Stone Imperial Russian Stout Chocolate Cake

Ever baked a chocolate cake with your mother-in-law? Using an Imperial Stout as a main ingredient? I have, and the results were delicious. The inspiration for this recipe comes from the Imperial Stout Chocolate Cake recipe from the Small Beer Blog, which in turn is a mutation of Nigella Lawson's Choclate Guinness Cake. The recipe is exactly the same as Nigella's, except instead of the watery Irish Dry Stout, I'm using the thick, robust Stone Imperial Russian Stout. Though the two beers share the "Stout" moniker, the similarities end at their dark black bodies. Consider them fourth cousins twice removed.


The Stone IRS is a beastly Russian Imperial Stout, weighing in at 10.5% ABV and 90+ IBU's. The beer strikes a delicious balance in its heft, packing all the syrupy heavy dark chocolate, roasted malt, coffee bitterness, and sharp alcohol bite that this beer style demands.


Now, if you've clicked through to Nigella's site, you'll notice that it's a British blog. That presented an interesting challenge in getting the recipe together. After translating terms like caster sugar and bicarbonate of soda, I recalled my middle school maths to perform conversions of grams to ounces and milliliters to cups (not really - there's an app for that).

Stone IRS Cake ingredients all laid out

So around 8:00 on a Friday evening, I laid out all the ingredients and we got to the business of baking. Mixing the beer, butter, cocoa and sugar in a saucepan, we let the mixture get nice and warm while I measured out the remaining ingredients on my little kitchen scale. I then pulled out the mixer to beat the eggs with the vanilla and sour cream, rounding out the prep of the ingredients. Once all that was done, we poured the cake batter into my wife's super deluxe cake pan and left it to bake at 355F (That's nearly 180C for those wondering).

Now, one of the best parts about this recipe is that it only calls for 250ml of beer. However, Stone IRS comes in a 22oz (650ml) bottles. That means there is bound to be ~400ml of beer left just sitting around. What to do about that? (See photo at right for answer...) After 45 minutes of baking, what came out of the oven was a fluffy, dark mass of chocolate goodness. It isn't overly sweet, as the beer seems to really bring out the more subdued side of the chocolate. The recipe calls for an optional cream cheese icing, but I decided to leave it off for this first run through, as I really wanted to see what the beer would do for the cake without the extra sweetness of the icing. I will say the cake itself is excellent, but next time I think I will make the icing, too. All in all, this was a successful experiment in baking with beer. The qualities of the stout mesh perfectly with the cocoa to make an elegant and tasty cake. I'll be on the lookout for other recipes involving beer and dessert.