Mendolonium

Inspired by watching the show Ace of Cakes and Thomas’ infatuation with turtles we decided to bake a “turtle cake” this past weekend. The challenge was to bake and frost a cake without eggs, soy, dairy, or artificial food colorings. The cake tasted fantastic, but the look, well, judge for yourself

Clearly, we are not quite at the Ace of Cakes level just yet. While I love to bake, I have never been adept at the decorative aspect of desserts. I would much rather bake them and then eat them. With Thomas’ allergy to eggs traditional cakes are forbidden and with an intolerance to soy even cakes from vegan bakeries (there are a couple in LA) are off-limits. So we will need to make his birthday cakes ourselves for the foreseeable future. Here’s what we did for our first attempt:

• We used the chocolate cupcake recipe from “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World“. We doubled the recipe, replaced the soy milk with hemp milk, and added 1/4 c additional sugar to the doubled version. The cake was a bit moist and had a bit too much “crumb” to frost cleanly.
• I made a vegan “butter cream” frosting by creaming 1 c of soy-free margarine, 4 c of powdered sugar, and 1 1/2 t vanilla.
• I have been avoiding artificial food dyes (e.g., yellow no. 5) due to Thomas’ seeming sensitivity to everything. I found brown, blue, red, and yellow natural food dyes at Whole Foods. The brown worked well. We attempted to make green from blue and yellow, however, the blue turned out to be purple and the yellow turned out to be non-existent (it seemed to make taupe – at best). So we made a command decision and ended up with an all-brown turtle. The frosting also seemed rather inept at taking up the color and rather than a nice uniform brown, it appeared speckled.

How did Thomas like the cake? True to form, Thomas started using the word cake instantly, touched the cake, identified the different parts of the cake (“flipper!”) and smeared frosting all over himself. He did not, of course, actually consume any cake. The boy simply will not eat anything that has more calories than an apple. He did, however, quite sweetly feed me cake. Ah well, I suppose I’ll just have to eat it myself then.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Fun with Food Allergies, Someone's in the Kitchen with Mama, Thomas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.