Cookbooks and Cake

Today we dropped by the campus bookstore and while browsing found a book we absolutely had to buy:

The holy book of vegan baking

The book is called Sticky Fingers' Vegan Sweets (Petersan, 2015). It has chapters on cakes, cookies, cupcakes, whoopie pies and more. It was written by the former winners of Cupcake Wars and the only team to ever win on the show with vegan cupcakes! The cake we made is a Chocolate Raspberry Cake and it was absolutely delightful. We think this cake would be perfect for Valentine's Day and is a really fun two-person baking project. It takes a little bit of time but is very much worth it.

The finished cake.

The profile.

The slice.

Some helpful hints: 

• Leave the cakes in a minute or two longer than the recipe says if you have a small oven. Ours were a little sticky in the center which made cutting a challenge.
• If possible, puree your own fresh raspberries.
• If possible, make the frosting and ganache ahead of time and refrigerate, Ours got a bit melt-y sitting out while we decorated.
• Have fun with the decorations! We went with the ganache pictured in the book, a crown of raspberries stuffed with mini chocolate chips, a mound of raspberry puree in the center and some more mini chips over top. This was by far the most fun part of making the cake.

Our overall thoughts on the book:

It's very well written and easy to follow. The page turns can get a bit tricky in recipes with multiple steps, so just make sure you know which pages you're using and bookmark them. There are ingredient and equipment indexes at the front of the book that make advanced baking seem much more manageable. There are two sections of inspiring glossed photos that are the honestly the reason we bought it. All in all we give this book a huge thumbs up and would highly recommend it no matter your baking skill level.