Tuesday Recipe Blogging: 42nd birthday cake
It was a friend’s 42nd birthday. She is vegan (allergic to eggs), and a fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I made a cake. The recipe was culled without shame from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World:
3/4 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of cocoa, pinch of salt, 3/4 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of baking power, sift all dry ingredients together in a bowl;
then,
1 cup soya milk (plain, unflavoured, unsweetened) curdled with a tablespoon of cider vinegar. Mix with 3/4 cup sugar (I used dark brown sugar), 1/3 cup oil (any unflavoured oil is fine: I used sunflower oil).
Sift the dry ingredients over the sugar, oil, and soy milk mixture and stir gently till everything is mixed together;
Obviously, if you are making cupcakes, you now spoon the mixture into a tray of cupcake papers. But what I had done was grease and flour a metal tray with deep sides, and pour the cake mixture entire into that. (Leftovers did go into a small tray for cupcakes. I had plans for a few extra cupcakes.)
I baked the cake in a hot oven (I hovered over the oven and took it out when it smelt done and the cake rose springly in response to the gentle press of one fingertip: it took about 20 minutes) and set it aside to cool.
Then I repeated the process 3 more times.
I had 4 cakes all the same shape and roughly the same thickness, and six cupcakes. (I ate one to taste-test it. It was fine.)
When the cupcakes were cool, I mixed up a batch of lemon icing: a lot of icing sugar mixed to a paste with small quantities of lemon juice, judiciously added.This makes a white, sweet/sharp icing,it’s very good. All the surviving cupcakes were throroughly dipped in this icing and set aside to dry.
When all the cakes were cool (I baked the last set the morning of the party, and waited rigorously for hours) I layered them together with orange “buttercream” icing between the four layers:
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