The 10-Minute Vegan Chocolate Cake

Going to someone's house for quick weekday dinner, especially for the first time, means you don't show up empty-handed. At least I don't. I have determined that I have a compulsion, nay, a pathology about this. If I am going to someone's house, chance are I'm packing something edible or potable. It just doesn't feel right to arrive without a consumable offering. Yesterday, I threw together this vegan chocolate cake, which is so absurdly easy, there's no reason why dessert should be relegated to a weekend domestic project. A 10-Minute Vegan Chocolate Cake may fit the bill; the 10 minutes refer to assembly time, not baking time—which is hands off, anyway.

A note about substitutions: if you don't have coffee extract or espresso powder, swap it for 1 T of coffee, and add it to the liquid. If you have neither, no worries. Coffee related additions create depth in chocolate desserts and I almost always, with very few exceptions, bring it on. And because I've adapted this from the awesome book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, you can of course make these as cupcakes. Just reduce the baking time to 15-18 minutes.

10 Minute Vegan Chocolate Cake

• 1 cup almond, soy, or other nondairy milk
• 1 tsp. apple cider vinegar
• 1 C plus 2 T all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup Dutch process cocoa
• 1 tsp. espresso powder (I like this one from King Arthur Flour)
• 3/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. coffee extract
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar (of your choice; I used light)
• 1/3 cup oil of choice (I used coconut)

Instructions

 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Combine the milk and apple cider vinegar in a measuring cup, stir, and set aside.

Sift together all of the dry ingredients (flour through salt) in a medium bowl.

Add the extracts to the measuring cup with milk and ACV. In a large mixing bowl, whisk the sugars, milk, and oil. Slowly add in the flour, gently folding it in with a rubber spatula. When it's mostly combined, switch to a small wire whisk to get out any last minute lumps but don't overmix it.

Pour into into a well-greased and floured 8-inch round pan (I used a Springform) and bake for 22-25 minutes until a cake tester or toothpick comes out mostly clean (a couple of small crumbs are fine) and the cake has started to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes and then remove the cake from the pan to cool completely.

Vegan chocolate cake with vegan chocolate frosting

You can serve this as is, with a snowy dusting of confectioner's sugar, or actually make some frosting. Or if it's berry season, quickly chop up some fresh organic strawberries, toss them with a squeeze of lemon juice and a tablespoon or so of granulated sugar, and serve them alongside the cake.

6 Food Resolutions (a.k.a. Intentions) for 2013

You can argue semantics about resolutions vs. plans, goals, or what have you. Making a resolutions seems to have more to do with the cessation of something—smoking, drinking, eating sugar—rather than the initiation or start of something. Last year I covered my take on the language issues and set forth my food resolutions. And of course, they were more than food resolutions—they were life-altering resolutions. For 2013, I'm just calling them intentions, because that's what they are. I had a very powerful experience last year when I did this. Most of them happened, and many of them in ways I could not have predicted. Here's one of them: puff pastry.

Apple turnovers, part of my kitchen to-do list. 

It was a year of synchronicities. Now, here's the harder part: continuing the momentum needed to make things happen. And just trusting it will.

First and foremost, though, I want to express my gratitude toward the various people I've come in contact with in the past year whose guidance and friendship have confirmed that I'm on the right path—there are too many of you to name, but you know who you are. I started writing a cookbook, got derailed when I started testing recipes for someone else's cookbook (thanks, Dave!), and then we went away and the holidays came. I met some amazing people in the Lehigh Valley who are doing beautiful work with food, and some of those relationships continue to be rewarding (hello, the teams at Molinari's and Two Rivers, among others). And toward the end of the year, capping it off, I was asked to serve as a judge at Lehigh Valley Harvest, which I blogged about. It was a delicious honor!

Fitting with the New Year's theme, Tuesday morning's yoga class was about shutting off the negative self-talk, and instead, telling yourself you can do it, that you are perfectly good enough to do what you need to do. I don't want to get too terribly introspective here, but in the past couple of years, the change in self-identification has brought with it lots of fun times but also its fair share of doubt and inertia. It's also brought about the need for incredible, unwavering focus, which is often challenging for numerous reasons (have you met my boys?).

