Cake-A-Month - December - Post 2

For my Christmas cake I used my trusty chocolate cake from scratch recipe. I found this recipe about 5 years ago when looking for an eggless cake recipe for my mom who is a lacto-vegetarian (eats dairy products but not egg or any other form of meat including seafood). I tested this recipe before making it for her and was stunned to find that it actually tasted pretty darn good - REALLY good!! AND it doesn't have dairy in it either!!! And to top it off, its made completely of pantry non-perishable staples that I always have in my kitchen, yay! Oh and did I mention how easy it is??? It's essentially a box cake recipe, it's so darn easy to make. I never bother with sifting and rarely measure my ingredients too carefully lol but I've never had this recipe fail on me, and I am ALWAYS asked for the recipe - even by my mother-in-law who is well-known for her baking talents :D I'm sure by now you're probably tearing your hair out wondering when the hell I'm going to get around to telling you the recipe...well I'll get to it. Eventually. At the end of this post.... (and the suspense builds...)

So, back to the Christmas cake, I baked four thin layers, and leveled them off. Normally I don't bother levelling my cakes, but when I try to do a fancy-ish cake in the past I've always cut them with a bread knife and eye-balled it. Doesn't usually go too well but I rarely bother so didn't really think much of it. But for my sons 1st birthday I bought the Wilton's cake leveller since I decided that for the price if it worked it would be worth it. Well fyi, it doesn't. It sucked, the wire wasn't stretched taut enough across the frame so when I went to use it it just stretched and went wherever the hell it wanted. I had these visions of it simply gliding through the cake, but it wasn't even sharp, I ended up having to saw it as though I was using a knife anyway. I think I got about halfway through the cake before giving up. Goddamn it.

But then, I read about this technique of measuring the height you want with a ruler and inserting toothpicks around the cake every couple of inches, then using a bread knife to score a couple of millimeters deep around the cake before cutting all the way through with the bread knife while keeping even with the toothpicks. I think I even watched a video of it on youtube that made it look so easy so I decided to try it for the Christmas cake. Well, whaddya know! It actually works!!! Didn't take too long to do at all, didn't require buying any special gimmicks that don't work, and was easy and straightforward. I highly recommend using this technique if you're like me and have crooked eyeballs lol!

This isn't the same brand as the one I used, but it does look exactly the same.

So then after freezing my cake layers, double wrapped in glad wrap (saran wrap for the rest of you guys not located in Oz!) I made up a batch of cherry brandy frosting. I tend to freeze my cakes because I find that the cake ends up really nice and moist after being frozen, never noticed any negative difference in flavor (only the moisture and that can hardly be described as negative!) and hell, makes it easy!

Tada! Mmmm looks good so far!

I made the cherry brandy frosting by mixing up a batch of standard buttercream frosting (I think it's often referred to online as American buttercream - even though we make it here in Australia too lol - and is made mostly from creaming powdered sugar with butter) then adding about 1/4C of cherry brandy and about half a cup of chopped up red glace cherries. I would have used maraschino cherries but they're very very difficult to find here in Australia and I had no luck searching :(
I'm not going to add the recipe for the buttercream frosting because I didn't end up liking the recipe I used very much, it was sickeningly sweet and nearly made the cake unbearable.

When torting the cake I piped a dam of frosting around the edge of the layer before covering in frosting. Supposedly this helps prevent issues of the frosting being squashed out from between the layers and causing the fondant to bulge. In another post I'll explain where I went wrong with this :(

My No-Fail Egg-Free, Dairy-Free but Yummo Chocolate Cake

 1.5 cups plain flour

1 cup sugar

4 tablespoons cocoa

1 teaspoon bicarb soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup water

1/3 cup vegetable oil (I've also used olive oil and canola oil if I'm out of vegetable oil with no discernible difference)

2 tablespoons white vinegar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 180 Celsius, or 350 Fahrenheit

Mix all the dry ingredients.

Mix all the wet ingredients.

Add wet to dry and mix till thoroughly incorporated. Batter will be fairly runny for a cake batter - this is okay!

Pour into greased cake tin (I've used all sorts of different shapes and sizes, best would have to be an 8" round) and bake for 30-40 minutes.

Let cool for ten minutes before removing from the tin to cool completely.

**Note: A lot of people are very surprised about using vinegar in this recipe. Don't worry, I was the same when I first read the recipe, but somehow or other it actually works! The best I've been able to figure from searching online is that the vinegar somehow compensates for the lack of eggs in the recipe. Not sure how or why, I'm no scientist, I just enjoy eating the damn things!!