Welcome to Bon Appétit Bake Club, a community of curious bakers. Each month senior Test Kitchen editors Jesse Szewczyk and Shilpa Uskokovic share a must-make recipe and dive deep on why it works. Come bake and learn with us—and don’t forget to join the Bake Club Group chat over on Substack.
Chocolate and malt are a match made in heaven. If you’ve ever had malted chocolate cake or brownies before, you know what I’m talking about. But finding malted milk powder in the store isn’t the easiest. Oftentimes it’s hidden within an instant drink mix, combined with chocolate to create something that looks like malt, but isn’t. But something that is easy to find—and an ingredient that packs a ton of robust, malty flavor—is Guinness. And so this chocolate and Guinness loaf cake was born. It’s malty, toasty, and incredibly complex in flavor, especially given such a short ingredient list.
The trick to making this cake comes down to how you incorporate the butter. The batter is mixed by combining all of your dry ingredients, then rubbing the butter in by hand—similar to making pie crust—until it is incorporated into the mix. (It should completely disappear; no pea-size pieces here!) This is a technique called reverse creaming, in which the flour is coated in fat to prevent excess gluten from forming. The result is an exceptionally tender crumb that is very forgiving and can handle it if you end up mixing the batter a little too much. The cake then gets topped with a lofty brown butter frosting, creating a loaf that’s both playful and celebratory.
