lovely chocolateness!

this weekend i made a birthday dinner and this cake for my son, who celebrated a birthday on saturday.  i had been wanting to try this cake for some time, and since my son likes to brew his own beer and also loves guinness beer, i decided this was the perfect opportunity to try the cake. 

i like nigella, and have a couple of her cookbooks, and this recipe was in her cookbook "feast", but i also looked on a couple of other websites. the other recipes were pretty much the same, except for some had a chocolate frosting, so i went ahead and used nigella's recipe. especially, since her frosting was the thing that appealed to me... i love her description of it looking like the frothy foam of a glass of guinness, and it was a cream cheese and whipped cream topping. yum.

it is pretty easy to put together, as i don't always have the best of luck with cakes from scratch.  my son loved it, and i did too.  it is so very wonderfully chocolaty, and i think a chocolate frosting would have been too much chocolate.  it is also a bit on the bitter side of chocolate, so if you like your chocolate sweet, it just is not.  hubby loves his baked goods very sweet, and did not care for the cake.  but my daughter had made a german chocolate cake the previous day (sometimes we have a chocolate craving the must be fed!) so he had some of that instead.  more for us...hehe!

i noticed in nigella's recipe on her site, the measurements are all in metric, and i found the same recipe on the website the kitchn, so if you get in the mood to make this cake, and do not own nigella's book, try the recipe on the kitchn's site.  it would be perfect for st. paddy's day coming up...maybe i will have to make another!