Vegan Chocolate Cake with Coconut Dream Frosting

Now, anytime you use the word 'vegan' to describe baked goods, most folks flee. In this combination, the cake is suprisingly moist and richly chocolately. It might lack that bit of mouth-feel richness butter can give but when paired with the coconut frosting, boy-oh-boy! This frosting rocked my socks off! This is the fluffy stuff of rainbows, unicorns and other puff-the-magic-dragon-like childhood dreams, but bursting with the coconut flavor your adult tastebuds rejoice in.

Chocolate Avocado Cake
adapted from the edible perspective
3 cups whole wheat pastry or all-purpose flour
8 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups sucanat or granulated sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil (I used cold-pressed canola oil)
1/2 cup soft avocado, well mashed, about 1 medium avocado
1 cup water
1 c almond milk
2 Tablespoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 8 or 9-inch rounds or 1 9 x 13-inch pan. Sift together all of the dry ingredients except the sugar. Set that aside.

Mix all the wet ingredients together in a bowl, including the super mashed avocado.
Add sugar into the wet mix and stir.

Mix the wet with the dry all at once, and beat with a whisk (by hand) until smooth.
Pour batter into a greased cake tins. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Let cakes cool in pan for 15 minutes, remove from pan and place on rack to cool completely before frosting.

Coconut Dream Frosting
1/3 c non-hydrogenated shortening or butter alternative like Earth Balance
1/4 c coconut butter*
1/3 c light coconut milk
2-3 c powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Cream shortening and coconut butter in ingredients in bowl of stand-mixer with whisk attachment (or in a bowl to blend by hand or with hand mixer). Slowly add powdered sugar as you mix at low speed. Add vanilla and coconut milk in a tablespoon or so at a time (you may not need the full amount), until frosting reaches the desired consistency. Frost cake once cool. Enjoy!

*to make coconut butter at home, get some unsweetened dry, shredded coconut and put in a food processor until creamy.

(P)FAT on a whole new level!

In a completely self-promoting post, check out my guest blog post on Eating Is Art. It will be familar to regular Pleasant Eats readers, but it's the first in a monthly series called 'Better Bites' on eating well. Check it out!

Frozen Custard with Homemade Dark Chocolate Syrup

So many sweets lately, I know. It's hard to whip up enthusiasm for a meal you make out of the last wilting selections in your cupboards when special sweets are so much sexier. I promise, more proper meals to come in the near future, but right now, let me share with you one fabulous warmer-weather treat!

Custard has to be one of the most simple, fabulous and yet underrated foods of the world. Almost every culture has their own take on custards, sweet and savory. Bake it in a crust with some onion, bacon, spinach and cheese and you've got quiche. Add sugar, caramelize, set it and you've got flan. Add gelatin and you're rocking a pana cotta. Add mango and you're getting closer to one tasty pudding. The basic formula of egg + milk +cream yielded some pretty fabulous results.

Sometimes, these results come when you're not really expecting them. Like when I started making David Liebovitz's vanilla ice cream last night.It started out as a regular ice cream, but as I stirred the delicious combination of egg, vanilla, cream and milk over the stove I got a little wrapped up in the mouth-watering aroma and probably let the egg firm up a bit more than I should. More than I should if I were going for regular old (if fabulous) vanilla ice cream. However, it turns out, just about perfect for making frozen custard. That velvety, decadent custardy flavor you know from creme brulee, baked custards and creme anglaise...spiked with vanilla bean, cool and lovely, melting against your tongue. Oh, and the dark chocolate syrup didn't hurt either. Now, where did that spoon go...

Frozen Vanilla Custard

Adapted from David Liebovitz's The Perfect Scoop

1 c 2% milk

2 c heavy cream

5 egg yolks

3/4 c sugar

1/4 tsp vanilla

1 vanilla bean

pinch of salt

Heat the milk, salt, and sugar in a saucepan. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds into the milk with the tip of a paring knife. Add the bean pod to the milk.

Stir together the egg yolks in a bowl and gradually add some of the warmed milk, stirring constantly as you pour. Pour the warmed yolks back into the saucepan.

