Last weekend was truly awesome. It was my birthday! 🙂 But, most importantly, I got to spend time with my family and my awesome boyfriend and eat delicious food.
And some of that food included my homemade birthday cake!
But I’ll get to that in a second.
For dinner, we went to Counter Culture here in Austin… and it was so good!
We got an appetizer for everyone to share and I ordered the special that night: mexican pizza. I was so impressed, and the best part was getting to eat the leftovers for lunch the next day.
Why is leftover pizza so great? Somehow it makes me feel like a kid again.
Oh yeah, and my sister is responsible for the cuteness above. She got Lilly and me matching UT shirts to represent her new school!
Anyway, on to my cake recipe!
I gotta say, I’m pretty proud of this one, folks. I was really nervous about the reaction to it because my goal was to make a cake that was gluten free, soy free, SUGAR free, and oil free, and sometimes experiments like that can become a free disaster. I also wanted to make it a two-layer cake with icing in the middle, because… well, that just makes a cake twice as awesome.
So when I put everything together the night before, I was super nervous that it wouldn’t taste as good as I was expecting. It was an experimental recipe, after all, and I had been so sure it would be great that perhaps I had overestimated the result.
But as soon as everyone bit into it, the reaction was immediate and SO good! Yay! They used words like “fudgy”, “cheesecake-y” and “rich” and “you could sell this!”. Yes!
So, in case you are interested, here is the recipe:
Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Birthday Cake w/ Cashew Cream Frosting
For the cake:
3 cups garbanzo beans
2 cups oats
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
6 tbsp peanut butter (or other nut butter)
1 tbsp plus 1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp plus 1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup plus 5 tbsps truvia
2 cups pitted dates
2 cups chocolate chips
How-to:
1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine baking powder, salt, and truvia together in a small bowl and set aside.
2. Add the beans, oats, applesauce, nut butter, vanilla, and dates to a HIGH speed blender or food processor (I have a Ninja blender, which I consider second best to a Vitamix, so it works better than my food processor. But the more powerful machine, the better.). Blend until very smooth and well incorporated. You may have to stop a few times and push down/stir the mixture yourself to make sure everything is moving properly.
3. Add the dry mixture from before to the blender or food processor and blend until it has been mixed in well.
4. Transfer the blended mixture to a large mixing bowl and gently stir in the chocolate chips. (NOTE: If you stir in the chips immediately after blending mixture, some of the chocolate may melt in the mixture. I liked this because it gave the cake a nice chocolate swirl, but if you want whole chocolate chips throughout, let the mixture sit in the bowl for a while until it cools off and then stire them in.)
5. Spray two cake pans with cooking spray and distribute the mixture evenly between the two. Bake for about 35 minutes, watching closely to make sure they don’t brown more than you’d like. Let cool in pans for 15-20 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.
For the icing:
4 3/4 cups cashews
2.5 cups water
4 tbsps agave
2 tbsp vanilla
4 tbsp truvia
How-to:
1. Clean out the blender or food processor you used and add the icing ingredients. Blend until smooth and creamy.
2. Once cake halves have completely cooled, add icing to the top of one about 1/4 inch think. Very carefully, pile the other half on top of the iced one evenly before icing the rest of the entire cake. Top with chocolate chips, sprinkles, what you like!
And enjoy!
Don't Forget the Sugar 