Nineteen hundred and twenty two NY Times readers can’t be wrong. That is how many NYT cooks have rated this Guinness cake an average of five stars (out of five stars), some giving the cake rave written reviews sprinkled with praises like “Divine!” and “Insanely Good!.”
Some of the NYT reviewers went so far as to suggest subbing in some Bailey’s Irish Cream for some of the heavy cream called for in the cream cheese frosting. Who could argue with that!
The only consistent negative review was that the cake, once baked, sinks a bit in the middle. I figured that wouldn’t happen to me. Baking this cake isn’t my first rodeo. I know my way around the kitchen.
Sure enough, though, when I baked the cake, the center sank. Damn.
Not to worry, though. There were lots of recommendations to relax (maybe drink some of the Irish Cream!) and just cover up that little flaw with a heavier application of the cream cheese frosting. Who would know?
It was also recommended to use a quality beer in the recipe, one with a more complicated flavor profile to enhance the cake’s flavor. One person, interestingly, recommended using North Coast’s Old Rasputin’s Imperial Stout in the recipe. What? Having taught European history for a very long time and being infatuated with Russian history, that recommendation caught my eye. Any beer named after the wily Rasputin has to be very interesting. Rasputin, if you have forgotten your Russian history, was the debauched consigliere to Tsarina Alexandra, the wife of the last Russian Tsar. Desperate, she welcomed him into the Russian court believing that he could cure her son’s hemophilia. His subsequent notoriously-debauched behavior led to his murder by a group of nobles. The Romanov dynasty collapsed a few months later.
North Coast’s Old Rasputin’s Stout, it turns out, is produced in the tradition of 18th Century English brewers who supplied the court of Russia’s Catherine the Great. With its rich and complex flavors, the stout has quite a cult following. Seems kind of appropriate for a beer named after Rasputin.
Here is my adaptation of the recipe.
[mpprecipe-recipe:188]