Cook over low heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom with a heat-resistant spatula until the custard thickens enough to coat the spatula - or if you're really going for that frozen custard flavor, a little past this stage but before the mixture begins to curdle. Strain the custard into the heavy cream. Rinse the vanilla bean and put it back into the custard and cream to continue steeping. Chill thoroughly, then remove the vanilla bean and freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturers instructions.

Homemade Chocolate Syrup

Adapted from Kim O'Donnell

1 c unsweetened hershey's special dark cocoa powder

1 c granulated sugar

1 c cold water

¼ tsp salt

2-3 tsp vanilla extract

In a medium saucepan, whisk cocoa and sugar until all the lumps of cocoa are gone. Add water and salt and mix well with whisk. Cook over medium heat, bringing it to a boil. Keep boiling until thick, stirring to keep from scalding.

Remove from heat and allow to cool. When cool, add vanilla. Pour into an airtight glass container or a squeeze bottle and keep refrigerated.

To make chocolate milk, use at least 1 tablespoon of syrup for every 8 ounces of milk, adding more to taste.

Makes about 1 3/4 cups.

Fat

If you'll bear with me, dear readers, an aside from normal recipe fare for a note on nutritional research published in the last few months.

F.A.T. Those three little letters have been the bane of nutritionists and cardiologists throughout the US for the last three decades; And perhaps any chubby child on the playground and the menstruating woman (or her partner). Increasingly, however, research has been disproving fat as the ultimate enemy in America's war on obesity.

Why the turn-about in conventional nutritional knowledge? There is an informative summary here, published by Slate, of the studies published, but basically, researchers have determined that not LDL ("bad" cholesterol) is so bad after all. The researchers identified that consuming saturated fat, while increasing total LDL levels, only increased the levels of the benign LDL particles, not the ones that do indeed raise the risks of heart disease. Another study identified that women who ate the highest amounts of vegetable fat (from foods like olive oil and nuts) had lower risks of heart disease than women on low-fat diets.

Now, fat as an integral part of a healthy diet and is hardly new knowledge, but it has been so demonized in the last three decades that my head is still spinning a bit from this latest about-face in conventional nutritional knowledge. Real food advocates like Nina Planck, have long asserted that traditional saturated fats like lard, butter and coconut oil are not the health enemies they have been depicted to be. Publications like Nourishing Traditions have also advocated a return to real food - a book precipitated by the start of the 'war on fat' decades ago. While the positions these writers advocate may be a bit extreme for the average American, they clearly reflected a polarization of approaches to healthy eating with a rather inflexible national nutritional standard that went against generations of eating habits. Now, it seems, the position of conventional nutrition is moving somewhere more moderate in terms of dealing with fat. But I imagine it will still be quite some time before Americans can imagine welcoming fat to their tables.

So what DOES raise the levels of the really naughty LDL cholesterol? The kind that leads to an increased risk of heart disease? Highly processed carbohydrates - foods that spike blood sugar levels. Research suggests that highly processed carbs, particularly those with high fructose levels (like high fructose corn syrup) not only increase the risk for heart disease, but diabetes, gallbladder disease and breast cancer (for references to all of these findings, please see the Slate article). Keep in mind, this does not mean ALL carbs are bad - whole grains, fruits, vegetables are all still fiber and carbs and vital to a healthy diet. Trans-fats also are still perpetrators on this front as well. No change in policy there.

And what has America been reaching for when it cuts fat out if it's diet? Perhaps diet foods like Snackwells, Baked Lays and other low-fat products ring a bell? You know, the highly processed carbohydrates? Uh, what I spent a good part of my teens and early 20's indulging in thinking it was making a 'healthy' choice? Uggh.

Bottom line? We KNOW how to eat for optimum health. We've known for centuries and it's all about eating real food. Food you grow, food you make from whole ingredients. Simple and delicious foods you don't need a PhD in Biochemical engineering to understand. Now, we (meaning I and many other Americans) just have to get over our fat phobias and relearn that yes, healthy fats - even saturated fats!- have a place in a healthy, well-balanced diet.

