MoFo Day Twentyfive: Birthday Cake!

 Well, the first piece of news is that the issue over the Home Ed workshop which involved learning about beekeeping and honey tasting is now resolved; we chose not to attend, as we had said all along that we would not, as we are against the exploitation of bees, and, as we had said we wouldn't, we did NOT pay for the session. It was a very uncomfortable situation but not unprecedented for vegans living in a non-vegan world..
  I haven't done a blog post for a few days and in the meantime Pony had her eighth birthday. She had planned three different birthday cakes as she was celebrating her birthday three times with different sets of family and friends; the first one was a vanilla cake with mandarin icing.
  We don't really like too much icing so a one layer cake or a loaf shaped cakes work well because then you don't have to have that extra layer of buttercream icing in the middle. We have a wonderful chocolate cake recipe for a layer cake which we often use for birthday cakes but Pony doesn't like chocolate (sigh) so I removed the cocoa from the recipe and put in a bit of vanilla essence; the sugar I used was vanilla sugar anyway because we keep a couple of vanilla pods in our tin of sugar. I didn't put in any extra sugar to make up for the omission of the flour because it the recipe already had 6 ounces of sugar so I actually cut down the sugar because that always strikes me as a lot of sugar. I didn't want to make a layer cake so I decided to put all the cake batter in one deeper tin and increase the cooking time.

Tractor drawn with sprinkled cocoa and home made stencil

  I made the mandarin icing by zesting and then squeezing a couple of mandarins, and then mixing with icing sugar. The result was a very pale orange icing with orange speckles from the zest which I thought looked lovely, although I don't think the speckles show up in the photo. The icing had a lovely sweet tangy taste, milder and sweeter and also a prettier colour, than orange would have made it although I couldn't really get the photo which showed this. I decorated the cake with vegan jelly hearts.
  The cake was very springy and moist and had a very good firm texture, especially for a cake which was about an inch and a half deep. So, that was the first cake done! Some years we have been requested to do very fancy things with different coloured icing; we've used powdered beetroot, raspberries, turmeric and even spinach as we don't want our children to start biting us.. and for several cakes in the past we've had to draw pictures of animals with melted chocolate (using one of our waif-and-stray feeding syringes), so this one was comparatively straightforward!