Vanilla Porter Spice Cake

October 1, 2019 by Madeline Horszt 4,473 Comments

Fluffy vanilla spice cake in a bundt pan next to a vanilla porter bottle

Our vanilla porter cake is a moist dense cake recipe, with a warm spiced flavor that evokes winter holiday feelings. One of South Shore Kitchens most critical testers said, “it tastes like Christmas smells”. We couldn’t agree more. It is the perfect cake for a holiday get together or to enjoy on a cozy afternoon, with a cup of tea and some great conversation. A cake I imagine my grandma would have served when
she invited her sisters to come gossip over a cup of coffee. Of course, it was never called gossip back then, it was a “visit” and only a small slice of cake would be accepted because they were “watching their figure” but actually they would spend the entire afternoon nibbling away, sneaking small slices every chance they got.

This little gem came to us tucked away in an old box of recipes we picked up at a barn sale. For us, finding an old recipe box bursting at the seams is the holy grail of long forgotten dusty treasures. Combing through our new pile of recipes we had a bit of a laugh because most of the recipes were illegibly scrawled lists of ingredients without instructions, cook times, temperatures, or even a recipe name. Feeling like we weren’t in Kansas anymore, but we kept on the path and out popped a recipe for beer cake. A real full recipe. It has a title, list of ingredients, temperatures and instructions. Score!

Out of the Blue, Something New!

The introduction for the original recipe states, “you will want to try this unusual recipe”. Heck yeah, we do! There is nothing we love more at South Shore Kitchen than to try something new, an ingredient, technique or a whole entire recipe

Going over the list of ingredients, we knew the perfect style of beer to pair with this recipe is a vanilla porter. Not only is it my favorite style of beer but the malty, sweet, roast flavor of a vanilla porter is a fantastic compliment to the other flavors in the cake. Driving to the store we were a little nervous about trying to buy a winter seasonal style of beer in August thanks to Wiseguys and Breckenridge Brewery for coming through.

We had zero expectations for this recipe. It sounded fun so we decided to give it a go and not really care how it turned out. Imagine our surprise when we LOVED it!

Spicing It Up

Here are a few changes we made to the original recipe, the recipe called for dried dates, we used dried figs for no other reason than we had a whole jar of them that needed to get used. We loved it with the figs and would use them again, but it would be good either way.

Mrs. Wilkinson used margarine in her recipe. We were trying to be authentic and stick with the original recipe, but margarine is a hard no for us. It’s not something we keep in the kitchen, so we went with butter. If anyone knows the merits of using margarine in this recipe, please comment down below. We would love to learn about it.

1 ½ cups of unspecified nuts, to us walnuts or pecans would be the default choices. We think either one would be great however we settled on pecans because we had them in stock. We did cheat a little and only used one cup of pecans seeing as our stock was a little low.

There you have it! Mrs. Wm. O. Wilkinson and Mrs. Harvey F. Rostiser’s beer cake recipe with a South Shore Kitchen twist. Let us know what you think in the comments down below or tag us on social media and show us what’s in your kitchen.