Vegan Chocolate Cake aka "Hippie Cake"

This Sunday's recipe from Baked Occasions is a vegan chocolate cake (or "Hippie Cake"), in honor of Earth Day. It's difficult for me to get excited about baking vegan desserts, because I believe that pretty much everything is better when it involves real butter and eggs. That's part of the fun of this group though - I bake things I ordinarily would never bother to make.

This vegan chocolate cake is really simple to put together. Just pour almost boiling water over the chocolate, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. (Side note: the vinegar is here to react with the baking soda and provide lift to the cake, making up for the absence of eggs.)  Let it stand a minute, whisk together, let stand again, whisk once more, then add in the sugar and whisk one more time. Then it's simply a matter of folding the dry ingredients into the wet in two steps, pouring into your 8-inch pan and baking. I'm not sure if it was me or simply this recipe, but the baking is where I seemed to run into trouble. Since the "done" window was 28-32 minutes, I started checking at 25 minutes. It was not done at 25 minutes according to the clean toothpick test, nor at 28, nor at 32. I pulled it out anyways, and let it cool on a wire rack where it sank a fair amount in the middle. To me, that indicated it was underdone, but no matter - I would just pop it into the fridge as recommended for slicing anyway and it would be like a fudgy rich cake. Instead, this cake was a mess of crumbs. It was completely impossible to transfer out of the pan without it breaking into crumbs. On the upside, the cake was not bad, although a little dry, and it carried a nice hint of the flavor of the olive oil I used. However, if I were to make this cake again I would probably under-bake it, let it cool 15 minutes, and then put it in the fridge to see if I could get it to be a cohesive, slice-able cake. I have to confess, I cheated with the frosting, but only because I didn't see a point in buying vegan butter when I only needed 2 tablespoons worth, plus I was going out-of-town for the weekend so I felt the same way about the almond milk. Instead of the vegan butter and almond milk, I used the same proportions but with real butter, skim milk, and then added a tablespoon of heavy cream. Also, I unexpectedly ran out of almond butter (I blame the almond butter brownies from Chickpea Flour Does it All), so I wound up with only half the amount for this frosting (65 g worth). As it turns out, I thought that amount of almond butter was exactly perfect. This (totally non-vegan) frosting was absolutely delicious, it set well, and in my opinion it completely saved the cake from being too dry (and it helped for eating the cake since all the crumbs clung to it).  I imagine the frosting would still be very good with the non-dairy butter and almond milk, but I might add a little coconut cream to it as well since my heavy cream yielded such a great frosting. This frosting would be good on pretty much any chocolate item you can think of and probably pretty fantastic on your morning toast.Check out the recipe for this hippie cake over at Baked Sunday Mornings and see how it turned out for the other bakers.