Next Tuesday, I’m turning 37 so I decided to make myself a cake a week in advance, for my Thursday breakfast.  37 is a weird age to be turning because it holds absolutely no significance. It’s not a milestone. It contains no auspicious (or unlucky, for that matter) numbers. It’s kind of a beige tinted purgatory somewhere between being, say, 29 and 40, but definitely tilting toward the old end of the spectrum. I have a sneaking suspicion that I ought to be mature and sensible by now but that probably only applies to my natal time zone.

I’m not sure if cake for breakfast is mature or sensible, but it’s irrelevant as I’m in China, 15 time zones away.

Now, the premise of this blog is to make non-Chinese dishes in China using only ingredients and equipment readily found in China. Perhaps you might think cake is out of the question. You’re probably right, in many cases. However, I came prepared. Or rather, 7 years ago I came prepared.

Back in 2004, at the end of my two-year stint living in the wilds of Central Anatolia in Turkey, I had a mad hankering for cake that wasn’t just dry white cake overstuffed with sickly sweet hazelnut cream and whole bananas and candied chestnuts, as the Kayseri folk were wont to do.  I flew home that summer and made myself a cookbook, neatly and patiently hand written in a cheap notebook, that contained every possible recipe from my parents’ cookbook collection that I might possibly want to recreate in the following years in my new home in Istanbul. I vetted the recipes based on plausibility and limitations: Turkish ingredients, Turkish equipment.

One of the recipes I transcribed was for vegan brownies from my old Rebar cookbook.  These particular vegan brownies were one of my regular food groups when I was living at home, since the Rebar restaurant‘s bakery also supplied their baked goods to several other cafes around Victoria that I frequented.  They are living proof that a vegan diet needn’t be healthy in the slightest. They’re halfway between a chocolate cake and a brownie and contain two essential food groups: coffee and chocolate.

However, when I moved to Istanbul that September, the flat I moved into didn’t even come with a toaster oven so I was limited to my small gas stove until I was able to save up enough for an embarrassingly basic counter top oven. The oven, from Carrefour in Kadıköy, came with a bonus gift of a powder blue hair dryer. As it turned out, the hair dryer produced more consistent heat than the oven did and so the oven was relegated to reheating pizza and, eventually, to storing dishes. The vegan brownie recipe had languished, ignored and half-forgotten, in my increasingly food-spattered cookbook for more than half a decade until today.

When I decided that I needed a birthday cake a week early– and a China-friendly one, to boot- I immediately thought of this one. It can be made in a toaster oven (or in a rice cooker, if you have a cake setting). It doesn’t need butter and it actually calls for soy milk rather than cow milk.  It isn’t even remotely healthy but it is spiritually and emotionally nourishing. Trust me on this one.

Here are the ingredients:

• 1.5 cups of flour (not self raising, just plain)
• 1/2 cup of cocoa
• 1.5 cups brown sugar
• 1.5 teaspoons baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup of coffee (Nescafe should be fine, stronger is better)
• 3/4 cup milk, soy or otherwise
• 1/3 cup veggie oil (I used sun flower oil)
• 1/2 cup walnuts, roasted and chopped (I don’t like nuts in baked goods so I threw in a few handfuls of Fiona‘s gifted desiccated coconut)
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips (I bought a bar of plain dark chocolate from the corner shop and hacked it to pieces with my cleaver)

See? Easy.

This is how you make them

Pre-heat your oven (toaster or otherwise) to 190C or 325F. This recipe makes one 9″ by 9″ pan of awesomeness but I used two smaller pans of indeterminate dimensions that were approximately okay. Lightly grease them pans.

Sift all your dry ingredients together- the flour, the cocoa, the sugar, the salt, the baking powder and baking soda. Shanghai is stupidly humid in summer so all of my dry ingredients were seriously clumped up. I don’t own anything resembling a sifter so I just worked my way through it with my fingers, unclumping. Add coconut if it makes you happy. Add walnuts if you like them.

In another bowl (or sauce pan or whatever), stir together the wet ingredients: the soy milk, the oil, the coffee (make sure it’s not still hot).

Get a bar of dark chocolate and smash it to pieces with your nearest big knife.

Stir together the wet, the dry and the chocolate.

Pour the batter into the lightly greased baking pan(s).

The original recipe said to bake it for 25 minutes but mine needed an extra 7 minutes, possibly because my little counter top oven wasn’t consistently up to temperature and radiates heat like crazy. If you have a small toaster oven, you might want to halve the recipe and just make one smaller pan, placed in the center of the oven so the heat can flow evenly around it.

The recipe also has an awesome glaze that I can’t be bothered to make this morning but which is easy to make: 210 grams of dark chocolate melted with 150g of butter in a double boiler, whisked til smooth, poured onto cake then cooled in the fridge.  It isn’t totally necessary though. The cake on its own is just fine.

Breakfast of champions!

ETA: I caved and made the glaze, some time around 4pm. I took one bar of dark chocolate and the other half of the one I’d used in the cake (studded with little espresso bean crunchies, by the way) and melted it slowly over the smallest flame possible with a big old chunk of butter (about 1.5″ by 3″ [3cm by 6cm], I’d wager) then poured the whole hot mess over the two cakes, including the one we’d already taken two pieces out of. They’re in the fridge now, cooling.  Dinner of champions!