Walnut Shortbread

I have a great fondness for shortbread. I don't think I'd tasted anything close to real shortbread until I was in the 5th grade. Before that, about all I'd had were those tinned Danish butter cookies at post-church coffee hours and the Girl Scout Trefoil cookies I sold as a Brownie. That all changed once I recieved the topic allotted to me for my 5th grade pioneer day: food. Tasked with recreating some tastes of the history of American pioneer fare, I thought of the descriptions of food in A Little House on the Prairie, one of my favorite elementary school reads. We somehow extrapolated one of their recipes for shortbread - you know, the special treat in Mary and Laura's Christmas stockings? It may have been thanks to some behind-the-scenes parental digging getting our hands on a copy of The Little House on the Prairie Cookbook - but who knows? I was probably too busy licking the batter of my fingers to notice. Once the first taste of homemade shortbread melted on my tongue, I suddenly realized just how much I'd been missing with those tinned and boxed cookies. A nice little lesson in appreciating that even if the pioneers didn't have the marvels of modern technology and society, they had daggone delicious eats! Most of my classmates if I recall correctly, agreed with me. There certainly wasn't anything left to bring home. Though I have yet to get my hands on that recipe again (a task I am working on I assure you), I saw a delicious and slightly similar-sounding shortbread recipe in this month's MSL magazine. I tweaked it a bit to make it a bit more nutritious but it was certainly still absolutely melt-on-your-tongue tasty shortbread.

Walnut Shortbread

adapted from MSL March 2010

1/4 c walnuts toasted and chopped

1 c whole wheat pastry flour (the original used white flour)

1/2 c Sucanat or brown sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1 stick of butter

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 325 F. Process walnuts in a food processor until ground fine. Add to a bowl with the flour and salt.

In a separate bowl or stand mixer, cream together butter, sugar and vanilla. Slowly add in flour mixture until just combined.

Press down into a 8" cake pan (a sheet of cellophane will be handy here to keep it from sticking to you), and cut the dough into 8 slices. Prick slices with fork a few times (I found concentric circles around the pan are rather pretty).

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until the shortbread is golden brown and the middle is solid.

Enjoy!

Pleasant Eats PSA

If you haven't noticed already, check out the newly added recipe page! After 2 1/2 years (can you believe it!?!?) of delicious recipes, they are finally indexed for your browsing convenience. Enjoy!

Wheatberry Salad with Dates, Celery and Walnut

Wheat berries and the idea of the freedom of adulthood go hand and hand to me. Growing up, I went to church more or less every Sunday and I will confess, sometimes I went rather grudgingly. I would look with longing at the leisurely brunchers at Bread and Chocolate as we sped by on our way to church, wistfully hoping for the day when I was a grown up and could spend Sunday mornings as leisurely as I liked and over brunches if I so chose. Every great once and a while, I could convince my parents to stop for brunch on the way home from church. While the challah french toast at Bread and Chocolate was divine, they served a wheat berry salad - sweet, nutty, acerbic and delicious that somehow tasted like those grown-up dreams of mine. It was the first place I'd ever tasted wheat berries and it's still my favorite way to prepare them. Though Bread and Chocolate isn't there anymore, my memory of that wheat berry salad and all the promise it represented is still quite vivid. And this adaptation of Martha Stewart's version comes quite close to recreating that salad. To have as I choose on Sunday mornings or otherwise, of course ;)

Wheat Berry Salad
adapted from MSL March 2010

1 c wheat berries (soaked overnight or at least 4 hours, drained)

2 celery stalks, chopped

3/4 c pitted, chopped dates

zest of 1 orange

juice of 1 orange

2 tbs walnut oil

3 tbs sherry vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

Place wheat berries in a saucepan, cover with water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and allow to simmer for 35 minutes. Drain.

While cooking, prepare the vinaigrette. Whisk together orange zest and juice, walnut oil and sherry vinegar.

Once the wheat berries are done, in a bowl, combine wheat berries, walnuts, celery, dates and vinaigrette (give it a good whisk before you pour it in, making sure it emulsifies). Mix together and enjoy!