ChocoPeanutButterCoffee Bundt Cake

A few weeks ago when I was at school having lunch with my friend, I decided I wanted to make a chocolate bundt cake with peanut butter filling and a coffee glaze. The world’s three best flavors all combined into one cake, oh my!

Note: The peanut butter wasn’t supposed to be at the top like that. I didn’t put enough batter in the bundt pan before adding the peanut butter tube, so it sunk right to the bottom. Luckily it didn’t get all caramelized and burnt to the pan like I feared! It just didn’t look as impressive as I hoped. Otherwise it was fine.

I googled “peanut butter filled bundt cake,” and surprisingly the first result that came up was vegan! I used the peanut butter filling from that recipe (link), along with the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The cake turned out very chocolatey and moist. By the way, cake is the ONLY thing that can ever appropriately be described as “moist”… don’t even try using it in any other context. ew.

The coffee-chocolate glaze was comprised of about 1 tablespoon chocolate chips, 2 tablespoons cold coffee, and 4 tablespoons powdered sugar. I had filled an ice cube tray with leftover coffee little over a week ago just for such occasions as this, so I popped one cube out and put it in a bowl with the chocolate chips and melted them together in the microwave. Then I mixed in the powdered sugar (it works better if you sift the powdered sugar, I didn’t and it was a little clumpy) and drizzled the glaze over the cake with a spoon.

Notice the Harry Potter mug in the background. That’s me getting excited for the movie release on Friday, woo!!

Overall the cake was reminiscent of eating my dad’s chocolate covered peanut butter eggs on Easter mornings with a nice hot cup of coffee. It was such a big success in my house that it was gone in 3 days!

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Wet Bottom Shoofly Pie

This is recipe #2 in my attempt to veganize Pennsylvania Dutch food (see #1). I’ve been meaning to make shoofly pie for a while now, and no one on the farm knew what it was so I decided it was time to show them what it’s all about.

Shoofly pie is, as I’ve said, a PA Dutch food, and PA Dutch foods are often laden with more unvegan ingredients than you care to know (who’s heard of scrapple??).  In fact, the Amish Dutch cookbook where I got the basis for this recipe instructs that “success in these recipes lies in a light hand with the pastry and unstinting use of cream and butter and more butter, and, eggs which are plentiful in most Pennsylvania Dutch farm households.” Guess I’ll have to prove them wrong.

For those of you who have never heard of wet bottom shoofly pie, it’s a dessert pie with a gooey molasses filling and a crumb topping. There is also the less common dry bottom shoofly pie, which has a more cake-like consistency.

Wet Bottom Pennsylvania Dutch Shoofly Pie

Crumb Topping:
2 cups flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
Large pinch each nutmeg, ginger, cloves
1/3 cup shortening

Syrup Filling:
1/2 cup dark molasses
1/2 cup hot water
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Preheat oven to 350.

Boil the water and dissolve the soda in it. Stir in the molasses and let cool.

Combine topping ingredients with your fingers or a pastry cutter to form crumb mixture. Set aside.

Have ready a 9-inch unbaked pie shell. Pour syrup filling into crust. Sprinkle crumb topping over syrup mixture. Bake 60 to 70 minutes.

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Gay Cakes: A History

As I was upstairs in the kitchen making guacamole at midnight and pondering what my next blog post should be, I thought that maybe I should change the name of my blog to “The Late Night Vegan” because that’s when most of my cooking (well, usually baking, actually) gets done. I’m a night owl, and when I bake at night I don’t have to worry about my parents using or hanging around the kitchen and bugging me, because… well, like normal people, they’re sleeping. Anyway, I decided to keep the title as-is, for now anyway. It’s just something I came up with on the spur of the moment because I couldn’t think of anything else, but I love the alliteration.

Since I am currently camera-less, I can’t really take pictures of the food I make unless my dad is home and feeling kind enough to allow me to borrow his camera. So, unfortunately I won’t be able to blog about the english muffin teese pizzas I made a few days ago… i just couldn’t do them justice without pictures. So I will blog about something that many of you know me for, which is…. gay cakes! I’m going to use this post to go through my personal gay cake-making history and how the gay cake became popular among internet vegans everywhere.

 

Gay Cake: The Original

This cake is the product of the cake decorating unit in my creative foods class last year at school. I did rainbow stripes around the side, the colors ending with a purple peace sign on top (it was more purple in real life, the camera made it look blue). We had to get our designs approved by the teacher before we started decorating, and when I told her I wanted rainbows on my cake she said, “you have to be careful with rainbows though, because these days they have other meanings… like gay and lesbian.”

I… um… wow? I was speechless. I wanted to say, “maybe I want it to mean that!” but didn’t want it to sound wrong. In retrospect, I should’ve just said, “is there anything wrong with that?” but it was first thing in the morning and my brain wasn’t functioning, so I ended up saying “I… like… rainbows?” Incidentally, I got a 100% on the project.

So, I posted about this on the Post Punk Kitchen forums and it earned me the new subnick of “gay cake,” and became somewhat legendary… it’s my avatar on the forums, as well as the picture for the Facebook group The PPK is SO GAY. Oh yeah, and it’s part of the current header image for my blog.

 

Gay cupcakes: An attempt

Based off of wintermitts’s cupgaycakes, I made these cupcakes to hand out at our GSA’s table for the club fair that showed the incoming freshman what clubs they could join. Unfortunately, my pink triangles ended up looking like ham (plus no one knows what a pink triangle means anymore, pfft) and when I opened my container of “rainbow sprinkles” I found out that they were just pale pink, pale yellow, and white. Not rainbow! But at least the colors complimented that of the triangles.

 

Gay Cake II: Hannah Montana

(Photos by Kelly)

This summer, I went to Illinois to visit Kelly. We decided to make a Hannah Montana gay cake, for obvious reasons. The inside is two layers, the bottom layer being chocolate and the top a pink and purple swirl (HM style, ohh yeah!).

She then put a purple border on the cake, and we worked together to pipe rainbows around the side.

For the top, she wrote “Gay Cake” in rainbow colors and stuck in two Hannah Montana cake toppers taken from the cake decorating lab at Piggly Wiggly (Kelly was at the time a cake decorator there). Rainbow sprinkles were added around the top and bottom edges for a final touch.

 

Gay Cake III: Veganstock Summer of Gaycake!

(Photo by Bianca)

Later this summer, I went camping with a bunch of lovely folk from The Post Punk Kitchen forums. I was supposed to bring donuts from Vegan Treats, but waited too long to order and was unable to get them. So what did I do? Stayed up all night baking, of course! I decided that since I was by this point well known for my gay cakes, I would make one for Veganstock, and it ended up to be a better idea than ordering donuts anyway because everyone loved it! A few of us even decided the name of the event needed to be changed from “Veganstock: Summer of Smlove” to “Veganstock: Summer of Gay Cake.”

I stuck with the purple bordering, since that seems to be the color I always use around my gay cakes (also, it’s my favorite color!). Notice that this time, my rainbow sprinkles are actually rainbow colored! I found nicely colored vegan rainbow sprinkles in the bulk bin at Wegmans one day when my friend Jen and I were wandering around the grocery store, so I bought a big bag of them to keep on hand.
There will inevitably be more gay cakes to come in the future, but you’ve now seen a comprehensive history of the ones I’ve already made. I hope you enjoyed it!

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