Welcome to Bon Appétit Bake Club, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior Test Kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep on why it works. Come bake and learn with us—and don’t forget to join the Bake Club Group chat over on Substack.
Chocolate and malt are a match made in heaven. If you’ve ever had malted chocolate cake or brownies before, you know what I’m talking about. But finding malted milk powder in the store isn’t the easiest. Oftentimes it’s hidden within an instant drink mix, combined with chocolate to create something that looks like malt, but isn’t. But something that is easy to find—and an ingredient that packs a ton of robust, malty flavor—is Guinness. And so this chocolate and Guinness loaf cake was born. It’s malty, toasty, and incredibly complex in flavor, especially given such a short ingredient list.
The trick to making this cake comes down to how you incorporate the butter. The batter is mixed by combining all of your dry ingredients, then rubbing the butter in by hand—similar to making pie crust—until it is incorporated into the mix. (It should completely disappear; no pea-size pieces here!) This is a technique called reverse creaming, in which the flour is coated in fat to prevent excess gluten from forming. The result is an exceptionally tender crumb that is very forgiving and can handle it if you end up mixing the batter a little too much. The cake then gets topped with a lofty brown butter frosting, creating a loaf that’s both playful and celebratory.
Recipe information
Total Time
1 hour 45 minutes (plus cooling)
Yield
8–12 servings
Ingredients
Cake
Frosting and assembly
Preparation
Cake
Step 1
Place a rack in middle of oven; preheat to 350°. Lightly coat a 9x5" loaf pan with nonstick vegetable oil spray and line with parchment paper, leaving generous overhang on long sides. Whisk 2 large eggs, ⅔ cup Guinness stout, 2 Tbsp. vegetable oil, and 1 Tbsp. vanilla extract in a small bowl until smooth.
Step 2
Whisk 1 cup (200 g) granulated sugar, 1¼ cups (156 g) all-purpose flour, ⅔ cup (70 g) Dutch-process cocoa powder, 1 tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. Morton kosher salt, 1 tsp. baking powder, and ¼ tsp. baking soda in a large bowl to combine. Add ½ cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces, and rub butter into dry ingredients with your hand until no visible pieces remain. (Mixture should look like lightly moistened sand. Don’t worry about overworking it.) Add egg mixture and whisk to combine (some small lumps are okay). Scrape batter into prepared pan and smooth surface.
Step 3
Bake cake until a tester inserted into the center comes out mostly clean, 50–60 minutes. Transfer pan to a wire rack and let cake cool slightly in pan. Using parchment overhang, remove cake from pan and place on rack. Carefully remove parchment and let cake cool completely.
Frosting and assembly
Step 4
While the cake cools, cook ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat, stirring often and scraping bottom of pan with a heatproof rubber spatula, until it sizzles, then settles and darkens into a light amber shade and smells very nutty, about 5 minutes.
Step 5
Immediately transfer butter to a medium heatproof bowl and chill until firmed slightly (like the consistency of softened butter), 30–60 minutes, depending on your fridge (check every 15 minutes or so).
Step 6
Add 1½ cups (165 g) powdered sugar, 2 Tbsp. Guinness stout, 2 tsp. vanilla extract, and ½ tsp. Diamond Crystal or ¼ tsp. Morton kosher salt to butter. (If butter is too firm, let sit at room temperature to soften first.) Slowly whisk to combine, then beat with whisk until frosting is smooth, fluffy, and slightly lightened in color.
Step 7
Transfer cooled cake to a cake stand or large plate. Dollop frosting on top and swirl decoratively as desired.
Recipe notes
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