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 cheese and chocolate fondue
Cheese and chocolate fondue for Valentine’s day. This is the second year for cheese fondue and the third for chocolate fondue. I declare it therefore to be our Valentine’s Day tradition. The tradition guarantees that we will use our fondue pot from Switzerland at least once a year which was an awesome wedding gift (despite the fact that the first time I picked it up, the handle broke off).
I never thought I liked cheese fondue. In fact, I don’t like cheese fondue made with wine. We learned last year that cheese fondue made with beer is far superior to fondue made with wine so now we make it with beer.
To make the cheese fondue, we combined cheddar, Gruyere, and Emmentaler cheese with a bit of flour, mustard, Worcestershire sauce and Sierra Nevada Glissade beer. Well, that was after an emergency trip to Bed Bath and Beyond for the sterno fuel needed to keep the pot warm.
Cheese!
Beer!
Melting cheese!
For some reason the fondue did not melt together quite as well this year as last year but it was still quite tasty.
We ate the fondue with cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, and zucchini that I blanched in boiling water as well as baguette bread and mini dill pickles. Yum! We drank Boston Beer Company Infinium along with our fondue.
For our dessert, we made chocolate fondue. Ok, so it really was just melted milk chocolate. Apparently real chocolate fondue has cream in it but that was not something I realized. The chocolate fondue pot is a little heart shaped dish that is kept warm by a tea light candle
In our chocolate we dipped strawberries, banana, grapes, mini marshmallows and mini ginger crisp cookies.
The best part? The left overs we will eat again on Monday which is the actual Valentine’s day!
