Best Chocolate cake!
This is more of a personal post… My son turned 12 last week, and part of the birthday tradition is that I make him a homemade cake. When he was little, I used to have fun creating themes for his parties around his interests at the time. I remember in somewhat chronological order: Thomas the Train, Pirates, Rockets, Star Wars Legos, Angry Birds, Minecraft and last year was Zelda. Last year as I sat pondering whether I had the time and skills to make a cool fondant Zelda shield cake or not, our cat caught one of my son’s pet parakeets. The bird lived, but the shield cake was replaced with an emergency vet visit. I made a more simple tri-force cake in the end I think.
Here are a few of the photos- as you will see, the cakes are made mostly with love not artistry. I wish I could find all my photos, taking photos on phones has really destroyed my photo collections, although the quality of the photos has improved.
This year, I am sad to say there was no theme. Although we briefly discussed Japanese anime. We are entering the teen years and I guess the cool thing to do is to play video games either together or just sitting in the same room on individual devices. It is kind of weird to watch, but the boys are happy.
For this birthday, I made this chocolate cake recipe from Minimalist Baker, and it was easy and delicious! The only thing I had to buy was some earth balance vegan butter in baking sticks.
I didn’t have quite enough coconut oil so I used half canola. I think I could have cut back on the oil a bit anyway. The cake itself was not too sweet, and the frosting was really delicious. This is one of those recipes no one would know it was vegan. My only mistake was starting to frost it while it was still a little warm and the center layer melted, so I didn’t put any frosting on the sides but piled the rest of it on top instead.
I only have one photo of it, because I didn’t think about artfully staging it until right as it was set on the table in front of excited boys.
After they ate all the sugar, we went to the park to burn it off. They were all armed with a variety of weapons found in our garage: one plastic light saber, two rubber swords, a Zelda Shield, 2 bouncy ball discs (that can be hurled at each other like frisbees or used to deflect like a shield), and one bamboo stick (yikes!).
During their battles, my teenage daughter and her younger friends spied on the boys wearing floppy hats, with newspapers in front of their faces. None of the boys even noticed them! Sorry girls, maybe later.
