Guinness bundt cake

I'm good at judging people. Usually I can tell if somebody is good or bad, usually I get it right. People say that Internet is a place created for cheaters, people who love to create themselves. Well I think I can judge people by their blogs as well. All bloggers I have meet so far where exactly as I expected or even nicer. 

I started blogging 9 years ago, I still have friends from that time. Mostly friends I have never met, but they have similar sense of humour, we like each others photos on Facebook, sometimes we even share secrets and even though I have never met them I know I can trust them. 

So whenever I wonder what I need the blog for as I'm not the most popular one, I don't create recipes, I don't have time to post a few time in a week or day, my writing isn't too exciting or poetic, or even correct. I can cook without blogging about it, so what do I need a blog for? 

One of possible answers is to meet people. So if you are in Dublin on Saturday, 6th April, join me and probably plenty other bloggers on the tour of the Honest 2 Goodness Market organized by lovely Irish Food Bloggers Association. I hope I will meet some new and old friends :)

But let's go back to the cake. This cake idea is genius, a reduced Guinness and a lot cocoa. Sounds very Irish isn't it? I think this will be good treat for St. Patrick's Day if you aren't into green cakes. The cake is lovely, rich and moist.

Guinness bundt cake 

Recipe comes from 101 cookbooks blog

Notes: I used Guinness and substituted maple syrup with golden syrup.  Guinness was reduced slightly more, I got 200 ml. I also skipped the icing. I used a 2-litre capacity Bundt pan.

• 475 ml Guinness / chocolate porter / stout beer
• 113 g unsalted butter
• 75g cocoa powder
• 140 g whole wheat flour
• 125 g all-purpose flour
• 120 g dark muscovado sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 large eggs
• 355 ml plain whole yogurt
• 180 ml golden syrup / pure maple syrup

Chocolate Buttermilk Icing:

• 75 g icing sugar
• 25g cocoa powder 
• 2 Tbsp buttermilk

Preheat oven to 180°C/ 160°C fan.

Grease a tin and dust it with rice flour or semolina.

In a saucepan simmer Guinness down to 240 ml. 

Remove from heat, add the butter and stir until melted. Stir in the cocoa powder, mixing until smooth, then set aside to cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the eggs, yogurt, and syrup. 

Whisk to combine. Gradually add the cooled beer mixture, stirring all the while. Stir until smooth. 

Add the flour mixture, folding until just blended, using as few strokes as possible.

Pour the mixture into a greased Bundt pan and bake for 40-45 minutes (or until a toothpick inserted in it comes out clean). Cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Turn out onto a wire rack and take off the pan. Let it to cool completely.

To make the icing:

place the icing sugar, cocoa and buttermilks in a bowl and mix to combine. Drizzle over the cooled cake.

Two banana breads

Do you feel sometimes like you need a break from your usual routine?
I've stopped baking bread. I don't always have a lunch, I don't check all the newsletters I signed up to. I don't visit Twitter, I rarely read blogs I follow, almost don't leave comments.
Instead I post too many cats photos to Instagram, I signed up for Italian, I try to find a book that will get me back to reading (I need to admit I am in the middle of reading 3 books, but I'm trying). I focus on small pleasures like watching tv series with Tomek or just watching the kittens, they grow so fast, but still are so cute I could watch them for hours.
Sometimes I bake banana bread. You wouldn't guess but banana breads are new to me. When I was a child I've never liked bananas. I told my mum they taste like sweet, bland potatoes. To this day I'm not the biggest fan of bananas on their own, but I can eat them with my granola and milk, or I really enjoy the banana flavour in cakes and desserts.
I have one major flaw when it comes to trying recipes, when I find the good source of recipes I have problem with trying other recipes. My favourite banana bread recipe comes from Sophie's Dahl "Miss Dahl voluptuous delights" book, but was recommended by White Plate and as usual it was great recommendation. This is one of the easiest cakes recipes. I baked that several times, one time in my friends kitchen where I didn't have most ingredients and equipment. You don't need much a spoon and baking tin is enough. The recipe always turned out fine, so it was really hard to try something new.
I told you once about my love for buying new magazines, but struggle to actually use them.
So I challenged myself to try Donna's Hay banana bread recipe. The execution you can see below. The recipe is a little bit more time consuming than Sophie's Dahl, but both banana breads are delicious. Which one you want to try is up to you.

Sophie's Dahl Banana Bread

For 26x11cm loaf tin

Recipe comes from Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights

• 4 ripe bananas, mashed up
• 75 g soft butter
• 200 g of soft brown sugar (you may reduce amount of sugar 150 g is enough)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 Tbsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 pinch of salt
• 170 g plain flour

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan.

Grease a tin and dust it with rice flour or semolina. 

Place the mashed bananas into the bowl. 

Mix in the butter, sugar, egg and vanilla extract. Add the baking soda and salt and mix in the flour last.

Pour into prepared tin. 

Bake for 1 hour, remove and cool.

Donna's Hay Banana Bread

For 26x11cm loaf tin
Recipe comes from Donna Hay Issue 63

• 125 g butter, soften
• 175 g brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar
• 2 eggs
• 4 bananas, mashed up
• 225 g all-purpose flour, sifted
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 115 g golden syrup

Preheat the oven to 160°C/140°C fan.

Grease a tin and dust it with rice flour or semolina. 

Place the butter, sugar and vanilla in an electric mixer and beat for 8-10 minutes or until pale and creamy. 

Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Gradually add the eggs and beat well to combine.

