The Beer You Should Be Adding To Store-Bought Chocolate Cake Mix

Store-bought cake mix is convenient, saving you the time and effort it takes to gather multiple ingredients and measure them out. While you might be content to follow the simple directions of adding eggs, water, and oil to transform cake mix into batter, there are some simple tweaks to upgrade the outcome. When it comes to boxed chocolate cake mix, beer is your surprising secret weapon for a flavor and texture upgrade.

Of course, there are many types of beer and not just any kind will do. The beer you should be adding to store-bought chocolate cake mix is stout. As its name suggests, stout is a thick, creamy, and robustly flavored ale that can also be broken down into categories based on additional ingredients like milk, oatmeal, coffee, and, yes, even chocolate. These types of stouts contain their namesake tasting notes (milk stout contains lactose rather than actual milk), which are excellent complementary flavors to pair with chocolate. Furthermore, stout has a high hop content, resulting in a bitter finish that beautifully balances the sweetness of cake while enhancing its chocolate flavors.

Stout also presents textural benefits to cake batter. Its carbonation will introduce air bubbles that'll help your cake batter to rise into a fluffy crumb. Stout's yeast and alcohol content are leaveners and gluten formation inhibitors respectively, further augmenting the rise and tenderness of the cake crumb. As a liquid ingredient, stout will also bolster the batter with extra moisture. It really is the perfect addition.

Stout chocolate cake is a well-known and beloved dessert, with many from-scratch recipes calling for a bottle or two of dark ale, most notably Guinness. For chocolate cake mixes, incorporating stout into the batter is a simple liquid ingredient swap. Substitute the water for stout, adding it to the dry cake mix along with eggs and oil, beating the mixture into a uniform batter. Then bake the cake at the temperature and for the time period indicated.

If you want to add even more of a homemade feel to your stout chocolate cake, swap the oil for butter or stir in an extra egg yolk. You can also enhance the flavor of the stout and chocolate with a tasty icing or glaze pairing. Our recipe for Guinness chocolate cake spikes the cake crumb with stout and creates a curd filling with Irish cream and whiskey. In case you're wondering, a cake with added stout is fine for children to eat as the alcohol burns off during baking, however, if you're adding whiskey or Irish cream to the filling or frosting, then it will have to be an adults-only treat. A stout chocolate cake would also taste delicious with a coffee-flavored icing or classic cream cheese frosting recipe. If you can't get enough chocolate, a rich chocolate frosting will stand up to the complexity of a stout-enriched cake. Since you're using boxed cake mix, you can also keep things simple with a store-bought chocolate frosting, for which we have a ranked list.