Peanut-Butter Chocolate Cake

I had folks over my place this weekend, so I thought: what better excuse do I have to bake a cake?

I also had a jar of Veganaise that I was worried I wouldn't get through before it went bad. So when I stumbled across a recipe for chocolate cake that called for using Veganaise (from Vegan Family Favorites), I knew it was the one I'd be toying with Saturday afternoon.

The recipe is a fairly-rich one for chocolate cake with spatterings of semi-sweet chocolate chips strewn throughout. The cake came out a bit too crumbly for me (which made it a little difficult to frost and to serve) but nice and moist. Upon having a bit of mishap with the cooling process (I pulled off part of the top of one of the cakes after cooling it on a plate), I realized that there are a few staples that I really need to suck it up and buy already: 1) cooling racks and 2) a second cake pan.

For the frosting, I decided to go with a recipe for Chocolate Ganache frosting from The Candle Cafe Cookbook (mainly just because it was the only frosting recipe for which I actually had all the ingredients handy). Holy mother of god, is this a good frosting. I think it's gonna be my stand-by when it comes to frosting chocolate cakes. It calls for semi-sweet chocolate chips, a bit of maple syrup, some soy milk, and a tad bit of coffee (though I may be forgetting something) and it is decadently sweet, amazingly thick, and orgasmically rich.

Because I didn't wanna use up all my chocolate chips for the frosting (and because based on past experiences, I've noticed that everyone seems to give frosting recipes that make enough to frost a small foreign country), I decided to make only a 1/4 of the recipe and instead frost the center and the outer rim of the cake with my own peanut-butter frosting recipe (a concoction of homemade powdered sugar, natural peanut butter, and soy milk). My frosting was a bit runny on the outside rim, only because I was impatient and didn't let it sit in the fridge (the frosting I used for the center *did* sit in the fridge long enough), but I still thought it tasted quite good.

All in all, it was a good recipe and a good baking experience. The cake itself seemed like it was missing a little bit of something, some indefinable oomph in the form perhaps of sweetness or decadence or chocolatey-goodness, but what was lacking in that was definitely made up for in the frosting.

VERDICT: A