Stout Ice Cream and Cake

For St. Patrick's Day I went and filled a growler with "Chocolate Cherry Stout" over at East End Brewing Co., but with only two people drinking, ended up with 1/2 of it left.  My apartment is already 90F at night, which has turned my thought to home-made ice cream, so the following was the logical conclusion. . .

The Cake:
I modified a cake recipe from Fannie Farmer to replace the chocolate with cocoa powder, (as I did not have chocolate and I read in On Food and Cooking that replacing flour volumes with other flour-like substances can help cakes by reducing gluten content) and the water with stout.

•  Cream together 1/4 lb. butter and 1.5 C superfine sugar
• It is important for the sugar to be super-fine for maximum aeration.  Instead of buying it, I just put normal sugar in a coffee grinder.
• Add 2 eggs and 2 tsp vanilla, mix
• Mix together 1 1/3C all-purpose flour, 2/3C cocoa powder, 1.5tsp baking soda, .5tsp salt; then blend it all in
• Pour in 8oz ice cold stout and mix thoroughly

The recipe is for 2 8-inch cake pans and I tried making it in 1 11in cake, which has 2 negative effects.  Firstly the cake seemed dry due to the extra 15min cook time, and secondly it fell almost an inch from the peak of its rising.  Note to self: buy 8in cake pans.  Still it was quite delicious, and the dryness helped it absorb ice cream. . .

The Ice Cream
This was a completely made-up recipe based on two figures from On Food and Cooking:  that Ice Cream should have ~ 18% fat content, and 15% sugar content.  Here's what I was trying for:

• 1 C heavy cream (36%fat)
• 1 C Stout (this was the main flavoring, and replaced whole milk)
• 3/8 C sugar
• 3 TBS powdered milk (This is the amount needed to reconstitute 1 C milk
• 2 TBS cocoa (I thought chocolate flavor would complement the cake)

Instead, I accidentally put in ~ 1.5 C stout (it was late OK! :-P), and by the time  everything was mixed, it was ~ 3 cups in total.  Which puts my fat content closer to 12%.  This was noticeable because the ice cream took longer to set (~ 30min in my Cuisinart Ice Cream maker, and then left to harden overnight in the freezer), melted quicker , and had a more icey character than commercial ice cream. In contrast to the cake which tasted mostly of chocolate, this was kick-you-in-the-face stouty.  Really good if you like that taste.  I do believe that if I had added .5 C less stout it would have been perfect in flavor and texture.

All in all, these seemed to be a popular pairing when I served them, and as the summer progresses you will probably see more ice cream and sorbet recipes popping up on here.

Sadly, I forgot to take a photo.