St. Patrick's Day Guinness Cake

As usual, just in time for St. Joseph's Day. (Happy Birthday to my brother Brian).
Yesterday our friend, Yovan who lives in Barcelona, visited and prepared a huge Catalan feast complete with chistorra sausage on toast points, deep fried whole green "pimientos del padron" (all mild this time! Usually one of them will blow your head off with no warning), deep fried "chipirones" (itty bitty little squids you eat whole) and the showstopper, two giant paella pans full of fideua, like paella but instead of rice, it's made with super thin toasted 1-inch lengths of angel hair pasta) one traditional and one "a la tinta", (that is, laced with black squid ink) Recipe coming soon.

I provided the superfluous dessert. We were all stuffed after those delicious tapas and the fideua but Guinness Cake presented itself as a patriotic must (at least for me as I was the only one in the room with Irish roots).

I more or less followed the Oprah Winfrey (of all people) recipe here. I replaced half the butter in the cake batter with home pureed pear sauce (works just like apple sauce) and then through a series of mishaps, I changed the frosting recipe entirely. I replaced the cream cheese with "light" cream cheese (the grocery store was out of the regular kind) only to add a bunch of mascarpone to the mix later to thicken it up. I used a simple sugar syrup rather than the powdered sugar (it was Sunday and I had forgotten to get powdered sugar when the stores were open on Saturday) All was well that ended well, the mascarpone rescued my too-thin-to-spread-well frosting and it turned out pretty tasty too. The Guinness does indeed add a coffee-like flavor to the chocolate-spice cake.