Add the bananas, flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and golden syrup and stir to combine.

Spoon the mixture into loaf tin.

Bake for 60-65 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Cool in the tin for 20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool compeletely. Slice a hour, remove and cool. 

Chrusty, faworki, angel wings with beer

There are certain values you need to follow. I'm still not convinced by Pancake Tuesday, I don't mind changing Thursday to Tuesday, but why pancakes, when you can make doughnuts or faworki? So I'm stil Fat Thursday girl, even though  this year we celebrated it on Sunday, as it was just easier to find a little bit time to make doughnuts or faworki. 

This year's doughnuts didn't turn out so beautiful as last year, but making making faworki / chrusty  / angel's wings using a pasta maker is fab. They are so thin and crunchy, just beautiful. 

This year I tried a different recipe for faworki, the one that contains beer. Tomek was a little bit shocked with such a waste of beer, but finally he admitted it was worth it. The faworki are light and crunchy. 

Chrusty, faworki, angel wings with beer

Recipe from Moje wypieki 

Notes: The portion is quite big. I made a half batch. 

• 3 cups plain flour, sifted
• 5 egg yolks
• 2 tsp vodka or other strong alcohol like rum
• 1 tsp butter, room temperature
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup beer (lager)
• pinch of salt

Other ingridients:

• 4 packets of Frytex or different shortaning deep-fry (you can use it also oil or lard)
• icing sugar for sprinkling

Place all ingredients into a bowl. Knead a dough. 

You can use a mixer, as it takes quite a long time. 

You will know that the dough is ready when it will be smooth and elastic. 

If it is too dry add extra one or two tablespoons of beer. 

And now the fun part. Put the dough on the counter and start beating it with a rolling pin. Fold it into rectangle, beat it with a rolling pin. Do it a few times. 

If you beat it well, you will get more air bubbles and your chrusty will be lighter and better.

Cover the dough with a cling film and leave it in a fridge for an hour. 

Split the dough into a few smaller parts and roll it very thin. The thiner the better. 

If you have a pasta roller, use it. 

Cut the rolled dough into rectangles 6-cm long and 3-cm wide (they should be longer than wider and shouldn't be bigger than a pot you are frying them in). 

Cut a slit in the middle of every rectangle. And pull one end through the slit. (see the photo)

Heat Frytex / shortening or oil in a big pot or saucepan to 175°C. Use enough oil that chrusty can float freely. Fry chrusty around 1 minutes on every side (or until golden). Don't overcrowd the pan, as the oil temperature will drop down. Flip them using wooden skewers.

Take them out of the oil and put it on a plate covered with paper towel to absorb extra oil. 

When they cool down sprinkle them with the icing sugar.

Isaura - Polish cheesecake chocolate cake

I always wonder what should I talk with you about. The weather? The cats? Life philosophy? 

The cats are sleeping, the weather is awful and I wish I could follow this philosophy. Well I can, but I just don't know the answer to the question yet or maybe I'm just a little bit too scare to answer it. 

Anyway let's talk about Polish cakes.  

After I shared this cake with my coworkers I heard from one of them "I've never eaten something like that, it's chocolate cake and it's cheesecake". Yes, indeed it is a chocolate cake and cheesecake in one, but don't tell me you never thought about it before.

The origin of the name probably is based on the Brazilian tv series "Isaura the Slave Girl". It was broadcasted in Poland in 1986 on Sundays. I was only 4, but I remember that everybody watched it. My parents say it was so popular that all streets in cities went empty as literally everybody was watching it. 

Isaura was one of my favourite cakes during high school. I used to bake it in something called prodiż (electric baking tin), you probably won't believe it, but most of the cakes baked there perfectly. It was also great for potato cake, or casseroles. This time I went for other recipe than usually as it had less butter and sugar, but it is as good as I remember. 

Isaura - Polish cheesecake chocolate cake

Recipe from Moje Wypieki

For a 22x34 cm baking tin

Notes: This is really big cake, if you don't plan to share it with bunch of people, make half of batch.  

Chocolate cake:

• 1 cup milk
• 125 g butter 
• 2 Tbsp cacao
• 3/4 cup sugar 
• 50 g dark chocolate 
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 tsp baking soda 
• 3 eggs (egg yolks and whites separately)

Cheesecake layer

• 750 g full-fat or half-fat curd cheese, ground at least twice 
• 4 eggs (egg yolks and whites separately)
• 2/3 cup caster sugar
• 1 Tbsp plain flour 
• 1 Tbsp potato starch or corn starch
• 2 tsp vanilla extract 
• 50 g butter, room temperature

For chocolate cake layer:
Heat milk, butter, cacao, sugar and chocolate in a medium pot stirring until combine. Take from the heat an let it cool.
Sieve flour and baking soda. Add to the cooled chocolate mixture along with egg yolks and mixed until well combined.

For cheesecake layer:

Put curd cheese, egg yolks, sugar, plain flour, potato starch, vanilla extract and butter in a bowl and mix until all ingredients combine.  Don't overmix it.

In a separate bowl whip all egg whites until stiff. Carefully stir in half of it to the chocolate mixture and other half to the cheesecake mixture.

Line in a baking tin with baking paper. 

Place half of the chocolate mixture in a tin and smooth it down. 

Then place all cheesecake mixture and cover it with the remaining chocolate mixture. 

Bake at 175ºC/155ºC fan for about 60 minutes. 

Cool down with a slightly ajar oven and place in a fridge for a night.

Enjoy!