This year, I'm admittedly having a little bit harder time with January and this list. The stakes are higher; I suddenly have time on my hands that I didn't have before, and holes in my income I didn't have before, to match. No one seems to know what will happen to Frommers.com; the last bit of the laid-off web editors are now all officially laid off, as of December 31. It's bittersweet. I hope to continue to do work with them in a new, Google-owned incarnation, but nothing is clear at the moment.

Ok......enough preamble. Here we go!

1. Write a formal proposal for my Lehigh Valley Farmers' Cookbook. It ain't going nowhere without that.

2. Go (with proposal) to the IACP conference in San Francisco. Self-publishing is likely the end result, and not necessarily a bad one, but I want to put it out there before self-publishing is confirmed.

3. Continue to explore cuisines and dishes I haven't done much with (hello, curry!), and cook with one unfamiliar item or cuisine every other week. This was on last year's list, but it was fun and I want it to continue.

4. Integrate all three of my sites: this one, the Lehigh Valley Farmers Market site, and Nostalgia Baking. It's all me, but I don't know how to integrate these, technically speaking; I'd need development and design help for certain.  I don't know which is the "brand"? (I'm kind of laughing at the word.) Maybe it's just my namesake site, which seems most logical.

5.  Start producing more of my own content: i.e., take those integrated projects and aspects of my work and do more of my own blogging, become something resembling my own media outlet. I'm not going to stress and worry about how to find readers, but there won't be readers unless there is regular content.

6. Find new outlets for writing about food and travel.

I'm going to stop at six, because this list is smaller but more difficult than last year's. These need to be manageable tasks. I'm just going to hope that I can work toward it and that the right people will appear (and the right circumstances will emerge), in order to facilitate these big changes.

There are other intentions I want to set, mostly of a spiritual nature, but I won't go into that here. Those things, I'm just going to let them evolve on and off the mat. They make all of this possible.

How about you? Do you have any big plans, goals, intentions, resolutions, for 2013? Don't underestimate the power of a clean slate. It's harder to be optimistic, so much easier to be cynical. Anything is possible, always.

Snickerdoodle Cupcakes

snickerdoodle cupcake

It's almost fall, and so that means boots, jeans, and sweatah-weathah. It also means all things cinnamon, apple, pumpkin, nutmeg, clove, cardamom, and chai. It means that soup, stew and homemade bread are also on the way, the latter thanks to a friend who generously gave me some of her sourdough starter (it made it through the power outage, thanks to another friend who kept it refrigerated). It also means you need to make these cupcakes because it's cold and raining this week. It's a pretty straightforward recipe, adapted from Martha Stewart. The original yield called for more than 2 dozen and I only needed 12, so I cut it in half--or thereabouts.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup cake flour
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. ground cinnamon (plus more for dusting)
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 2/3 cup  milk

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 and line 12-cup muffin tin with liners.

Cream the sugar and butter together in the bowl of an electric mixer until color has lightened.

Add egg, one at a time, beating well to combine. Add vanilla; mix until just combined

In a separate, medium-sized bowl, sift together all the dry ingredients (flours through cinnamon).

Add flour mix, alternating with milk, beginning and ending with the flour.

Use a 1/4 cup ice cream scoop to fill the tins 3/4 of the way full; any more and these babies will overflow.

Bake for 18-20 minutes, remove from oven, and let them cook for about 10 minutes before removing from pan.

Now, Martha's version calls for these gorgeous looking swirls of seven-minute frosting, but my hunch was that all that meringue-like egg would get crunchy fast. Please, by all means use that frosting if you want; I had to take into account shelf life of a couple of days and you may be serving these for a crowd, immediately. I just used my own standard buttercream recipe, which includes one stick of unsalted butter, more confectioner's sugar than you think you need (about 6-8 ounces, sifted), 2 tsp. or so vanilla extract, and a few tablespoons of milk to keep the consistency fluffy and smooth. The cinnamon sugar dusting on top is essential to achieve that full-fledged snickerdoodle effect: just combine a small about of both in a small bow and use your judgment about how sugary or cinnamony you like it. We tend to err on the side of cinnamon in this house.