Vegan MoFo: Chocolate Avocado Cake.

Well I had some avocados getting mushier and mushier by the day, and wondered whether they would make a good egg replacement- kind of like mushy bananas. So I did some good old googling and found a few recipes which raved about avocado goodness with cake. I figured that chocolate cake would probably be the best move, just to be sure that the cake had no hint of avocado! This lovely site gave me the perfect recipe: http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/ they also have some great vegan recipes, and plenty of beautiful veganizable ones too. The photography is so lovely. I have adapted the recipe, adding and omitting things that I didn't have and things that I love to add to chocolate cake recipes.

3 cups plain flour
6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups golden caster sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup soft avocado, well mashed, about 1 medium avocado
2 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Handful of ground almonds

Plenty of cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180c. Sift together all of the dry ingredients except the sugar. Set that aside too. Mix all the wet ingredients together in a bowl, including the super mashed avocado.
Add sugar into the wet mix and stir. Mix the wet with the dry all at once, and beat with a whisk (by hand) until smooth. Pour batter into a greased cake tins. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let cakes cool in pan for 15 minutes, then turn out onto cooling racks to cool completely before frosting the cake. The recipe I began with used avocado icing- no butter!- but I decided on some vanilla buttercream, with just a smidge to glue the two cakes together. The chocolate cake is really moist and I wanted that to shine through. Ideally I would like to make some cream cheese buttercream frosting! I finished the cake with a dusting of icing sugar.