Chocolate Cake with Cream Cheese frosting

Wow, these past few days have been so jam packed there just hasn't been anytime until now to tell you about this super delicious cake I made the other day. I've been crazy busy playing with my new cellphone, drinking german beer out of beastly-sized pitchers and boots, watching bad take offs of sex and the city, cleaning up tennis ball vomit at 4am, going to a rad restaurant opening and feasting on endless shortbread and chocolate pudding and blood orange margaritas, and last but not least, making a pretty darn delicious chocolate cake!

This recipe (and frosting) comes from the Joy of Vegan Baking:

1-1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/3 cups veg oil (i used 1/3 cup of applesauce instead)
1 tablespoon white distilled vinegar
1 cup cold water

Preheat to 350 degrees and lightly oil either a bundt pan, some 9inch form of a pan, or muffin tins.

Combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, and cocoa in large bowl until thoroughly combined. In separate small bowl, combine vanilla, oil, vinegar and water. Add to dry bowl and mix only until just combined. Pour into your pan and bake for approx. 30 minutes -- if you're making cupcakes it would be closer to 15 minutes. Either way, when you insert a toothpick in the center and it comes out clean then you are ready to go! Make sure to cool it completely before icing it with:

Cream Cheese Brandy frosting:

Combine until creamy:

8 ounces of tofutti cream cheese
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup of confectioner's sugar, sifted
at least 2 teaspoons of brandy (ok maybe at least four)

I made mine in a boring 9"x9" pan, and there was a LOT of frosting. Not complaining, but if you're only going to be covering the top you could get away with making 3/4 of the recipe. Otherwise slobber it on there. A bit of confectionery sugar sprinkled on also looks nice, as does some fresh fruit. I opted to serve it with some raspberry sorbet and preston's favorite mexican sprinkle cookies.

Enjoy!

This is another fun and straight forward recipe so I've included some musica you can bop around to:


rolling stones - she's a rainbow


all girls summer fun band - later operator


headlights - cherry tulips


j church - she's so mean


camera obscura - razzle dazzle rose

not the best decorations but I was tired and wanted to eat it.

Hardy muffins

Welp, the mood struck me again, and with two sad sorry bananas sitting around birthing fruit flies, I poured through cook books to see what I could make with what I had. Ok that's not totally true. Mostly I just wanted to use my new cookbook again and had to really fudge it with only two bananas.

Here's the recipe for banana chocolate chip muffins, followed by another not-really-related-to-baking-playlist (I was kinda tired so it's a little mellow of a mix):

3 cups whole wheat flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp each of: cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom
3/4 cups choc chips
1 cup maple syrup (instead I used 1/2 cup sucanat and 3/4 cup brown sugar)
3 super ripe bananas (i used two)
1/2 cup applesauce (i used 1 cup since i only had 2 bananas)
approx. 1/4 cup water (i prob used at least a cup, partly due to using sugar as the maple syrup substitute)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and choc chips in large bowl.
3. Mix syrup (or sugar), mashed bananas, applesauce and water in medium bowl.
4. Add wet to dry and add more applesauce/water as needed to make a batter that's thicker than pancake but a little thinner than cookie batter. (I had a kettle of water nearby that I kept gradually adding from -- you get the idea of what the consistency is supposed to be pretty quickly)
5. put into greased muffin tins and bake for 25-30 minutes.



Hall & Oates - I can't go for that


Rolling Stones - let it loose


Smokey Robinson - going to a go-go


Joanna Newsom - inflammatory writ



Billy Bragg & Wilco - blood of the lamb


Okay, I made a ton of substitutions and also made muffins instead of the bread that the recipe was originally made for. SO based on that, I actually think they turned out pretty good. I freaked out right before I was done because before adding the last 1/4 cup of brown sugar I thought it was too bland and then after dumping the sugar in thought it was way too sweet. So I added a dash more flour and a few pinches of salt. Not sure if it was necessary because some of the sweetness seemed to be baked away -- but the hint of banana and choc chips were really nice. Otherwise, these muffins are pretty hardy due to the whole wheat flour, so I think if you're looking for something a little lighter I might go with reg flour. It might also be nice to add a dash of vanilla into the wet mixture. I also would have preferred to use maple syrup but I didn't want to use the last of mine up what with french toast weekend coming up and all. Whatever you do, be sure to let me know how they turn out!!

Oh, so another thing is that this made a good amount of batter. I only have one 8-slotted muffin tin, so I decided to make the rest into a tiny loaf (roughly 3" x 7"). That ended up baking for about 10 minutes longer. Here's some pictures of the final yummers:

my favorite part about this cookbook: watch the top right corner of the book -- they almost kiss.