Help! Birthday Cake Quandary
I've not posted with a question before, but now I have one that's giving me a good deal of pause. Here's my problem: I have two friends with birthdays this weekend, so we are throwing a joint birthday party for which they both have their respective and separate friends invited. There will be around twenty people there. My partner and I are not only the only vegans, but I seem to be the only baking inclined person of the bunch. Thus, I've volunteered to supply the birthday cakes, and I'm happy and excited to be able to do so. I do think it needs to be cakes, plural, since one won't feed 20 people and there are two birthday people, after all.
My quandary is that they've both indicated that they like chocolate raspberry the best. I've made the Raspberry Mocha Cake from this site with a good deal of success, and I could do a repeat performance of that. I'm worried that making two chocolate cakes would be overkill. If I do the Raspberry Mocha Cake, what should the other cake be? Should I do variations on a theme? For example, one with a ganache and the other with a buttercream-y frosting? Any feedback would be very much appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
There is no such thing as too much chocolate! ;)
That said, being the host, it would be nice to provide a different type of cake. Can't help you with a recipe, though. ::)
Thanks, Lezly. I feel like there must be some fabulous option that would balance the very intense chocolatey goodness of this other cake... Maybe another, slightly different chocolate cake with white icing? The little emoticons freak me out a bit, otherwise I'd post one here that looked bewildered, yet hopeful.
gotskates: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=6348.0
Robin has posted a recipe for a quick, easy cake that uses a Duncan Hines cake mix, which is vegan. I think she subs out 1/4 cup applesauce per egg & one can of soda pop for the liquid. Maybe she'll read this & confirm.
I agree that something to counter the super rich chocolate cake would be appropriate. On the mocha raspberry cake, you can write "happy birthday bob and jane" so it's like they're both getting the choc cake but also serve something else. Such as a carrot cake, pineapple upside down cake, white cupcakes (Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World is a fabulous book for cupcake ideas) or maybe even bake a pie.
Duncan Hines is vegan?
You know, you could do the melted ice cream thing except use a pint of melted soy dream and add it to a box of cake mix.
Duncan Hines has changed their recipe, and their cake mixes are no longer vegan. :'(
jkl, what is the "the melted ice cream (soydream) thing? sounds intriguing!
What about lots of muffins piled up with birthday candles stuck in, perhaps with a nice lemony flavour? That would counteract the look and chocolate intensity of the other cake.
Firefightress,
the melted ice cream cake thing is based on a recipe that has been around forever and which i found in a book called "The Cake Mix Doctor" which is a fabulous (but non-vegan) cookbook that has saved my b@tt on many a weeknights when cupcakes were required the next day.
The basic recipe is to mix 1 box plain white cake mix with 2 cups of melted ice cream and three eggs. The author says she tried many kinds of melted ice creams and the cherry ones with the chocolate chips were her family's favorite. One pint of premium ice cream was about enough for two cups, but if it was a brand with more overrun, then you might need to melt more than one pint to get two cups. Mix the whole thing together and bake in a bundt pan at 350.
So if I were doing this, and I might just try to veganize it to see if it works, I would probably use 1/4 cup plus 2 tbls pureed silken tofu instead of the eggs, unless I chose a cake mix/ice cream combination where pureed banana might work as well. Soy Delicious makes a "Bananas Anna" and I might try that and throw in a handful of chocolate chips for good measure.
If I do try it, I'll report back the results. Maybe we should get the administrators to start a board for things that don't work too!
Bananas are great with caramel, peanut butter, and chocolate flavors too-- good luck, and I can't wait to see how it turns out!
thanks JKL, it does sound great!! i'll have to try it out sometime! :)
what's your favorite vegan cakemix? rumor has it that duncan hines doesn't cut it anymore, thanks to some recipe altering. i know there are some pricey vegan mixes available online, but are there anymore good, accidentally vegan ones left?
Has someone called Duncan Hines and actually confirmed this?
I've made the Dr. Oetker, or whatever the name is, that they carry at Whole Foods and my family thought it was gross. I wound up tossing out the whole cake.
Re: Somehow I always check right after Lezly has "called" me...
Duncan Hines has changed their recipe, and their cake mixes are no longer vegan. :'(
It's the brain, baby!
Argghhh!!! Too bad about Duncan Hines!
Thanks to everyone who posted for your help! I ended up going with the raspberry mocha cake, and the super moist chocolate cake. To balance out the dark, chocolatey goodness of the mocha cake, I frosted the other in a light, fluffy, lemony cream cheese icing and topped it with fresh raspberries. This way they both get the chocolate raspberry thing. I'm taking them over in about half an hour. I hope they go over well!
They sound delicious!
I went googling about for vegan cake mixes, but since Duncan Hines messed up their mixes, it looks dire. Maybe we should all e-mail Duncan Hines pleading for them to come back to their senses!
Hi MDVEGAN. Please post recipes for cakes in a jar when you have a chance. Sounds great.
BTW, I did make a melted ice cream cake Saturday night just to see how it would work. I melted I pint of Soy Delicious Swinging Bananas Anna and mixed it with a box of Duncan Hines plain white mix. I added a half package of mori-nu tofu pureeed with three tablespoons banana liquer (an entire bottle I acquired for some recipe in the past, I'm sure), beat it all together, and topped it with chocolate chips.
The verdict is the melted soy dream thingy does work, and everyone would have eaten more of it except that I chose banana. We eat a lot of homemade banana muffins in my house, so the cake didn't seem like much of a novelty. Just a super-sweet, not particularly good for you version of something they eat all the time. So no one was particularly interested, and neither was I. It also occurred to me later that the cake mix already has a lot of sugar in it--too much for my taste--and so the extra sugar in the soy dream doesn't really help matters much.
And of course, when I was cleaning up, I looked at the box of Duncan Hines and apparently they felt the need to add some whey to the mix so it's not vegan after all.