Well I have tackled an Irish tradition, put a bit of a hillbilly spin on it, and created a successful dessert night at home. I’ve had this recipe bookmarked in my cookbooks for quite some time now, but haven’t had the time or resources to attempt it. I was watching the Today Show and an Irish chef was showing off some recipes from his restaurant, and finished by showing a giant platter of his sticky toffee pudding (which is actually a cake, not a pudding, but is so moist and sticky that it may take on a bit of a pudding quality). Well, that did it for me, and seeing all of that homemade caramel poured over the cake made me pull out the recipe and all the ingredients.
Like I said, I didn’t have the resources to make this cake before…and I still don’t, hence the hillbilly spin on the traditional recipe. Pastry chefs may cringe when I say what I did to this cake! Well, first off, I eliminated the dates from the recipe. Then, I nixed the Guinness beer, because I wasn’t going to go to the store for one beer, and replaced it with…let’s just call it a cheap beer from the fridge (not even a dark ale). As you can imagine, the cake didn’t turn out with the same dark coloring as the pictures in the cookbook, but it still turned out light, fluffy, moist, and speckled with a hint of cinnamon. (Oh, and yes, I eliminated boiling the beer because I didn’t want to do extra dishes, so my microwave got a bit of work in with this cake.)
Now, for the caramel (or toffee sauce). I was supposed to use dark brown sugar and heavy cream…lets just say there was medium brown sugar and 1% milk in the fridge, so that was what was used. It turned out so good! I was glad I only made a half-recipe because we ate the entire cake! Drenched in toffee sauce and perfectly sweet and slightly spiced, this cake was ooey-gooey heaven on a plate.
