Cake, Breakfast, and Pearl Tea

I made a cherry chocolate fudge cake last week.  It came out pretty good, but wasn't a shining paragon of deliciousness, so I'm going to make the recipe a couple more times before I post it.

It was basically a chocolate cake, with fudge icing (Betty Crocker's), and cherry jam sandwiching it together.  My ideas for improvements are as follows;

Firstly, use a different basic recipe for the cake.  I used Chloe Coscarelli's recipe for chocolate cupcakes, which did not translate amazingly well to a large round cake.  The middle was a little gooier than I'd like, which isn't a huge issue with vegan cooking (what, you're going to get salmonella off the cider vinegar?), but wasn't fantastic.  Cherry chocolate fudge cake should always be fantastic.  Next time, I'll try her Halloween cake recipe, which is actually designed for a layer cake.  Leaving the espresso out both times; I'm not a huge coffee fan.

As for the centre, I was thinking a fresh cherry compote instead of cherry jam.  Maybe with some vanilla butter icing in there, too.

Finally, for the chocolate fudge icing, I was thinking some kind of mixture of walnut oil, icing sugar, cocoa powder, and maybe some corn flour to thicken it up a little.  That's basically all that Betty Crocker's is, after all, only she uses plain vegetable oil.  Then decorate the top with (rice) milk and dark chocolate shavings, and dot with glacé cherries.

Now, back to my vegan breakfast idea.  I've settled on a shortlist of baked beans, mushrooms, toast, hash browns, grilled tomatoes, sausages, bacon, and hollandaise sauce.  All vegan, obviously.  For those recipes I don't follow to the letter, I'll post up my own versions.

I know hollandaise sauce isn't a normal inclusion, but I have my logic.  If I attempted to make eggs, they'd basically be fried tofu, either as tofu scramble or masquerading as egg whites.  The vegan bacon is already fried tofu, and people seem to agree that the runny egg yolk is the important part, and if I tried to mimic that, it would end up as a poor imitation.  So I'm hoping a vegan hollandaise can fulfil the same basic niche, and be good in its own right.  Worth a try, right?

I love making food from scratch.  I'm a little obsessed with that baked beans recipe at the moment because it is really, really good.  I haven't eaten baked beans from a tin since I was seven; they're unappetizing, and syrupy, and really not worth it.  Homemade baked beans, with fried onions and added deliciousness, on the other hand, are so flavourful, and yummy, and taste like real food.  I've never heard of anyone making their own baked beans before Gizzi did.

Incidentally, that's what I like about her show, Cook Yourself Thin.  It's not about the weight-loss, but the sheer inventiveness.  Gizzi uses fresh ingredients, cooks from scratch, and will often come up with something you'd probably never consider, like using a roasted sweet potato to add sweetness to brownies.  Plus, y'know, she's not mean to people, and she has a cool tattoo.  And she'll often cut down on the meat a bit, and pack in more fresh veggies, which makes it easier for me to cut out the meat altogether.

I have a bit of a chef-crush on her.

Mango Pearl Tea!

90p for 300g of tofu.  Bargain.

I picked up some tapioca balls from a supermarket in China town while I was buying tofu the other day, so I'm planning to make my own Pearl (bubble, boba...) Tea.  I happen to think 'pearl' is the prettiest name.

There are some recipes here.  I was thinking of making a mango pearl tea, with orange juice as the liquid.

Incidentally, you can also buy Pearl Tea from Caffe Chinno, in Chinatown in Birmingham.  It's right by the entrance from the Pershore Road, on the left, just a little way in, near the Day In supermarket pictured above.  It's quite nice in there.

I wonder where I can get the big straws from?