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You are here: Home / Beers / Blue Bottle’s Stout Coffee Cake

Blue Bottle’s Stout Coffee Cake

October 16, 2010 By Jay Brooks

blue-bottle
Back in August, I wrote about a cake made with stout at Miette’s in San Francisco and Oakland. It had been chosen by Alton Brown of the Food Network as one of the Top Ten Sweets in the United States. And while it was very tasty, I lamented the fact that it was made with Guinness stout rather than a local beer. I’ve noticed that a lot of foodies who insist on local food ingredients and even wine are completely blind to the concept of local beer. It’s a head-scratcher, with the most famous example I know is that locavore pioneer Alice Waters until very recently served soulless imported beers at her famous restaurant Chez Panisse.

The restaurant’s website describes Waters as an “American pioneer of a culinary philosophy that maintains that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally. She is a passionate advocate for a food economy that is ‘good, clean, and fair.’ Over the course of nearly forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.” While I don’t quibble with her influence and importance in creating the idea of how important using local ingredients is, the fact is that it took 35 years to extend that idea to beer. I find that incredibly sad and to me it says quite a lot about how slow much of the food community has been to embrace craft beer while at the same time they’ve been so quick to champion artisanal cheese, bread, chocolates, preserves, charcuterie, pickles, coffee, tea, wine and much more. Happily, things are finally changing and a growing number of self-avowed foodies are accepting craft beer as an equal to other artisanal foodstuffs.

So I was thrilled to learn that another local company, Blue Bottle Coffee, was making a pastry — in this case a coffee cake — using a local stout, Magnolia Stout of Circumstance. Dave McLean’s Magnolia Gastropub makes some great beers (and has really good food, too) so I was very keen to try the coffee cake made with his beer.

Blue Bottle Coffee has six locations in the Bay Area (five in San Francisco and one in Oakland; and there’s a seventh location in Brooklyn, too) and last week I stopped by their Kiosk location on Linden Street in San Francisco.

blue-btl-kiosk
Waiting in line at the Linden Street Kiosk.

It turns out that the co-founder of Miette, Caitlin Williams Freeman — who made the other stout cake — sold her interest in Miette and started making pastries for her husband’s company, Blue Bottle Coffee. Her most famous pastries are the art-inspired creations she makes for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But it was the beer confections that caught my interest.

stout-ccake-1
Blue Bottle Coffee’s coffee cake made with Magnolia’s stout.

The coffee cakes are sold in a small, round personal size. They’re quite tasty, with a melange of different flavors. There appear to be oats, chopped walnuts, caraway seeds and possibly dried currants in the cake. The stout brings out a nice balancing sweetness that’s treacly and molasses-like. That sweetness also balances the dry cake and makes it nice and moist so that when you bite into it you get both dry and wet sensations. I’m not actually much of a coffee drinker — I prefer tea — but I can see how this cake would be a perfect compliment to their coffee, which as I understand it are some of the best.

P1010387
The Blue Bottle Coffee Cake close-up on my kitchen counter.

Filed Under: Beers, Just For Fun Tagged With: California, Food, San Francisco



Comments

  1. caitlin freeman says

    October 16, 2010 at 3:05 pm

    Hello!
    What a thrilling post, thank you so much for posting about our little cake! Just a quick note about the flavors: the cake has oats and currents in it (which are soaked in the beer for 2 hours before mixing/baking), and the streusel has pecans and caraway seeds.

    This was a cake that my dear friend Nicole Krasinksi (also pastry chef, formerly of Rubicon) made for our 2009 Blue Bottle holiday party. To turn it into a cake that would be good for the coffee shops, we did beer tastings with Magnolia’s beer and came up with a streusel that would pair well with the malty beer flavor. I had been obsessed with using caraway seeds in a non-rye bread application, and this was perfect! It really is one of my very favorite cakes!

  2. Greg Warwick says

    October 18, 2010 at 12:33 pm

    Blue Bottle Coffee Cake:
    Sounds and looks absolutely incredible and I can’t wait to try it!

  3. Sean Paxton says

    October 19, 2010 at 12:06 pm

    Yet another reason I love you Jay! Love your points on local and how beer for some reason is forgotten. Like beer isn’t artisan or something.

    And I saw that Ginger Stout cake special with Mr. Brown and wanted that. But now I really want that Stout Coffee Cake! Might have to make up a recipe!

    Cheers,

    Sean

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