They Say It's Your Birthday

Happy Birthday!
I made a cake for you. Aren't you excited to look at the pretty pictures?

Normally I only write about recipes that I make up, but when it comes to birthdays you have to surprise people - SURPRISE - I didn't make this recipe up!

The recipe comes to us from Sarma Melngailis' book Living Raw Food. I changed a couple of things but I still don't think I should post the recipe, cause it ain't mine.

It is 'Milk Chocolate Mousse Layer Cake', and it is freaking awesome. The mousse part calls for 1 cup of young coconut meat, and I didn't have time to drive an hour away to get coconuts so I replaced it with about 1/4 - 1/3 cup melted cocoa butter. I knew this would make it more stiff and would give it a bit of a white chocolate flavour. Turns out it was a great idea!

The original recipe has the cake in a square/rectangle shape but I like round birthday cakes so I did just that - made three separate rounds in the dehydrator. I also thought it needed icing to make it look like I made it, not my cross-eyed cat Eddie. I melted about a pint of 'so delicious' brand vanilla coconut based ice cream and about 1/3 cup or so of raw 'artisana' brand coconut cream and added vanilla bean scrapings and some agave and blended it all together to make a random, quick and easy icing. I would have made a truly raw icing with cashews except I used them all up in the mousse part of the cake... plan ahead people, plan ahead.


Mixing wet + dry ingredients, mostly almonds and walnuts in different forms, raw cocoa powder and maple syrup.


Spreading the batter into 3 rounds on parchment-lined round metal things I borrowed from work...


After about 20-22 hours of dehydrator time the cake batter was fudgy cake. I flipped one upside down and spread 1/2 of the mousse on top. (Mousse was mostly cashews, agave, cocoa powder + cocoa butter...)


Put another cake layer on top, the rest of the mousse and then the final cake layer. Oh yea, saved some mousse for filling in the gaps. I eye-balled the rounds so I did a little trimming once everything was in place.


I added one layer of icing, let it drip all over, put the cake in the freezer for 20 mins and then poured a second layer on. Great technique. Topped it all off with some shaved cocoa butter and a few flicks of cocoa powder and popped it in the fridge for a couple of hours.





This cake was very easy to make, you just need a dehydrator, a high speed blender (like a Vita Mix) and time to plan ahead.

Thanks for the recipe Pure Food and Wine, the birthday boy was very happy!

(Also very excited - a friend is visiting NY and I told her to go to PF+W and One Lucky Duck and bring me back some goodies!)