I can’t believe that after 5 years of blogging, I’ve never made a chocolate stout cake! This one has been brewing (see what I did there) in my head for a while, and I wasn’t going to let another St. Patty’s Day go by without posting one. It ultimately morphed into this manly creation that I call the Bar Snack Cake. It’s paired with a peanut butter pretzel frosting, and ganache is made with beer rather than cream.
Over the last few years, I’ve developed a taste for stout beer. I’m not really a fan of Guinness, but I do like a good chocolate or coffee stout. Originally, I thought the beer flavor would be subtle and just add some depth of flavor, but you can really taste it in both the cake and the ganache, so use a beer that you like the taste of. I used a coffee stout and thought it paired well with the chocolate.
The cake can be made a few days in advance, but I’d recommend frosting it the day that it is baked to keep the pretzels from getting soggy. If you don’t mind a little extra work, you can swap out the crushed pretzels for malted pretzel crumbs from this Momofuku inspired recipe I posted a couple of years ago.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a poll on Facebook and Instagram, and asked my readers to choose between 3 recipes that they wanted to see on the blog. I results were split pretty evenly 3 ways, so this post is the first of the three. Stay tuned for the next post- a frosting tutorial!
, since it’s cheap and it works well. A stand mixer is also really helpful. It’s possible to make them without one, but you’ll probably need another person to help you since the mixing process takes a while.
