Vegan Chocolate Cake

275 meters swimming, 16km bike riding over our hilly town and a 5K run.

Finally, completed my first triathlon! 🙂

Now, the embarrassing part- I was one of the lasts to finish.(*sheepish look*)

While my swimming and run timings were pretty decent, everyone dusted me off in the cycling round. Before you make fun do understand, for me, the cycling part was the toughest. I only started cycling a month and half back, after more than a decade of not getting on a cycle. And it was a real task for me to do uphill cycling, which was almost 50% of the entire route. One of the roads we biked on is actually called Mountain road (not even Hill road- its called mountain!). So it wasn’t easy for me. And that’s why it took me a lot of time. And the wind didn’t help either when climbing uphill on the cycle.

Anyway, the idea this time for my first triathlon was to complete it. Next time I’ll probably think of actually competing!

To celebrate my completion of the triathlon, I decided to bake a cake.

A few weeks back, one of my juniors from college had messaged me on Facebook asking for good eggless cake recipes. This other friend of mine had tried this eggless cake recipe from Passionate About Baking (originally published by Barbara from barbarabakes.com) and had highly recommended it. Before trying this recipe, I tried another one that I had copied from one of my mom’s recipe books. While that recipe produced a really moist and spongy cake, I had baked the cake in a bundt pan and while removing it, it broke at several places. Also, it wasn’t as chocolatey as I wanted it to be.

Since I knew this recipe was tried and tested, for my next attempt at baking eggless cakes, I decided to use Barbara’s recipe. Plus, this one was vegan as well.

This cake is very simple to make. It doesn’t require any beating of butter with sugar. Heck, there is no butter in the recipe. It uses oil- maybe next time I’ll try subbing applesauce to see if that works as well. Nor does it require too much work. While the oven is pre-heating, you mix your dry ingredients and wet ingredients in two different bowls. Mix them together till just combined. Add any chopped walnuts and chocolate chips if you like and pour the  batter into the prepared tin. Meanwhile the oven has preheated and you just pop it in the oven and bake for 35-40 min (it took mine 45 minutes- probably because of the different pan). I had some problem with the mixing- a tiny part of it didn’t mix, and that’s why you see a portion of white on the cake, though some if the white spots are actually walnuts. That aside the cake was spot on- moist, chocolatey and spongy.

While I followed the recipe to a T, I made a few changes. One of them- instead of using 2 9-inch round pans, I used a Bundt pan. In spite of my last bundt cake tragedy, I decided to bake it in a bundt pan and this time I made sure to grease and flour the tin well. And it came out beautifully.

I also added a few chopped walnuts to the batter. Next time I would probably add a few chocolate chips as well. Just for fun!

I didn’t frost it like Barbara or Deeba, keeping it simple. Sometimes, that’s all you want in life- a simple chocolate cake.