Two birthday cakes! Lucky boys!

Well today there is a party for two of our housemates tonight and I thought it was a great excuse for some baking! Luke asked for carrot cake which I have wanted to do for ages and I thought to suit everyone I would make a chocolate fudge cake as who doesn't like chocolate! I have to warn you...my icing skills weren't very proficient today as I just whacked it on with a spoon due to time!

I got my carrot cake recipe from: food.com
and my chocolate fudge cake from: veganvillage.co.uk
and the chocolate fudge icing from: veganfamily.co.uk

CARROT CAKE

Ingredients:
3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
3 cups finely shredded carrots (best thing to use is a chocolate/nutmeg grater but it is a lot of grating!)
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup applesauce
2 tsp vanilla essence
4 made up egg substitutes (I used Orgran)
1/2 cup of chopped nuts

Icing
3oz cream cheese substitute
1/4 cup margarine
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/2 cup icing sugar

If you find a nice cream cheese then I would use more cheese and less/no margarine but I used tofutti for the first time and really didn't like it so I ended up making a buttercream. In these quantitities it was very much like a buttercream anyway.

Method

• Preheat the oven to 160 degrees celcius
• Grease two cake tins, or one if you don't want a filling. Mine were 20cm.
• Mix the dry ingredients together
• Mix the wet ingredients in and nuts
• Divide the mixture into the two cake tins
• Bake for 40- 50 mins until a knife comes out clean
• Allow to cool
• For the icing just beat the ingredients together into smooth and spread on the cake when it is completely cool
• Simple eh?!

For decoration I sprinkled some more chopped nuts on top and also some orange jelly sweets and some terrible writing icing skills! (they are both 28 if you couldn't guess!).

CHOCOLATE FUDGE CAKE

Ingredients:

I did double this but it was rather a lot and had to make cupcakes too so I will write the ingredients for a much more sensible amount!

125g margarine

300ml soya milk

2 tbs golden syrup

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

250g plain white flour

50g cocoa

250g sugar

Icing

100g plain chocolate

1 tbs margarine

1 tbs icing sugar

1 tsp golden syrup

Method

• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius
• Grease the two cake tins (same as before)
• Melt the soya milk, margarine, and golden syrup on a medium heat (leave 4 tablespoons of the milk out).
• Dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in the soya milk.
• Mix all the dry ingredients 
• Add the wet ingredients
• Divide the mixture into the two cake tins
• Bake for half an hour then turn the oven down to 160 degrees and bake for a further half an hour.
• For the icing, melt all the ingredients in a pan. Allow to cool for a little while and spread on the cake when the cake is cool.
• Once again, lovely and simple!

I decorated it further with "milk" and white chocolate buttons and writing icing.

Apart from a few nibbles which tasted delicious there hasn't been a proper taste test yet but I will update you after tonight. I hope everyone isn't too drunk!


**UPDATE**: Both cakes are the best cakes of their type that I have made. This is very good for the chocolate cake as I have made many of those. The consistency was perfect and the icing was super delicious and the best complement to the cake rather than butter icing. I have only ever made one other carrot cake and it was a disaster! But this carrot cake was 3 million times better. Very moist, very moorish. It was quite dense but that is not a bad thing in my book. Both cakes went down a treat with everyone and these recipes will definitely be used again!