Drink beer, and you'll be all right

[venta]

So... anyone got any ideas on how to bake a beer-flavoured cake?

Having been caught up in the heady excitement of my rapper team's Facebook page, I have accidentally agreed to make someone a cake "made out of beer". I have remarkably little idea of how to proceed.

A quick google suggests that recipes for chocolate and stout cake exist. My mum makes a Guinness cake, but (although it's lovely) it tastes more of fruit cake than of Guinness. I'm currently inclining towards this Spiced Beer Cake recipe - though again I'm worried that the spices (while nice) will detract from the beery flavour.

Any advice? Please note I don't want a cake that looks like a foaming tankard, or is iced to resemble a bottle... I want a cake that contains and (preferably) tastes noticeably of beer.

I need to bake my cake next Thursday (to be delivered on Friday), so not a lot of time for experimentation...

Comments

[zotz]

I don't want a cake that looks like a foaming tankard, or is iced to resemble a bottle... I want a cake that contains and (preferably) tastes noticeably of beer.

I don't see a contradiction here.

[venta.livejournal.com]

No, they needn't contradict each other. Just if I can only have one, I'm optimising for taste.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Hm.

Ok, you could try soaking some dried fruit in beer... something woofy, like OP might be ok. Or... well, how about buying some hops from a brewshop, putting them in a muslin, steeping in a teacup of boiling water overnight and adding that to, say, a malt loaf recipe? Malty and hoppy are the flavours of beer. A half teaspoon of marmite might help, but I'd be wary of putting too much in.

Or, make beer icing. Bottle of something really hoppy and not sweet, reduce until thick and gloppy, add to icing sugar to make a thick paste.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha, thank you, I was hoping you'd be passing by :)

Hopefully I can spent time on Saturday experimenting. And eating the evidence. Or drinking the leftovers. Or both! Will doubtless witter extensively about how it goes.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Hm, interesting challenge; the problem is that if you cook beer, it tends to end up not tasting much like beer, and that's doubly true if you add a reasonable amount of sugar. One option might be to use beer as the basis of a sugar syrup, with which to soak the cake after it's cooked (like a lemon drizzle cake), and then again in the icing/frosting. But that tends to work better with quite intensely-flavoured liquids, like liqueurs or extracts, so I don't know how well it will work with beer.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Mm, yes. I think I'm coming a bit unstuck because malty beer is much more likely to work (or "woofy beer", as nalsa put it), but I mostly like hoppy beer. So I want a hoppy cake. Which is far too vague a flavour to work well...

Definitely time for a weekend of cooking :)

[shermarama]

Hoppy could be a bit weird with something as sweet as cake; most hoppy beers are the less sweet ones, I think. I once made beer ice-cream with a black IPA and while the malt in the black part went well (I used a Guiness ice-cream recipe), the hops did stick out in its own very distinct direction. I mean, it was edible, but... memorable. In the not-necessarily-good sense.

That said, if you can find the right sort of cake recipe for hops to replace a strong flavour in? Not lemon or ginger, but some distinct thing like that, only bitter/floral/herbal. (Is there such a thing as a lavender cake? Or something with rose water?)

[shermarama]

Or, Kriek cheesecake?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think the only appropriate response to Kriek cheesecake is "dear God, no!"

But on the other hand, I am kinda curious :)

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Kriek floats are apparently a thing now.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm, OK. Maybe hoppy really isn't the way to go. I'm tempted to try and make a malty cake, and use hoppy icing. If I make my malty cake mix into lots of little cakes, I can test with different amounts/types/etc of icing...

[lnr]

I've come across Guinness and chocolate cake, which does taste a *bit* beery, but I don't know the recipe.

A quick google finds a Nigella version (bound to be nice - though she says you can't quite taste the beer so that's probably out), a Delia version, and one on Guinness's own webpage! Delia at least puts some in the icing too, which might be more obvious?

[venta.livejournal.com]

That might be a fall-back - if I can't make a properly beery-tasting cake, then at least I can rely on nearly everyone liking chocolate cake :)

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I hereby offer j4's cake recipe, with notes.

