Passion is Thy Name!

Last week, a galfriend emailed me an interesting recipe that tickled my curiosity. Together with some galfriends, we decided to give the recipe a try over the weekend - with some minor tweaking of our own (we didn’t like the creamy topping and decided to substitute with vanilla ice-cream).

Ingredients :

• 250ml Guiness
• 250g salted butter
• 80g cocoa powder
• 400g caster sugar
  (use less if you don’t like it too sweet. I personally found this too sweet and would definitely use less sugar the next time round)
• 142ml sour cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 270g baking flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate soda
• Vanilla ice cream - for topping

 Method :

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius
2. Line the muffin tins or you can use the individual paper cup mould lined up on the baking plate.
3. Pour the guiness into a large saucepan.
4. Melt butter in microwave (to save time)
5. Add melted butter into the saucepan and stir.
6. Turn off heat.
7. Whisk in cocoa and sugar.
8. Beat sour cream, eggs and vanilla extract. Mix into pan.
9. Whisk in flour and bicarbonate soda, little by little to avoid lumps in the batter.
10. Pour the mixture into a jug or piping bag and fill in the muffin tins/paper cup mould.
11. Place in oven and bake for 20 mins or until they are nicely puffed up.
    *Note : It was at least 30 mins before I was satisfied with the puffiness and removed them from the oven*
12. Let them cool before removing the muffins from the tins/cups.
13. Scoop a generous dollop of vanilla ice cream and place on top of the muffins.
14. Enjoy the Chocolate Guiness delight!

Here’s how the end-product looked like.
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It actually tastes alot like the mudslide from TGIF (or is it Chilli’s?). A couple of folks asked for seconds. So, guess it was a success story.

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Some learnings to share :

• It’s blardy difficult to get sour cream on Paradise Island. We had to go to FIVE places over a span of 2 days before we can find sour cream that’s not expired! Giant supermarket actually had tubs of sour cream that were waayyy past their shelf-life. Shame on you, Giant!
• There’s a gem of a place in downtown Penang (Carnarvon Street, to be precise) that is Heaven for all bakers or baker-wannabes. It’s called SIM Company S/B and I was blown away by their pricetags. I felt blardy cheated for all the previous times I bought baking stuff and paid more for them elsewhere. Kanasai. The other thing that fascinated me about this place was how ancient this place is. It’s like it got trapped in the 30’s and while other more modern places mushroomed all over the island, this place stayed steadfastly old-fashioned and strong. It’s gonna be my #1 place to go for baking stuff. You would consider it too if you are into baking and do not want to spend a bomb every time you catch the baking bug. No words can describe the rest of my experience there. You’ve just got to to be there in person. It’s good shite, I tell ya. 
  Address : 193 & 195 Carnarvon Street, 10100 Penang
  Tel : 04-2610522
  Over the weekend, the place was PACKED with Muslim customers shopping for stuff to bake their Raya cookies.
• Looks like there’s gonna be competition for the #1 spot in my comfort food list. Watch out, BR. Bulla may soon be knocking you off the top spot! It’s also premium ice cream but cheaper and actually tastes pretty darn good. It already had me at first lick. MMmmMmmm…

Will definitely be experimenting with more baking in the near future. Being the unselfish person that I am, I’ll definitely share the recipes and whatever discoveries I managed to unravel. Set?