Thursday, June 26, 2008

Cake just makes me smile. Its presence in a room lights everyone up, and although many vegans have lived a vanilla cake free life, because there is an oddly large proportion of vegan chocolate cake out there, it is really quite easy to make a fabulous vegan vanilla cake. I simply adapted the recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I doubled the vanilla cupcake recipe and the vanilla frosting recipe, leaving me with a ton of frosting afterward (The little devil on my shoulder is thinking cookie frosting sandwiches). I made two layers and spread strawberry preserves with frosting in between. I also added a little bit of almond extract to the frosting to give some depth of flavor and had a little fun with decorating (I love the little red sprinkle doodas!) and voila; a perty little cake.


For pairings I would highly suggest a sec (sweet) or demi-sec sparkling wine. Don’t ask my why they are called that. Sec actually means dry in French, and usually dry means not sweet when it comes to wine, but for some reason they decided to make it extra confusing for everyone. Another type of wine that might work would be a lightly effervescent dessert wine like a Muscato (my personal fave). These are Italian dessert wines that are white, lightly sweet and usually have deep blueberry flavors. They make a great dessert on their own but pair nicely with a variety of cakes and tarts.