Chocolate Guinness Cake

So this crudely decorated cake actually turned out to be ridiculously delicious.

My friend Chad had a recipe for a chocolate Guinness cake, and since he knows how much I love to bake, he asked me to make it for him (and he bought all the ingredients, so I couldn't say no).

Just trust me on this one. It's got beer in it, so you're probably thinking, this cake is going to be awful. At least, that's what I thought. But surprisingly enough, it turned out to be a really good cake. It was really rich and moist, like the recipe said it would be...  but I did make a couple of changes.

First of all, I didn't have a tube pan, so I baked the cake in two 9" round pans, and decreased the cooking time (I don't remember exactly how long, since I just estimated, but it definitely was not for an hour) until a toothpick stuck in the cake came out "mostly" clean (see step 3 in the recipe).

Second, I iced the entire cake, even though the recipe says to "to capture the essence and simplicity of a pint of Guinness"by only icing the top. But since I made a layer cake, and not a bundt-type cake, I just iced it like a layer cake should be iced. However, this cream cheese icing is not your average decorator's icing, so there was pretty much no way to make this look pretty in the traditional, smooth sense. What I'm saying is, I just slapped the icing on there. It worked though, and even the pros (if I can call myself that) get lazy. And since I was baking in Chad's kitchen, and didn't have any decorator's tools with me anyway, I wrote "THE GAME" on top of the cake with a knife.

The point is, it tasted good. And that frosting I was just complaining about? It had whipped cream and cream cheese in it, which is why the cake was hard to frost, but the combination was light and fluffy and honestly counterbalanced the rich chocolate flavor of the cake very nicely. Next time I'll just have to find myself a 10" angel food pan and make my cake as pretty as the one on Design*Sponge.  :-)