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Sunday, September 11, 2011

Little chocolate-berry birthday cakes (gluten-free and vegan)

Little chocolate cake with blackberry jam centre and chocolate icing
It was Alvin's birthday on Monday.  Coincidentally, I had asked him when it was about a week before the day.  We had an abortive attempt to organize something for his actual birthday (turned out he already had plans), but ended up putting plans on hold til the next workday... which was today.  All pretty vague, but I decided to make some gluten-free cakes (he eats GF).

Chocolate cake:

Dry:
1/2 cup GF oat flour
1/3 cup rice flour
1/3 cup glutinous rice flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp custard powder
2 tbsp ground chia seed
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Wet:
1/2 cup fake milk
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp apple cider vinegar

Heat oven to 350F.  Mix dry ingredients well together with a fork.  Mix wet ingredients in a separate bowl.  Add wet to dry and mix til combined.  Prepare a muffin tin and put the mixture into muffin cups (this makes 12).  Put in oven and bake 25-30min / til a skewer comes out clean.  Allow to cool completely before icing.


Chocolate icing:
(recipe from here)

(makes 2 cups - a half quantity is plenty for icing 12 little cakes).

1 pack (12.3oz box eg Mori-Nu) firm silken tofu
1 tbsp canola oil
1/3 tsp salt
1/4 cup icing sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla
6 oz chocolate, melted
1-3 tbsp fake milk, for thinning, if required

Put tofu, oil and salt in blender and puree til smooth.  Add sugar, cocoa and vanilla and blend til smooth.  Add melted chocolate and blend til smooth.  Refrigerate until needed (1 hour to a day).  If it is too thick to spread easily add some fake milk until you get a good consistency.



Decoration:
~1/4 cup blackberry jam
6 glace cherries

Once the cakes are cooled and the icing chilled, assemble as follows:  cut a small piece out of the middle of each cake and put in ~ 1tsp blackberry jam.  Replace the cut-out piece as a lid.  Take 1 - 1 1/2 tbsp of frosting and spread out on top, trying to keep it neat and cover the whole surface.  Cut glace cherries in half and put half a cherry on top in the middle of each cake.


When I took the cakes out of the oven I thought it was a bit of a disaster - they really sank, and seemed to be undercooked although they'd been in for about 45min.  The batter was too wet I think (this is what happens when I make it up as I go along) - I've edited the quantities above a little to try and address this, although I might also consider taking out the applesauce and using 3/4 cup fake milk to make a simpler recipe.  But the recipe is definitely a work in progress.  I made the oat flour in my spice grinder, and that worked well.  The icing was good - you can't go wrong with melted chocolate - could simplify it a bit I think: maybe just chocolate, tofu, vanilla and sugar would be worth trying.

Despite the initial mini-cake-disaster, once the cakes were filled and iced they looked pretty good (somewhat less so by the time I'd biked across town with them, but they more-or-less survived).  And they went down very well!  I took candles, and we had cake and candles and a spontaneous singing of 'Happy Birthday' at the garden.  I made some black bean brownies as back-up, and all of both kinds of cake disappeared, which is usually a good sign.  Non-vegan / GF people didn't guess the cakes were lacking (the tofu in the icing was a particular success), and at least one GF girl was happily surprised that she could eat cake!  There was a good turn-out today - even Seb came along - and it was a good day.
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