UPDATES!!!

HEYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!

I am SO SO SORRY that it has been WAY TOO LONG! I have missed my blogging life so much and I promise that once we are settled in Vancouver, my blogs will become regular once again!

Since returning to Victoria, my husband and I have been working random times and have been busy with Noah and planning his birthday party as well as thinking about packing for our move to Vancouver! That's right...we are moving to Vancouver this Sunday!!!! I can't believe how much we still have to do but I figured that to blog would reduce some of my stress, put a smile on my face and relieve some of the guilt that I have been feeling over not blogging!!!

Noah doesn't turn two until August 5th, but we wanted to throw a little party for him in Victoria where his friends could come and celebrate so we did so last weekend! It was such a gorgeous day and we held it at a beautiful park! I was proud of the healthy food that I served, along with my vegan chocolate cake!!!! Everything was a hit and everyone's different tastes were met!!! Everyone RAVED over how delicious the cake was so I thought that I would share the recipe with you...I stumbled upon it while searching for the 'perfect' recipe! After skimming tons of tempting recipes I settled for this chocolate cake recipe which I found at the following website: http://vegan-food.suite101.com/article.cfm/delicious_vegan_chocolate_cake_recipe

I first made this cake in Winnipeg so that Oma, Opa and Ally could sing Happy Birthday to Noah and share some very-early birthday cake and celebrations! It was a great time to test out this new recipe which everyone loved!


Due to it's great success I made it again for Noah's party. Our family were the only vegans and EVERYONE loved it! whoohoo! It didn't look aesthetically pleasing because I attempted to shape the cake into a dinosaur (a vegetarian brontosaurus) and failed miserably!!! Let's face it, I am much more interested in cooking than baking!!! I did however, have a blast making Noah his requested dinosaur cake and watching how happy he was!

hahaha....oh wow! Who would have known creating a dinosaur cake could be so trying?!!

Nevertheless, we all had so much fun and watching the joy on Noah's face was incredible!!!

So for those of you who either have a birthday coming up and you would like to wow everyone with your own vegan chocolate cake OR for those of you that are just feeling in the chocolate-mood, here is one very delicious chocolate cake recipe!!! I had no idea how easy it would be to make this cake! The only difficulty proved to be my carving-a-cake-into-a-dinosaur skills (or lack of)!!!
I want to add that I tweaked the recipe by throwing in some dark chocolate chips into the cake mix before baking. This added a little added punch and deliciousness! I also substituted spelt flour for all-purpose and used maple sugar.
When I made the cake in Winnipeg, I found the following ingredients sufficient for an 8x8 pan but for Noah's birthday party I doubled the recipe!

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups of spelt flour
1 cup of maple sugar
4 tbsp. of vegan cocoa
pinch of sea salt
1 tsp. of baking soda

1/3 cup of canola oil
1 tbsp. of apple cider vinegar
1 tsp. of vanilla extract
1 cup of water

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 350'F. Add all of the dry ingredients to one bowl and mix well. In a separate bowl add all of the wet ingredients and mix together. Make a well into the center of your dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients into the well that you've made. Mix together until the batter is smooth. Pour into a round or 8x8 square baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes. The cake is done when a toothpick is inserted into the middle and comes out clean!

Vegan Icing:
I did not measure the amount of the ingredients but just took advice from Dan's mom who is an icing expert!!! In Winnipeg we added approx. 2 heaping tbsp. of vegan (Earth Balance) butter and whipped it until creamy. We then added a bunch of vegan icing sugar (ewww, did you know that a lot of icing sugar is made by grinding with animal bones?!)...so make sure it's vegan!!! We stirred rapidly and added a couple of large spoonfuls of cocoa...once the icing was very thick, we added a few splashes of soy milk (or almond milk), and a splash of vanilla. Really you just need to whip everything together and keep adding icing sugar when you want to thicken the icing, cocoa if you want it more chocolaty, and soy milk if you want to thin-out the icing a little!

The icing turned out AMAZING I must say!

I re-created the same icing when in Victoria by myself and I actually loved mixing and throwing in a little of this and a little of that!!! How fun! I let Noah lick his first spoon of icing too!!!