Chocolate Stout Cake is dense, moist, and satisfying. So dark, you’ll swear there must be a Death Star in orbit. You can really taste the stout; it lends the Oreo-similar chocolatiness a marked and interesting complexity. Although it’s only one layer, the cake is much taller than a typical single-layer. You’ll be very proud of the way it looks and tastes.

I found this cake at one of my favorite blogs, Sippity Sup. If you want to read about its provenance and see the full set of directions, check out Sippity Sup. I’ve converted the measurements to weight, summarized the directions, and provided my typically neurotic notes.

What you need for one 9-inch cake, serving 12-15:

8 oz. stout (such as Guinness your favorite local craft brew, 1 cup)
8 oz. unsalted butter (1 cup, or 2 sticks)
2½ oz. unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process, ¾ cup)
10 oz. all-purpose flour (2 cups)
14 oz. granulated sugar (2 cups)
1½ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
2 large eggs (at room temperature, 3½ oz. total)
5¾ oz. sour cream (at room temperature, 2/3 cup)
12 oz. confectioners’ sugar (3 cups, plus more for dusting)
5½ oz. heavy cream (about 2/3 cup)
12 oz. cream cheese (at room temperature)

Summarized Directions (For the full directions, visit Sippity Sup.)

Melt butter in beer, whisk in cocoa. Preheat to 350°F and prep a 9″ springform. Blend egg & cream, then remaining wet; add dry. Bake 40-50 minutes. (See notes about doneness.) Beat sugar (and cream) into cheese.

Notes:

1. It takes about a couple of hours for sour cream and eggs to come to room temperature. Although it’s possible to speed things up with warm water, I suggest you let nature take its course, and use that time to practice a couple of the Chopin Nocturnes.
2. Once you’re ready to start, do so with the saucepan work. That way, you can allow the cocoa mixture to cool while you preheat the oven and butter the pan.
3. Why always Guinness? I used Left Hand Brewery’s “Fade to Black,” and I enjoyed the leftover 4 oz., even at room temp. I really did. It’s creamy and so much like an espresso that I think the two would make a fantastic mashup. It’s (1 part) also a great match for root beer (3 parts) – but be careful: too much root beer and it gets weird.
4. It says on the packaging that a stick of butter weighs 4 oz., but my two sticks of butter suspiciously weighed out to 7¾ oz. Is my scale off? Or is this the latest way corporate America is screwing us over? First it was subprime mortgages, and now this.
5. Melting the butter into the beer takes about 6 minutes. Stir after the 5th minute, to encourage the butter to melt.

6. I’m not a huge fan of using parchment on cake pans unless the cake is so unusual as to demand it. This cake will come out of the pan just fine if you remove the ring as soon as the pan is cool enough to handle, and – once the cake is fully cool – run a knife around the bottom edge before inverting the cake off the plate. It helps to have good pans, though, and you know what a really good springform pan costs? About the same as three rolls of parchment.
7. For the flour, I used 5½ oz. bread and 4½ oz. cake. I don’t stock all-purpose. I paddled the dry ingredients at lowest speed for 30 seconds.
8. Beat eggs and sour cream until homogenized and creamy. They’ll look like a very loose vanilla pudding. This takes just shy of a minute, ramping up to medium speed.
9. I experimented with folding in 4 oz. of semi-sweet chocolate chips. It was nice, but not flat-out spectacular.
10. The cake will crack and the toothpick should come out pretty much dry, perhaps with an almost undetectable oily sheen. The cake may fall slightly while cooling, but that’s OK so long as your toothpick did not test wet.
11. As an alternative to thinning out the frosting with cream, you can simply stop adding sugar once you’re reached a desirable texture. Perhaps a bit less nuanced – but also less sweet … still, a lovely frosting. This recipe produces a lot of frosting. You could get by with less, but I like the balance as-is.

This is a fantastic recipe. Thanks for posting it, Greg! It came out perfectly and produced an impressive cake that wowed my guests. It also keeps very well, refrigerated. On the fourth day, you may notice a slight degradation if you really search for it. On the eighth day – yes, the eighth day – the cake still will be similar to the fourth day: slightly less moist than it was initially, but by no means dry. Still I-would-serve-this-to-company delicious! I recommend keeping this cake in the fridge, tightly sealed in a cake tote (with plastic wrap pressed tightly onto any cut surface once it’s leftover). Allow it to come to room temperature before serving. (Although, for breakfast, eat it straight from the fridge with a cup of strong coffee.) (5 / 5)

Chocolate Stout Cake

Credit for all images: Make It Like a Man!

This content was not solicited nor was it written in exchange for anything. Greg at Sippity Sup did not promise to bake one per month for me for the rest of my life.

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