Celebratory All Black Cake (with Beer)

I discovered that being an All Black fan (which I have been for about 4 days now) can combine delightfully with baking! A few weeks ago I stumbled on Nigella Lawson's Guinness Chocolate Cake via Twitter and I liked the look of it. Then with the ABs doing pretty well, I thought that could be a fun celebratory cake for the World Cup Final. So I adapted Nigella's cake to make this!

Nigella uses white sugar in her cake, but I wanted to give this cake as much chance as possible of being black, so I used dark muscovado sugar. It turned out pretty well, but it did get a bit burned around the very edges, possibly because of the advanced caramel in the sugar. I just trimmed those bits off, turned the cake over so I had a nice flat bottom to decorate and no problem!

Although made with beer, it doesn't taste like beer, just a bit maltier than your average cake.

Here's the recipe.

All Black Beery Chocolate Cake

First butter (or spray with non-stick non-flavoured oil, which is what I do) and then line a 20-23cm cake tin with baking paper. Heat the oven to 180C.

Start with the following

• 250mL of porter beer – if this is to be an All Black celebratory cake, then best you use a porter from New Zealand. Likely brewers include Three Boys or Tuatara or Renaissance (who make a chocolate stout which I am sure it worth trying in this!)
• 250g unsalted butter

Heat the above together in a big saucepan until the butter is melted. Take it off the heat.

Whisk into the beer:

• 75g cocoa
• 400g dark muscovado sugar (presumably this works with white sugar (Nigella calls for caster), but I used dark)

In a separate bowl beat together

• 150mL sour cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 T vanilla essence

and then stir that into the beer mixture

Then whisk

• 275g of plain flour
• 2.5 t baking soda

into the mixture until all nicely mixed together.

Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour until the skewer test shows it's cooked. For me the cake went from not cooked (gunk still stuck to the skewer) to cooked (nice clean skewer) quickly, so keep an eye on it towards the end. I also had to cover it with a bit of tin foil for the about 10 minutes or so of the cooking as the top was cooking faster than the middle.

Cool in tin on rack before turning out on its top (so that the bottom, which is the flat bit, is available for dressing).

I made a stencil out of the ABs' fern and logo with a stanley knife and some patience. Then I sprinkled icing sugar through the stencil just before serving. Be very careful as you remove the stencil. Serve with cream or yoghurt if you want (I didn't).

Enjoy! Preferable after a magnificent All Black victory. 

Congratulations to the 2011 All Blacks – the 6^th NZ rugby team to win a World Cup: 1987 (Men's, NZ), 1998 (Women's, Netherlands), 2002 (Women's, Spain), 2006 (Women's, Canada), 2010 (Women's, UK) and 2011 (Men's, NZ).

Now, time to focus on that election thingy and the rest of NZ culture!