Happy Birthday, Susa!

Today is my friend Susa's birthday! I hope she has a fantastic day and the new year will bring her all she wishes for when she blows out her candles.

I have known Susa for over 10 years, we used to be workmates at first, but she soon became a friend. I even lived with her for a few weeks after I had given up my apartment in preparation for my move to London. I'm really grateful that she's still my friend, after that! For my wedding last year, Susa was my personal, all-day make-up artist. She is incredibly good at making a girl look gorgeous! We also share a slightly unhealthy obsession with The Lord Of The Rings movies, complete with borderline stalking of one of the elves, who we went to meet at a fantasy festival in the Netherlands. At age 27. (Oops, did I just write that?) For a while now, she has been eating mostly vegan, which I admire her for.

Unfortunately, she is in Germany, and I am in London, so I cannot see her for Kaffee und Kuchen, but I promised her a while ago I would be on the lookout for a good vegan cake recipe, and I might just have found one. It is for an Chocolate Orange Cake and Susan from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen kindly let me share it. You can find it here. 

I pretty much stuck to Susan's original recipe, but made the following substitutions:

unbleached flour : plain flour

white wholemeal flour : dark wholemeal flour

sugar : golden granulated sugar

1 tsp cinnamon : 2 tsp cinnamon

water : soya milk

The oven should be at 175°C and I baked the cake for 50 minutes. I also added one tablespoon of orange flower water for some extra fragrance. For the cake decoration, I left out the orange icing, but made double the amount of chocolate icing, to which I added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, and water instead of orange juice (I used one extra teaspoon of water, so 5 instead of 4). So all in all, I guess I made more of a cinnamon-spiced Chocolate Orange Cake. (I am a bit of a cinnamon addict, sorry.) After I had drizzled the icing over the cake, I added a circle of candied orange slices as decoration. The cake rose beautifully and even though it is dense, the crumb is quite light and springy, which is rare in a vegan cake. I tried a bit this morning, and it did what it said on the tin. Lovely chocolate flavour with an orangey note. Plus a cinnamon hit, in this case...

When I have a whole piece this afternoon, I will think of you, Girl! Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Susa! x