Now is time for cake



After the success of my most recent foray into cake-making, I decided to purchase the e-book from which that recipe came, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. The way I see it, it doesn't hurt to have an entire baked-goodies cookbook which makes a point of avoiding dairy. I don't currently have all the supplies I need for a true foray into cupcake-making, but I do have the basics for cake-making.

Mom's birthday, this past Thursday, seemed the perfect excuse reason to try out a recipe or two from the book.

I'd heard so many good things about Red Velvet Cake and was hoping its allure was less about its often-vibrant colouring and more about the balance of flavours involved. I decided to try my hand at adapting a dairy-free version.

In the end, extracting natural food colouring from beets or raspberries was a bit too intimidating at this early stage in my development as a baker, so I opted to do a simpler "Velvet Cake", omitting any extra colouring — thus using the exact same recipe I paired with the raspberry buttercream last time — and going with the vegan cookbook's cream cheese icing.

I doubled the cake batter to fill two cake pans and also doubled the icing recipe to be certain to make enough to frost a cake.

The cake, as a whole, was the best damn cake I've ever eaten in my life. The icing didn't overpower the chocolate cake (although I would have liked a bit more cream cheese "tang" to the finished product) and wasn't too sweet, 'though certainly sweet enough. The cake itself was unbelievably moist without being dense. It was fantastic!

I'm sittin' on a goldmine!

Well, $559,628 any way.

Hey, know what's fun?

Trying not to sound passive-aggressive when you're so hormonal, massively underslept and fed-up with the fact that your mother just holds up clothing up to your baby to make sure it looks "pretty" on her in the midst of a North American bedbug infestation that you finally send out an email to your immediate family to tell them to cut that shit out.

Well, it's not going to win any Prettiest Cake awards...



...but this is a much better cake than the last one I made.

I had some leftover raspberry buttercream in the freezer following the making of Kara's birthday cake and knew from experience that pairing lemon cake with it again would be a mistake, so I decided to look into chocolate cake recipes. I was able to find a recipe for vegan chocolate cupcakes which I made the batter for and poured into a cake pan. After the resultant cake cooled, I halved it vertically, frosted the bottom half, then added the top half and finished frosting. The cake itself is really good (and I don't like cake); it's not too chocolaty, not too sweet and it's moist without being dense. The frosting is much better with this cake than with the lemon cake. I think it's because having the two tart flavours paired makes everything come across as too sweet, whereas having the tart frosting paired with the slightly bitter chocolate flavour balances out nicely.

I will not make this icing again (I think I'll experiment further with the mock whipped cream recipe in my Friendly Food cookbook). If I make the cake again, I'll try to remember to double the recipe and bake two layers to slice — having a top layer made from the domed top portion of a cake makes it less visually impressive than it tastes.

Looks like I'll have me-friendly birthday cake this year!