Chocolate cake, vanilla buttercream icing, raspberry jam filling.
It was our 20th wedding anniversary this week. My husband John and I loved our wedding cake, oh so long ago. In fact, for the first few years after we got married, on our anniversary I bought a mini cake from the baker with the same flavours as a treat for us.
Fast-forward 20 years, we live in a different country and out of reach from the baker, so I made one myself. Bit of the past (same flavours as original), bit of the present (beans!).
Found a delicious chocolate cake recipe here and substituted half of the regular flour for chickpea flour. Work great — cake was moist and chocolaty and fantastic. Put raspberry jam in between the cake layers, and frosted with buttercream icing made with aquafaba (the water in a can of chickpeas). It all tasted *amazing*. (It didn’t look great because I’m a newbie cake baker and thought it would be nice to put a little layer of raspberry jam on top of the cake as well as between the layers and no never do that because I learned you can’t spread the (white) icing properly on top). But wow so yummy.
If you haven’t had Swiss or Italian buttercream, it is worth the experiment. Not too sweet, just like the best butter in the world. I think Swiss is easier (don’t need to get the temperature exactly right like you do with Italian) so I’d try that. It normally uses egg whites, but aquafaba works too.
A few tips: I used a bit of aquafaba from a can of chickpeas but I also used some of the water from chickpeas I’d cooked in my pressure cooker. I’d read somewhere to boil that down a bit so I did, from about 2 cups to half a cup. Boiled the sugar in that, then cooled and put in the fridge, and it got to a gelatinous texture like egg whites which was pretty cool.
It took kinda forever to whip up to firm peaks. In fact I didn’t really get it there, just soft peaks, then gave up and added the powdered sugar and it stiffened up and held well from there on.
Anyway, recommended, will be making this again. Happy 20th John 🙂