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Liquid bread? No, liquid cake!

Over the holiday weekend, we started joking about making a beer pie, a dessert pie rather than a savory pie, which resulted in a lot of googling and cries of "Euw" and, less frequently, "Hey, that looks good!"

Oz was especially taken with the idea of Guinness cake and since we had almost all the ingredients on hand, except for the Guinness, oddly enough, I decided to give it a go. I kind of figured we'd end up with a pubscum fruitcake, reeking of stale beer and demanding a cigarette ash garnish, but what the heck?

Here's the recipe we used from the above link, with some minor modifications.

Guinness cake

2/3 cup dark raisins or currants
3/4 cup dried cherries (we used sweetened, dried cherries, not candied cherries)
1 1/3 cups golden raisins
2 12 ounce bottles Guinness stout, plus extra for drinking (because you know you will)
1/2 cup butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
3 eggs, beaten
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice

1. Place dried fruit in a bowl and cover with Guinness. This takes one 12 ounce bottle. Allow to soak overnight. This was where the pubscum concern surfaced. Dried fruit soaking in Guinness smells like a bad thing to do with your Guinness. On the bright side, none of the fruit got snitched.

2. Preheat oven to 350 °F. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth, then beat in the eggs one at a time.

3. In a separate bowl, combine dry ingredients with a fork. After the last egg is added and beaten in, gradually add the flour mixture and beat until it is blended in.

4. Strain fruit, reserving the Guinness separately. We placed a colander in a bowl, placed some cheesecloth in the colander, and added the fruit, giving it a few light squeezes to get any excess beer out. Add enough fresh Guinness to the drained stout to measure 8 fluid ounces. We ended up with 3/4 cup of fruity Guinness, so we only needed to take a quarter cup out of a fresh bottle to make up 8 ounces. Yay! Extra Guinness for us!

5. Add the beer to the batter, mixing thoroughly to combine. The batter will be rather soupy. Stir in the fruit. The batter will be chunky.

6. Butter a 9-inch square cake pan and pour in the batter, smoothing top evenly. Bake in preheated oven for one hour, until the center is firm. Stick a toothpick into the cake. If it comes out clean, it's done.

And the outcome:

Pretty good cake, especially considering how easy it is to make. Probably would not taste good to kids. It's very fruity and rich, not overly sweet, with low notes from the Guinness, and not pubscummy at all. Not quite all the alcohol bakes out of the fruit. It does cry out for a scoop of vanilla ice cream or some Jack Daniels sauce. Or both. I made some whipped cream flavored with sugar and a little bourbon and it complements the cake quite well. Actually, a bourbon version of the cake would probably be pretty good too. When I make it again, I may increase the amounts of the spices and add a little ginger.