My first attempt at a Chocolate Truffle Cake went just okay, but this weekend, I had a chance at a second attempt!  I was very excited.  Matt’s cousin, Amy had a birthday party and, being that she too is vegan, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to make her a vegan cake.  We only heard about the party Wednesday night and the party was Saturday, so I didn’t have much time to prepare.  And since I didn’t have much time to prepare, I went with a straight forward chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream then covered the whole thing in ganache.  This time, I used the same dark chocolate for the ganache, but used soy milk instead of soy creamer.  This fixed the problem of my ganache thickening up when it cooled down, but the ganache started cracking the longer the cake sat.  I don’t know what could have caused this, but I can only assume that it was something with the chocolate.  Next time, I will try a different kind of chocolate and hope that fixes this new problem.

This time,  I made a 2-tier cake which probably looks a lot more complicated than it really is.  The bottom cake has 4 dowels (i.e. chopsticks) inserted in the center to provide support to the top tier.  The dowlels should be trimmed about 1/4 inch shorter than the cake so that they don’t poke out.  The top tier is decorated with a strip of fondant and some dots of icing around the top and bottom.  The fondant kept slipping off the cake, so I used toothpicks to hold it in place (excess was trimmed off and the hole covered with icing).  A few daisies finished it off!  (Check out this list of other non-toxic flowers that can be used for cake or food decoration.)

The texture of the cake was perfect– nice and moist.  The icing was also yummy and the perfect consistency.  The ganache, though, tasted fine, but still gave me problems looks-wise.  Again, it must be some additive to the chocolate that makes it act so weird.  Third time’s a charm, I guess.  Nex time will be perfection!

I also made a few snacks for the party– my corn & black bean salsa and a platter of yummy roll-up sandwiches and foccacia pizza.  For the sandwiches, I took a whole wheat lavash, smeared on some Tofutti cream cheese, sprinkled on some olive tepenade, and piled on some lettuce, cucumber, roasted red and yellow peppers, tomatoes and some chopped basil.  Yummy!!!  The foccacia is VeganDad’s recipe with a few minor changes.  Instead of sage, I used 1 TB of Italian seasoning (dried garlic, onion, oregano and basil).  I also rolled the entire batch of dough out onto a large baking sheet and topped it with a little olive oil, a little bit of FYH mozarella, some red onion, chopped red and green bell peppers, sliced black olives, and artichoke hearts.  After it was done baking, I sprinkled it with some chopped fresh basil.

Don’t forget to enter yourself into this month’s giveaway, if you haven’t done so already.  I’ll extend the deadline one more day to 11:59 pm on Monday, February 9th.