Guinness Cake for St. Patrick's Day
Sweet and Pungent Cake Keeps Well, Soaked in "The Black Stuff"
Feb 2, 2009
What to make to take care of both the sweet tooth and alcohol? Irish coffee is easy, and often sweet, depending on the amount of brown sugar one puts into it. But you can’t make an Irish coffee and save it for later; it must be consumed hot. That limits its usefulness in a busy season.
You could make some Irish soda bread. It’s easy, and good. But it’s not sweet.
A cake, perhaps, would be the very thing. You could make it, keep it, and slice it at will. Indeed, the following recipe for Guinness Cake, reprinted from In Search of Modern Ireland, with permission, instructs you to save the cake for at least one week before eating. One can only assume it allows the alcohol in the relatively abundant Guinness applied after baking to dissipate…or it might have to be called Tipsy Cake, which is a different recipe altogether.
Guinness Cake
Ingredients:
- 1 cup butter
- 1 cup soft brown sugar
- 4 eggs, lightly beaten
- 1 ¼ cup plain flour and 2 level tsp. of mixed spice sieved together
- 1 cup seedless raisins
- 1 cup sultanas
- ½ cup mixed peel
- 8-12 TBS. Guinness
- ½ cup walnuts, barely chopped
Method:
- Cream butter and sugar together until light and creamy.
- Gradually beat in the eggs.
- Fold in the flour and mixed spice.
- Then add the raisins, sultanas, mixed peel and walnuts
- Mix well together
- Stir 4 TBS Guinness into the mixture
- Mix to a soft dropping consistency.
- Turn into a prepared 7-inch cake tin.
- Bake in a very moderate over, 325 degrees F, for 1 hour.
- Reduce heat to cool, 300 degrees F. and cook for another half hour.
- Allow to cool.
- Remove from cake tin.
- Prick top of cake with skewer and spoon over the remaining 4 to 8 TBS Guinness.
- Keep cake for one week before eating.
Notes:
Mixed spice is a British/Irish name for a prepared mixture of sweet spices used in baking. You can order it from a British/Irish online store, or make your own by mixing together equal parts of allspice, cinnamon, ground cloves, ground nutmeg and ground ginger, and keeping the mixture for use in pies and cakes. For this recipe, you’ll need to mix no more than 1/4 teaspoon of each spice, and you’ll still have a bit left over. You might keep the leftover spice, and add a bit of it to Irish Spiced Beef, also, as an added bit of flavor.
Mixed peel is candied orange, lemon and grapefruit peel, chopped, and often mixed with maraschino cherry pieces. You can buy it in the U.S. usually around Christmastime, or order it from an online shop.
In Ireland, raisins are small, dark dried grapes, and sultanas are large puffy ones. In the U.S., it will do as well to use dark raisins for the raisins, and the biggest golden raisins you can find in place of the sultanas.
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