guinness. I'd been meaning to try out Nigella's chocolate Guinness cake for a while, and was kicked into action by discovering a chocolate stout pudding recipe on another blog. So, two good reasons to buy some Guinness.

The Nigella recipe is here, and here is the finished product (without icing as Graham isn't a fan of creamy stuff).



It wasn't quite as "resonantly ferrous" as promised by the author, but having finished the remains of the can, I can tell you that the drink tasted somewhat watered down compared to a pint in an Irish bar. If you have a pub round the corner that will pull you half a pint, go there for your raw ingredient. It's a very easy cake to make, although I would mention that where Nigella says "whisk", obey her instructions. I used a wooden spoon, and this is why my cake has small white bits of unmixed flour in.


Happy cake-making!
Labels:

Comments

John Evens said…
Rarely does a half bottle of red wine find itself languishing in our house without soon finding itself being sent down some-one's gullet in liquid form. Plus we were recently informed that any open bottle of below par red wine should be stored in the linen closet to transform to great vinegar. However, if I find myself in possession of canned Guinness I will have no compunction in turning it into cake.
18 November 2009 at 18:29
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...
2 comments
Read more

Back on the Portway: Smalley and Morley

I didn't by any means feel I had fully explored the Erewash Valley, but I had completed my planned routes and got some idea of the transport, industry, and general geography of the area. It was time to return to the Portway. There are lots of -leys around here. Smalley, Morley, Mapperley, Stanley, Horsley. The suffix means "woodland clearing", and although there are not many woods around any more, it doesn't take much imagination to think of little villages among the trees. I started in Dale Abbey (or should that be Daley Abbley?) where the monastery once dominated the surrounding area. I've been to Dale Abbey several times but never actually walked through the village before. There is a neatly trimmed pub, an old chapel, now a church known as The Gateway, and a house with an odd lumpy corner which I realised must be part of the ruined abbey. A field path led me up to the main Derby-Ilkeston road. I crossed it and followed a couple of horses along a single-track l...
Post a Comment
Read more