Vegan Mofo Day 4: Double Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting

My husband's birthday is today, so I had to figure out a special cake for him. His favorite flavor combination is chocolate and peanut butter. We're both in a sugar coma right now, but everything, especially the frosting, tasted delicious.

Double Chocolate Cake
1 - 10" cake

3/4 cup Teff Flour
3/4 cup Tapioca Flour
3/4 cup Sorghum Flour
1 scant cup Cacao Powder
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Salt
1 cup Agave
2 large over ripe Bananas
1 scraped Vanilla Bean
1/2 cup Olive Oil
1/4 cup Water
1/2 cup Enjoy Life or other Vegan Chocolate Chips
1 tsp coconut vinegar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Use a fine mesh strainer to sift the cacao powder to break up any large chunks. Combine all of the dry ingredients with a whisk. Combine the bananas, agave, olive oil, and water in a high speed blender and blend until smooth and creamy. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and fold everything together with a spatula.

Put a little palm oil on a paper towel and wipe down the interior of a 10" cake pan. Put a little teff flour in the pan and rotate the pan, patting the sides to evenly coat the pan with a very light layer of flour. When your pan is ready and the oven is preheated, add the chocolate chips and vinegar to the batter, stir vigorously, and then pour the batter into the cake pan. Use a spatula to smooth the top of the cake.

Bake the cake for about 30 minutes, or until the middle of the cake is firm. A toothpick shouldn't come away completely clean because you want some moisture.


There is a slight hint of banana to the cake. If you do not like banana, you could easily add a little more cacao to mask the flavor. Banana, chocolate and peanut butter is a great combo, so we didn't mind (and honestly I think the peanut butter masks the flavor even more).


Frosting
Enough for a little more than 1 - 10" cake

1/2 cup palm oil shortening
1/2 cup "creamy" peanut butter
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar*
2 TB hot water

Put all ingredients in a mixing bowl and add the hot water. Combine with a hand mixer until it is smooth.

*Vegan and Allergy Note: Not all sugar is vegan. Many manufacturers use bone char during processing to make the sugar white and use the bone char as a filter. I run turbinado sugar through a blender to make powdered sugar, although the texture isn't always perfect and doesn't add to the presentation (it's a little lumpy, as you can see in the picture). Wholesome Sweeteners produces sugar without bone char, but they add 3% "corn starch or tapioca starch" to their powdered sugar. If it were just tapioca, I'd consider it, but I'm very allergic to corn. Trader Joe's has powdered sugar with tapioca starch, but it's not on their vegan safe list. Looks like I'm sticking to the blender, but I'll keep checking labels.

I am going to go have a cup of tea and some miso soup to help balance out the sugar swirling through my system. I need to get some sleep so I can go to work tomorrow.

Vegan MoFo and Chocolate "Cheesecake"

It is Vegan Month of Food, so I am going to do my best to post a recipe per day! It's going to be hard to come up with new recipes every day, so I may have to resort to a few vegan food and restaurant reviews. I didn't officially sign up in the blog roll, but I'm more than happy to contribute!

Vegan food can be absolutely delicious and indulgent. The most decadent foods I have ever experienced have been raw vegan. The desserts are rich and creamy without the dreaded sugar crash/hangover. So to kick off the month, I am going to introduce (or reintroduce those raw vegans out there) the raw vegan cheesecake. The chocolate "cheesecake" I have made in the past was so well received by my non-vegan family members that they requested the "cheesecake" in lieu of their "real" birthday cake (and in my family, that is an accomplishment to be proud of). I will contribute to more sustainable and healthful eating however I can and take those small wins.

Chocolate Cheesecake with Raspberry Sauce



Crust:
8-12 pitted medjool dates
1 cup soaked hazelnuts
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1/4 cup cacao nibs
1 vanilla bean, scraped
1 TB Orange Zest

Pulse the hazelnuts until they are broken into small pieces (not a flour, but smaller than gravel). Add the coconut, cacao nibs, zest, and vanilla bean and pulse a couple times to combine. Turn the processor back on and drop in the dates one at a time, until they are well combined and the mixture forms into a ball. Press the "dough" into the bottom of a spring-form pan.

Filling:
3.5 cups soaked cashews or macadamia nuts
1.5 cups water
1 cup agave
2 vanilla beans scraped
1/4 tsp salt
3 Tbs finely ground chia seeds
3/4 c cacao powder
1/2 c melted cacao butter
1/3 c melted coconut oil


Blend the soaked nuts, water, agave, vanilla bean, and salt until smooth in a high power blender. This may take a couple minutes. My Vitamix wasn't turning quickly enough for my taste after this was all combined (I am so impatient), so I poured out the smooth batter and added the ground chia seeds and cacao powder with a hand mixer. After the chia and cacao are very well combined, slowly add the oils while the mixer is on low to low-medium.

Pour into the springform pan over the crust and put on a flat surface in your freezer. The batter needs to chill for 2 hours in the freezer and then overnight (or at least 3 hours) in the fridge for it to have that cheesecake texture. This is definitely something I make the day before.

Raspberry Sauce
2 c. raspberries
5 dates
Combine in the food processor. You can add more dates if you feel this combination isn't sweet enough.

Lemon Cake

Please note that you will want to use shredded yellow squash, not pureed, baby food or pre-cooked. My mom thought pureeing the squash would give the cake a better texture, but the cake sank. Even my friends with a texture food phobia thought the texture of this cake is very good. I like the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I like using yellow (crookneck) squash because the color blends in very well with the batter. I prefer the squash without bumps in the skin, but you can peel those off. If you can't find the proper kind of squash, you can substitute with zucchini, although I would probably peel off the skin.

Lemon Cake
makes one 10" cake
1 cup brown rice flour
3/4 c sorghum flour
1/4 c tapioca flour
1 1/2 cup sugar (or 1/2 cup turbinado sugar and 1/2 cup agave)
1 vanilla bean, scraped
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup olive oil
2 cups shredded yellow squash
1 lemon, zested and juiced

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl. In another bowl, combine the squash with the wet ingredients. be sure to add in the lemon zest and juice. Combine the liquid and dry ingredients by folding in the squash mixture. This will be a drier than normal cake batter. The squash releases liquid as the cake cooks in the oven and it comes out quite moist. Because the cake doesn't have eggs, feel free to try a very small amount of batter. If there isn't enough lemon flavor, zest half of another lemon into the cake batter.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes away mostly clean. You don't want to overcook this cake and a little extra moisture is better than too little.