“Half & Half” Cake – My first attempt at making a cake with no eggs!

I decided to call this my “Half and Half” cake and let me explain why…

Recently I’ve been looking into vegan recipes… thanks to Shannon, she recommended a vegan chocolate cake recipe from a popular website! Can you guess?! Yes, that’s right… allrecipes.com!! Can you believe there are no eggs in this cake recipe?! Crazy! Even crazier was adding a cup of water and teaspoon of white vinegar to the batter – and honestly, the smell of the batter was not so appetizing, but I hoped for the best! I liked the idea of making this cake though because the ingredients were much healthier than a regular chocolate cake. I decided to spice up the cake a little bit and mixed dark chocolate chips, chopped walnuts, and coconut flakes into the batter. Mmmmm….

The cake baked really well and eventually the smell was much more appetizing after it came out of the oven.

Oh by the way, of course this would happen to me… I took the cake out of the pan and it was pretty simple to get it out… unfortunately some of the cake had stuck to the bottom of the pan but it was nothing a little frosting couldn’t hide! I had actually thought I had dropped a piece of chocolate cake on the kitchen floor though. So I bent down to pick it up, luckily with a paper towel, and looked at it realizing it wasn’t cake at all! Turns out it was a little tiny baby frog carcass!! Can we say eww?! Like I said, good thing I had used a paper towel to pick it up. Ick.

Now, back to the cake… all though Shannon had recommended a vegan frosting she likes to use for this cake, I had ingredients in my refrigerator that would just go to waste if I didn’t use them. And as some of you may know, I’m leaving for a week to go see a very best friend, Crystal! So I really didn’t want to go out and buy new ingredients for the frosting as well as let ingredients I already had go to waste. Also, most of you know that I am not vegan, but I do like keeping an open mind with food which is why I have started learning more about the vegan diet. But are you ready for this one? I had about a cup left of heavy cream… an ingredient I used for the coconut cream pie. Instead of letting it go to waste I decided to make a whipped topping for my vegan cake. You are probably all laughing at me right now, right? I mean the frosting completely defeats the purpose of making the vegan cake. I know I know! But that’s what I did and I will try a vegan frosting the next time… probably with soy milk which I actually like! After frosting the cake, I topped it with crushed famous chocolate wafers and toasted coconut flakes.

I had a piece of this cake for dessert while David and his mom were enjoying the coconut cream pie. Let me tell you, this cake was actually very good! When you take the first bite, you notice it’s different, but it’s still moist and chocolatey. Yummy! Also, I think the add-ins (chocolate chips, coconut flakes, and walnuts) really spice up the cake!

By the way, I baked this cake the same day as making the pies. My refrigerator looked like I was running a bakery from home!