Guinness Chocolate Cake with White Knight Frosting

This Guinness Chocolate Stout Cake with White Knight Buttercream based on recipes from Zoë Bakes Cakes, was inspired by my trips to Ireland. I have had especially good fortune, which brought me to Ireland twice. In January of 2020, I spent a week seeing Ireland with my friends at Bake from Scratch magazine, Tourism Ireland and Williams Sonoma, just months before I was there with KerryGold to eat as much butter as I could and it turns out that’s a lot! 

With each trip I have fallen deeper in love with this country.

Ireland is beyond beautiful with the rolling hills of green grass and clover that fall off into the ocean and that’s just a description of the pastures where the dairy cows graze. They produce the sweetest, richest milk in the world, which makes Kerrygold’s Irish butter taste silky and creamy and glow a healthy, golden yellow. I used it make the White Knight Frosting in this amazing, Guinness infused Chocolate Cake. The recipe is below and you can see more photos of my trip in the Highlights on Instagram. 

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Perfect Peach Pie with Lattice Crust

peach pie with lattice crust on ZoeBakes. Photo by Zoe Francois

When the peach season is a good one—and this year it is spectacular—it is best to keep peach pie simple. There is nothing more beautiful than a perfectly ripe, juicy, smooth, sweet peach, so don’t fuss it all up with too much extra stuff. This perfect peach pie with lattice crust is really just peaches, a touch of booze, which is optional and some raw sugar (use brown sugar if you don’t stock raw). The trick is binding the peaches enough to keep them together in a neat slice, without adding so much starch that is gets gloppy. This is an art, rather than a science (that’s only partially true), because each batch of peaches produces a different amount of juice. I tend to go on the under-bound edge of the spectrum, so keep that in mind when you are making your filling.

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