Yellow Butter Cake with Dark Chocolate Frosting

On Saturday a friend celebrated her 26th birthday and I offered to bring cake. Her request: yellow cake with chocolate frosting. It seemed simple enough except that I don’t often bake cakes and I have never baked vegan cake. I was eager to take on the challenge, however, so I took great care to do my research. At the library I consulted Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and La Dolce Vegan!, the only vegan cookbooks they seemed to have on the shelf, along with several other non-vegan baking and cake books. Eventually I decided to use VCTOTW’s Golden Vanilla Cupcakes recipe, scaling up for 2 9-inch cakes instead of 12 cupcakes and La Dolce Vegan’s Chocolate Fudgey Frosting. It seemed like a perfect combo and quite close to the birthday girl’s request. After a brief shopping trip to stock up on vegan baking essentials, I set to work. Preparing the cake itself was easy. It was very similar to non-vegan baking and given that I’d already come to realize the importance of room temperature ingredients and not overmixing from previous baking endeavors I figured I would be fine. Boy was I wrong. The challenge came not from my creaming and mixing skills, but from my math skills. You see when I scaled the recipe to make cakes instead of cupcakes I vastly overestimated the amount of batter I needed. The result was two cakes that dripped all over the oven before becoming crusty on the outside, while still molten in the inside. I took them out of the oven, hoping that with a little trimming they would be passable, but alas, the texture was uneven. Areas were either overcooked and dense or uncooked. The frosting was no help either. I had been hoping for something creamy and full of body, but instead I got a frosting that, even after cooling, was more like the consistency of hot fudge. Sadly, the cake had to be dumped. It was that bad. I was disapointed in myself for my failed vegan baking effort. I hate the tremendous let down when you invest time in researching and making a recipe, not to mention building it up in your mind, only to have it flop.

Had I been less frazzled, I might have attempted the VCTOTW recipe with better math and different frosting, but instead I relented and turned to my trusted Martha Stewart Baking Handbook. (You can find an adapted recipe online here.) Her book is definitely not vegan, but it is tremendously reliable, which in my moment of baking panic was exactly what I needed. I ended up making her Yellow Butter Cake with Dark Chocolate Frosting. To my relief, it came out perfectly. The layers were evenly baked with a lovely crumb and the frosting was fluffy and deliciously chocolately. It received rave reviews from the birthday girl and others at the party. But it was bittersweet because while I always appreciate compliments about my creations, I desperately wanted the praise-worthy cake to be vegan. However, I refuse to let this deter me and am confident that by the end of October I will have mastered at least one vegan dessert. Vegan Dad’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Pudding Cake looks easy and delectable so perhaps it could help me become a successful vegan baker. So I apologize for my current failure as a vegan baker and am hoping that my subsequent posts will make up for these blunders.