Magic Chocolate (birthday) Cake!
This cake is magic because it’s so easy to make and turns out perfectly each time – rich, moist, and rather moreish!After a couple of months on a healthkick, my inherent sweet tooth was ready for some decadence, and my recent birthday seemed like a pretty good excuse to indulge it! On the day, my typical green smoothie breakfast was left aside in favour of chocolate cake batter. By midday, the cake & cupcakes were cooled down and ready for icing, so it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to decide to have chocolate icing for lunch. Needless to say, my sweet tooth was swooning. If only we were like dogs and could claim seven birthdays per year…
The recipe I used was from Jennifer Raymond’s The Peaceful Palate, one of the first vegan cookbooks I bought, back in late 1998 (despite its age, it remains one of my go-to cookbooks to this day). My family was visiting my uncle, who was living at the time with his own family in Peterborough, USA. It was a fairly small town – the kind where the residents didn’t bother locking their front doors when going on vacation for a few weeks – but it sported a fantastic healthfood store with an extensive book section and also a café. I still remember the flavoursome vegan corn chowder from the café… although, given back in those pre-digital days recording images of food wasn’t exactly a common occurrence, I don’t have any photos of it to share!
Something else I remember from that lovely holiday is my uncle saying ‘if you cooked for me all the time I could probably be vegan pretty easily”! We lived on different continents so it wasn’t at all feasible, but it showed the power of sharing delicious vegan dishes with others and demonstrating how tasty a cruelty-free meal can be.
Even un-iced, the cupcakes were pretty tempting…
During that visit my aunt and I made the banana cake from The Peaceful Palate, and it was the first time I was introduced to thawing out frozen ripe bananas to use in a recipe. The banana cake turned out perfectly, but this post is really about the “Magic Chocolate Cake” recipe, as TGO isn’t a fan of bananas* and I wanted to make a party cake he would be keen on too.
… but the icing does manage to lift them still further! Yummo 🙂Handily, you can find the cake and icing recipes, both written out and also demonstrated in a video, on the ChooseVeg website. The presenters say not to use olive oil in the recipe as the flavour is too strong but I don’t find this to be the case. I also doubled the recipe in order to make both a square cake and a dozen cupcakes (as well as enough batter left in the bowl to form my aforementioned breakfast!).
This cake truly is ‘magic’ to make – and I warrant you’ll find that it disappears like magic too!
This is my fourth blog post as part of October’s Vegan Month of Food, which means I’m already 20% of the way through the challenge of at least 20 posts. Check out the blogroll for extensive inspiration from hundreds of bloggers worldwide!
*This is a significant understatement; he intensely dislikes them. Fortunately, his multitude of excellent character traits manages to balance out this major flaw.
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