Making stout into cake

Yes, I really did bake two cakes this week. The second one was for my husband’s birthday. This is the second time I’ve made this chocolate stout cake from use real butter.  Yes, the recipe really is in that blog post after you scroll past all of the pictures.

This year, I changed two things from what I did last year. I substituted half of the butter for applesauce to make the cake moister (which worked) and I used a milk chocolate icing that my husband bought rather than the fudge icing I used last year. I recommend the fudge icing. Both years I used Guinness in the cake because we happened to have some and it’s not fancy enough for my local beer snob to drink.

Guinness, butter, and applesauce, oh my!

Heating the stout and butter, and then after the butter melted, adding the applesauce:

Mixing in the cocoa powder:

Mixing eggs and sour cream:

Adding the chocolate mixture:

Ready for the oven!

Out of the oven!

First layer iced:

Done!

Making a breakfast birthday cake

I got to do some more baking recently for a coworkers birthday. This baking was special because the celebration had to be at 9:30 am.  So instead of a dessert cake, I came across this Cinnamon Apple Cake recipe from Cooking Light that is perfect for breakfast! Also, I was amazed by the insane number of outstanding reviews it had, so I knew I just had to try it. An added bonus is the fact that the cake is relatively low in calories.

My husband bought the largest organic Fuji apples I have ever seen so I ended up chopping up just two of them and still had way more than the 3 cups called for. To make apple chopping easy, I used my peeler / slicer / corer contraption from Williams Sonoma, given to me a few years back by my mother-in-law. That thing rocks if you bake with apples often!

So many apples…

Dry ingredients combined:

(P.S. My apple corer contraption is the same red as my Kitchen Aid mixer, another awesome baking gift from my mother-in-law)

Mmmm… apples all cinnamon’d up and ready for use!

Folded into the dough – I noticed this recipe seemed to have more apples than dough, which of course makes it delicious. Also, I used extra apples. I spread some on top too because I had so many. And maybe I ate a few of the chunks.

The cake was baked in my 9” springform pan and that worked out just fine. I think next time I will bake it for a bit longer because I don’t think it was quite cooked all the way. I subtracted the 5 minutes for my larger pan as the recipe suggested but I think that was too many.

It earned rave reviews from my coworkers (and myself). Definitely worth making again.