One Bowl Guinness Chocolate Cake

Chocolaty stout beers, such as Guinness, can be great additions to baked goods – particularly if those baked goods are chocolate. While beer might not sound like the first thing you want to reach for when baking,
beers container a lot of complex flavors and can add a lot of depth to baked goods if you use them properly. Heavy stout beers often contain notes of cocoa and malt, both of which blend seamlessly into chocolate recipes, like this One Bowl Guinness Chocolate Cake.

This moist chocolate cake is loaded with rich flavor. It has a lovely bittersweet chocolate base a just a hint of the chocolaty beer in the finish. It is very tender with a tight, soft crumb and is good enough to be served without frosting if you find that you just can’t resist digging in as soon as the cake is cooled. The cake is mixed up in one single mixing bowl without the need for any special mixing equipment. It does contain a generous quantity of Guinness beer, which can be used cold or at room temperature. If you’re planning to drink the leftover beer while you’re baking, you’ll probably want to opt for chilled instead of warm.

I topped this cake with my Two Ingredient Cream Cheese Frosting, which makes a generous amount of frosting for a cake this size. The tangy cream cheese is a great match for the bittersweet cocoa notes of the cake. There is enough frosting to cover both the top and the sides of this cake, but I prefer top coat only the top. The cake has such a rich, dark color to it that I like the presentation with a top-only frosting in this case.

I generally leave the frosting plain, but you can either tint it green or throw in some green sprinkles if you are serving this cake for St Patrick’s Day and want it to have a little extra holiday flair.

One Bowl Guinness Chocolate Cake
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup Guinness
1/3 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease a 9-inch springform pan.
In a large bowl, sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt and sugar.
Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and whisk together vegetable oil, eggs and vanilla extract inside of the well until they are combined. Add in Guinness and buttermilk and whisk all ingredients together until no streaks of dry ingredients remain. Pour into prepared pan.
Bake for 40-45 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean or with only a few moist crumbs attached.
Cool completely in the pan before unmolding it onto a cake plate.
Top with Two-Ingredient Cream Cheese Frosting.

Serves 10.