Full question
I’m in the US and want to make the Chocolate Guinness Cake. The frosting calls for cornflour. Is that the same as what we would call cornstarch here in the US?
Our answer
Nigella's Chocolate Guinness Cake (from FEAST) is a damp, dense and rich chocolate cake that is topped with a frothy cream cheese frosting that emulates the "head" on a pint of Guinness.
The frosting includes cornflour, which in the US is cornstarch. If you slde the "metric - U.S." toggle at the top of the ingredients list to "U.S." it will switch the ingredients list to US ingredients. It may sound odd to add cornstarch to a frosting, but it helps to absorb some of the moisture in the cream cheese and prevents the frosting from becoming too runny, and you don't notice any cornstarch taste in the frosting. It is also worth noting that cornstarch was used (and in some cases is still used) as an anti-caking ingredient in confectioners' (icing) sugar, so it is not that unusual for some cornstarch to be used in buttercream and other frostings.
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