we made cake...

...and damn, was it ever good.

The 'we' was me & lintil. The occasion? karob's birthday. After she finally agreed to let us celebrate the occasion, we decided to surprise her with a vegan cake. Neither of us had actually cooked a vegan cake before. It wasn't as hard as we thought. We found a recipe in The Garden of Vegan by Sarah Kramer & Tanya Barnard for a 2-layer chocolate cake (I don't have the book here with me so I don't have all the measurements on hand):

Dry ingredients:
1 1/2 c flour
baking powder
baking soda
salt
1/2 c sugar (we used Splenda!)

chocolate mixture:
2 tbsp strawberry jam (sugarless)
1 c chocolate chips (semi-sweet, no milk)
1/2 c cocoa
3/4 c water
1 c margarine (lactose free- can you believe that only, like, 1 brand out of 10 at IGA is actually lactose free?)

other ingredients:
2 tbsp soy milk
1 banana, mashed (subsitute for 2 eggs)
2 tbsp olive oil

topping and filling: strawberry jam! (this was a fluke decision but proved to be an essential one. It made the cake nice and moist and dense).

I think that's everything.

Lintil mixed all the dry ingredients. She sifted everything, using a sieve. I had no idea that that's what sifting actually meant, so good thing she knew.

I melted the chocolate mixture together over the stove on low heat.

We put the chocolate mixture, as well as the mashed banana, olive oil and milk into the dry mixture. We mixed gently till it was 'just mixed'.

We poured the batter into 2 8x8 pans, trying to distribute as evenly as possible between the two. Both pans went into a pre-heated oven for about 25 minutes @ 350F (or was it 325?).

The recipe gave no directions on what to actually do with the 2 layers of the cake...so we improvised. We were careful when transferring the layers to a plate - we made sure that the flat sides of the layers would be touching one another. We didn't have all the ingredients for icing, but I remembered that a friend had made a cake for me with a jam topping. So we thought we'd try that, with all of the jam we had left. We spread some jam over the bottom layer, then placed the top layer over it (that was a bit tricky, we just kinda did it, and a little bit of the cake broke) and spread jam over the top.

...and damn, was it ever good!