All-Bran Cake -------------

Ingredients:
1 pint liquid (water, milk, soya milk, coconut milk, whatever)
8 oz. All-Bran (or shop's own equivalent)
1 lb. 4 oz. mixed dried fruit
10 oz. brown sugar
8 oz. self-raising flour

Put all ingredients except flour in a bowl and leave to soak for about
an hour. Mix in the flour, pour into a fair-sized (8"-ish?) cake tin
(usual faff about greasing or papering tin, preheating oven, etc.) and
bake at any Gas Mark 4 (350'F, 180'C) for about an hour.

That's it. Really.

***

With the ingredients above, it makes a fairly standard fruit-cake. Add
spices (cinnamon, ground cloves, mixed spice, whatever you fancy) to make
it a bit spicier. Add weirder dried fruits (papaya, pineapple, coconut,
nuts, whatever) if that's your kink. (I used loads of glace ginger once
and that was *really* nice!) Use coconut milk (and add dessicated coconut
perhaps?) to make it, erm, coconutty. And of course if you use soya milk,
coconut milk or water for the liquid then it'll be suitable for vegans.

Quick note: I have no idea what 'brown sugar' is meant to mean, and I
can't afford to use that much dark brown muscovado! I usually use golden
granulated sugar but to be honest I think it'd work with anything. Have a go.

Final note: this cake always seems to be a bit sticky in the middle no
matter *how* long you cook it for. I think this is a function of
fruit-cakes rather than a problem with this recipe... The knife-test (see
previous cake recipe notes) is still useful but don't expect the knife to
come out completely clean. For one thing, you've got all that cooked
sticky dried fruit in there. If the raisins sticking out on the top are
starting to burn, it's probably done. :-)

(End of text from J4)

Personally, I've made this cake with a wide range of liquids, most memorably Baileys, which produced a cake best described as amazing, but which had the calorific density of Plutonium. I've never tried it with beer (on account of not liking beer), but making it with decent Ginger ale did result in a cake that was noticeably gingery, if not nearly as strongly so as the time when I made it with half a pound of diced crystallised ginger.

[venta.livejournal.com]

A pint of Baileys? Respect :)

Sounds like a useful all-purpose cake recipe, that, I must try it out.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a homebrewer - even though hops are amazing in beer, I'm not convinced how great they would be in cake.

However - I suspect you could use canned malt extract syrup (or if you insist on hops, get a basic no-boil beer kit, which already has beer-appropriate quantities of hop extract already mixed into the extract, just like getting bread mixes with the seeds already included) as a substitute in recipes that call for golden syrup/dark treacle. You may want to poke the internet to discover relative quantities of sugar & water in each, if you're of a kitchen science bent.

Spray-malt sugar is also a possibility - it's an icing sugar consistency, and is basically a powdered/freeze-dried version of the canned stuff ;)

I use http://www.art-of-brewing.co.uk/ if ordering online - pointing you at Kentish brewing shops is probably not helpful, and I don't know what's around local to you. Some branches of Wilkinsons do stock homebrew stuff if that's any help.


Malt extract syrups - http://www.art-of-brewing.co.uk/acatalog/AoB_OnLine_Catalogue_Beer_ingredients___Syrups______13.html
Basic kits - http://www.art-of-brewing.co.uk/acatalog/AoB_OnLine_Catalogue_Beer_kits___Budget_____________11.html
Spray malt etc - http://www.art-of-brewing.co.uk/acatalog/AoB_OnLine_Catalogue_Beer_ingredients___Powders_____14.html

Light/medium/dark etc in the descriptions refers to the colour & flavour of the malt - think about the taste range of a golden demerara through to dark muscovado sugars & you're not a million miles away. Only, you know, more malty :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Think I'll have to start with a lightning trawl of health food shops on Saturday morning and see what I can scare up - since I need to do my experimenting this weekend, online shops are out. Apparently a nearby-ish chemist to me stocks some bits and bobs (or did, when someone posted about it on t'internet a while back); it seems our local Wilko used to, but no longer does.

What can possibly go wrong!?

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Looking at the above, I wondered if the recipe for what UH calls "brack", where you soak the fruit overnight in tea, would work if you used beer. It's simple and quick once the fruit is soaked. If you think it would work, can email recipe (though you should have it).

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think it'd work - I'll have to see how much time for cake-making I have over the weekend!

This recipe (http://www.beerbirrabier.com/2010/11/beer-muffins-with-hop-drizzle-hop-icing.html) (found by hjalfi) looks quite enticing, but I don't know whether I can get hold of hops and crystal malt locally. (Nearly wrote crystal meth, there... that'd be quite a different cake!)