Diana's Guinness® Chocolate Cake with Guinness Chocolate Icing

The cake is a 5 star cake. I had to knock the frosting down a bit tho, thus the 4 star rating. The only thing I changed was to make cupcakes, but other than that I made this cake EXACTLY as instructed, and I made the frosting EXACTLY as instructed. I'm NOT a beginner cook, and I've taken cake decorating classes before. The problem I had was w/ the frosting. It was the right consistency for a filling, but not for piping work. I ended up using the frosting to fill my cupcakes, but a different recipe to frost them. It's an amazing from scratch cake!

I seriously questioned the unusual execution of this recipe but I followed through and was rewarded with a rich and buttery, light chocolate cake. I was so hesitant to make the beer infused frosting that I played it safe and didn't. (Besides, I wanted a white frosting to show off the green and gold Packer colors for our big playoff game tonight!) But I will be the first to admit that this is so light chocolate that it would have been better with a rich chocolate frosting, even if the one included in this recipe isn't used. Recipe notes: I did use Guiness, ordinary table sugar rather than superfine, which really isn't necessary, and sour cream rather than the pricier creme fraiche.

This cake is yummy. The cake isn't very sweet but the icing brings the sweetness in. Loved the dark chocolate.

Not too rich, very tasty. My friends and I all tasted banana for some reason? Maybe its in the Guinness. I ended up with probably twice as much icing as I could fit on the cake, I will cut the icing recipe in half next time.

This was the ugliest cake I've ever made--it fell apart when I took it out of the pans and crumbled like crazy! I used a lot of icing as glue to piece it together; it really looked a mess. The TASTE, however, is quite another matter. It was delicious! I LOVED the icing (best chocolate icing EVER and I will use it ever after) and the cake is really rich and chocolatey. I would try it again and hope for better results next time as far as the appearance, but my family has really enjoyed eating it!

The cake was very tasty, although very dense. The following day it had the consistency of very dense brownies rather than cake. But it was very yummy!

I used this frosting with a different cake because I didn't have creme fraiche or superfine sugar. best frosting I have ever made!

I made this recipe exactly as directed and I found this cake dense, with the Guinness giving it a funky flavor. The frosting was flat. It definitely needed salt. I won't ever make this again. I really wanted to love this recipe.

When I beat the flour mixture together, it immediately clumped up like bread dough. Putting the rest of the wet ingredients in that point didnt help. I've made very few cakes from scratch, but it sure seemed like something was off here.

My cake came out a little crumbly but those crumbs are so moist and delicious. I tried cutting the amount of butter and used a chocolate stout so maybe the decreased fat made my cake fall apart. But it's so good me & the family don' even care. I didn't even frost this cake it's so good on its own.

Pretty good. I had hoped for a bit more stout flavor, but it's a pretty good end result. I used buttermilk in place of creme fraiche (didn't have any), and I subbed Whey Low for the sugar. A couple of reviewers mentioned the cake was dense, so I added a teaspoon of baking powder to the batter. That did the trick. The cake was light and fluffy. I cut the recipe in half, and it made 12 cupcakes. The icing is just a little too sweet for me. I added a tablespoon of espresso powder, and that helped. The family loved them, so it's a success.

super yummy - it does have a little banana taste :-) don't know where that comes from.

This cake is delicious. I had the same problem a few others had in that the cake fell apart when I took it out of the pans. It had a strange consistency almost like nuts in it. That's when we figured out that I hadn't cooled the chocolate mixture off enough before adding it to the flour and creme fraiche and I think the eggs got cooked before the batter went into the oven. This would explain the consistency and the fact that it didn't hold together. I will definitely make this cake again. But I'll make sure the chocolate part is well cooled before I add it to the rest.

This is toward the top of my list of best chocolate cakes I've ever experienced. It's dense and moist, but not visibly (I can't actually *see* the butter, if that makes sense). I will probably be making and re-making this frosting until I'm very, very old. SO good. Using what I had, I went for: salted butter, Deschutes Obsidian, sour cream instead of creme fraiche, and two 3.5oz 70% chocolate bars. I didn't use extra fine sugar. I didn't have 9inch rounds, so I used 3 8inch-- which took 35 minutes in a convection type oven. The egg/sour cream/flour stage got real weird (I had to run to the grocery store mid mix-- that could have done it) and became almost like bread dough. It thinned down with the chocolate and was fine. I let everything cool completely and chilled the frosting in the refrigerator (it didn't require any extra or less powdered sugar for me), and the cake didn't even shed any crumbs when I spread the frosting. Ugh. So good.

Very good not to sweet

Flavour was great but the bottom crumbled out and when I took the cake out of the pan half of it stayed in... :( having said that, I did change the recipe a bit. I added 1 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt. that might have made it crumble a little more. In the end I just covered the entire cake with frosting so you couldn't see how ugly the cake turned out. I also used the crumbs to make cake pops with the frosting. Instead of the creme fraiche, I used greek yogurt.Turned out great! No one complained about the look after they all took a bite. everyone loved it.

Absolutely horrible receipe. It raised up nice and high, the cake, I looked again and it fell, flat as a pancake. I didn't open oven or make any loud noises. What a waste of time and money.

The taste is amazing but the cook time was too long and dried it out. I would take 5-10 min off