Gargantuan Guinness Cake
About this build
A stack of sponge cakes and jam is carved and iced to resemble a giant pint of Guinness. The beer is the design inspiration, not a cake ingredient.
Archive summary updated
Read the original account and photographs ↓
What the original account establishes
These notes distinguish the recorded result from quantities or settings the contributor did not specify. Follow each source link to the original passage.
- The list is 1.75 kg butter, 21 eggs, 500 g chocolate, 1 kg caster sugar, 500 g icing sugar plus more borrowed from the host, 2 kg flour, 1 jar of raspberry jam, baking soda, vanilla essence and a tube of white chocolate icing, estimated at £20; Guinness itself was too expensive for the students, so the beer is the shape, not an ingredient. With no scales the cake mix was measured against a packet with a ruler, and 6 round cakes were baked of the 8 planned before the second batch ran short. Domed cakes were carved, stacked with the whole jar of jam and skewers, then trimmed to a pint shape. The head was butter icing from the remaining butter, all the icing sugar and vanilla; leftover icing mixed with melted chocolate made the outer coat, and the harp was painted on before the cake was served to the whole party. The calorie figure is the contributor’s joke. Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5 · Source 6 · Source 7
Notes from the contributor
Selected passages from the original account. Quantities may describe shopping, tests or the final build; follow the linked passage for its full context.
Ingredients: 1.75 kg butter 21 eggs 500g chocolate 1 kg castor sugar 500g icing sugar (and plenty stolen from the host’s flat to finish the cake) 2kg flour 1 jar of raspberry jam baking soda vanilla essence 1 tube of white chocolate flavoured icing. estimated cost: £20 Apparently it is possible to bake an actual cake with guinness in it but poor students can’t afford such lavish ingredients.
Read in context →
Archive guides · Explore projects
The original account
So my friend Emma and I decided to pimp. We’ve pimped in the past, but we wanted to impress. But what to pimp? Most of our ambitions had been previously done and far be it from us to steal ideas! So (with St Patrick’s day nearly upon us at the time) we decided to pimp guinness to feed the paddy’s day party.
Ingredients:
1.75 kg butter
21 eggs
500g chocolate
1 kg castor sugar
500g icing sugar (and plenty stolen from the host’s flat to finish the cake)
2kg flour
1 jar of raspberry jam
baking soda
vanilla essence
1 tube of white chocolate flavoured icing.
estimated cost: £20
Apparently it is possible to bake an actual cake with guinness in it but poor students can’t afford such lavish ingredients.
Start with making a huge volume of cake mix using the butter, flour, baking powder, eggs and castor sugar. We didn’t have scales so we used a ruler to measure how much of a packet to take and a LOT of luck guessing quantities! Put the mix in round baking trays and hey presto some wonderful building blocks! Sadly the cakes were domed so we had to carve them so they’d stack well.
so, once we’d baked 6 (we aimed for 8 but our quantity-guessing failed us on the 2nd batch) we decided it was time to stack (after an eventful transit from my flat to the party-flat: copious quantities of cake shouldn’t be transported too quickly). Get one whole jar of jam in there and some skewers to hold the cakes which are falling apart and what do you have? That’s right, you guessed it, a stack of jammy cake.
some brisk carving later and the shape is born.
Next we made up some butter icing using the rest of the butter, all the icing sugar and some vanilla essence.
This became the head (actually was a head of icing rather than just icing-covered-cake). Whatever icing we had left we mixed with melted chocolate to make a weird, weird substance: this was the outer layer of the cake. Finally we used all the dexterity we could muster to paint that intricate little harp on the beautiful baby.
now we were done, all that was left to do was to get that obligatory comparison.
and let everyone enjoy the spectacle for a while before slicing that bad boy up (we would have done the slice-comparison as is customary but it turns out it is rather difficult to slice a pint of guinness).
There you have it, one successfully pimped guinness. The sliced cake got put on a platter (wherever that came from) and served to everyone at the party – nobody went unfed.
Estimated calories: 1,000,000…at least!
