Vegan Spice Cake with Buttercream/Cream Cheese Frosting

I love to make cakes!  Love it!  Love it!  Love it! Here are few pictures of the cakes of the past.

Vegan Chocolate with butter cream filling with vegan chocolate cream cheese icing.  It was to die for and so rich it could have owned its own boat!

Tribute to University of Louisville for my friend's birthday.  He loves UofL.  The bottom layer is a white cake with buttercream topped with a chocolate football with chocolate buttercream icing.  All vegan.

A simple vegan chocolate cake w/ (gasp) store bought icing for my birthday last year.  I took this one to work.

This is the other cake I made for my birthday party.  It says "Ladies Night" and the layers completely fell apart.  That's what I get for not letting them cool all the way.  I get way ahead of myself.  This is vegan chocolate with vegan chocolate cream cheese icing.

This is my cake graveyard that I made for the 3rd Friday the 13th we had in 2009.  Its vegan chocolate with store bought (gasp again) icing and Hershey sections as tombstones.

This is a corset cake for my friend's personal shower.  She loves corsets and so do I. This is vegan spice cake with vegan cream cheese icing and vegan buttercream decorations.  The cream cheese icing didn't turn out too well and some of the stays in the corset are off, but hey - she loved it!  :)

This is my latest cake for the birthday of a co-worker.  This is a vegan spice cake with buttercream/cream cheese frosting (a simple buttercream recipe with 8 oz of cream cheese added, I think I could have used 10-12oz but 8 is all I had).  It is topped with ginger hard candies (rose shaped) that my roommate made especially.

I used a texture tool that I got for Christmas for the edges.  The problem was that 2 of my cake pans are bigger than the 1 so I had a tower affect going on.  Very difficult to do with a texture tool consistently.  Once I get 2 pans that match my Wilton 8", it'll turn out much better.

Top view.

Winging It!

This recipe is the brain child of my roommate.  She found out that she's allergic to alot of stuff, some of that stuff being cow milk and cheese.  So this is an Grilled Eggplant with Cucumber Tzatziki sauce.
Take 1 eggplant, cut horizontally.
Take 2 tomatos, cut in thick slices
Take 2 cucumbers, goat yogurt, lemon juice, dill, salt and pepper.  Make sauce, chop cucumber, insert into yogurt sauce and stir.  Add a good deal of dill, to taste.  Its better if you don't use a whole lemon.  Our sauce was very very tangy.  Its best if you let the sauce sit for awhile to infuse flavors.






 
Take eggplant, salt lightly.  Apply paper towels to eggplant to suck out the excess moisture.  Coat with olive oil and place in pan.  








Grill approx 2-3 mins until hot then turn.









 


Assemble:  Take eggplant, add tzatziki sauce over it and add tomato.  These are really messy to eat so best to use a knife and fork.









The tomatoes are great on top, especially if they're sweet and ripe!  Totally awesome!

Stuffed Bell Peppers

This is a recipe my vegan friend and I made on Jan 16th from a cookbook called Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson.
Its made with sweet peppers, stuffed with a corn meal mush (I forget the actual name) infused with olive oil, garlic, onion, roasted red peppers and spices.  Then you bake then for about 25 mins and enjoy.

We also put some rosemary bread with it (bought at Whole Foods), which complimented the flavor tremendously, and fresh steamed asparagus.

 

As you can see, they're hard to eat with a knife and fork!

Hello World

Here is a blog completely dedicated to cooking.  My friends and I do alot of cooking, a lot of baking and lot of eating!  :)  We are also fans of whole, unprocessed food; one is a vegan and we have a lunch sharing program at work.  Hopefully as the Lent fast comes down to a close, you'll see a good amount of recipes and cooking on here. Just because we live in KY, doesn't mean we don't like cuisine from around the world!

Happy Eating!