Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Two Cakes

Friday was Mark's birthday. He wanted a coconut cake. But since we planned to go to a vegan restaurant on his birthday, and expected to have yummy vegan cakes, I didn't bake his coconut cake until Saturday. And since Saturday was Passover, and we went over to my aunt and her family to celebrate, and I brought a Kosher for Passover cake with me, we didn't eat the coconut cake till Sunday night (which was actually Mark's birthday by his recently-discovered Hebrew date!).

We indeed had a yummy vegan blueberry cake at the vegan restaurant. No pictures, though, despite my carrying the camera with me at all times... It had a blueberry (vegan) cream cheese frosting that was simply delicious!

On Saturday I therefore baked two cakes. The first was made of a potato and absolutely no flour, oil or dairy (which qualified it as a kosher for passover, healthy, and kosher pareve, respectively). I would like to emphasize that it was made out of a real whole potato - not potato starch (a common substitute in Passover baking). My aunt and uncle were amazed with the cake almost as much as they were amazed by Mark's Hebrew capabilities.


Don't the strawberries simply look gorgeous?

The recipe for this cake is taken from the Vegetarian Times magazine. You can't see it from this angle, but this cake really holds itself - despite the lack of flour and leavening agents, it is quite tall! The original recipe says you should process the cooked potato, pecans and sugar till smooth in a food processor, which I don't have, so I just chopped the pecans by hand and so the result was not very smooth, but I think it gave the cake a nice crunchy bite.

The second cake of the day was the birthday coconut cake. I combined recipes because Mark wanted buttercream frosting and not egg white frosting, which is what most coconut cake recipes come with. So the cake recipe is taken from here and the frosting from here. Although I substitute coconut milk for the milk and added about twice as much of it than was required to make it taste more coconutty.



Oh, and since I didn't have 2 9" pans, I used 3 8" pans instead and got this 3 layer cake instead of two :)


1 comment:

Dani said...

I admit I'm hear to see if I can figure out what you are bringing to the tea party today. The coconut cake looks good. Bring that.