A Contemporary Southern Layer Cake for Your Holiday Table

To start, we soaked currants and raisins (both regular and golden raisins for depth of flavor) in porter beer overnight. The bath plumped up the dried fruits, making them juicy instead of chewy, and imbued them with the nutty, malty, bitter-sweet flavor of porter. 

We drained the fruits (setting aside the liquid to use later) and mixed them into a thick cake batter flavored with brown sugar, ginger, nutmeg, lemon zest, and a splash of vanilla. The batter baked into rich, moist cake layers chock-full of fruit but not cloyingly sweet, balanced with warm spices and citrus zing.

To get even more flavor into the cake, we reduced the leftover porter with more brown sugar until it was thick and syrupy. We brushed some of the syrup onto the still-warm cake layers and then whisked cold butter into the remaining syrup to create a caramel-like sauce for decorating.

A tangy cream cheese frosting—always a crowd-pleasing favorite—was the perfect counterpoint to the fruity spiced cake layers. 

Using a technique from our archives, we bolstered the frosting with a scoop of buttermilk powder to amplify the tart dairy flavor of the cream cheese while stabilizing the frosting to a stiff, pipable consistency.

This cake is rich, and we preferred frosting it with a lighter hand (although the recipe makes enough frosting to give you options). 

We love the modern look of a naked cake, so we scraped the cake sides clean to let the separate layers show through. We then piped frosting around the top edge and drizzled it with the porter syrup, letting the sweet liquid naturally cascade down the sides of the cake—an elegant flourish.