Vegan Chocolate Cake (with non-vegan chocolate icing)

When I came home from work yesterday, the very last thing I wanted to do was... well, anything. I didn't want to cook. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to watch tv. I didn't want to do anything. But I went to check my email, and then I started looking for a file with some addresses I needed, and then... I found a recipe for vegan chocolate cake.

I don't like baking. I'm not vegan. I didn't want to eat cake.

Somehow it seemed like the best thing to do at that moment. So I baked a cake. And it turned out beautifully. And deliciously.

However, a plain chocolate cake does not a pretty picture make, so it turned into a whole saga of how to decorate a chocolate cake when you have no icing sugar. Well, I had a half bag of frozen mixed fruits, so I made myself a very simple (and tasty) fruit glaze.

But the pictures were awful. They came out terribly dark and the sauce was the same colour as the cake. (Alas, that's what happens when your mixed fruit is really just a bag of frozen blueberries with a few strawberries and some peach slices thrown in as an afterthought.) So I threw out almost a quarter of the cake (from wasted photo attempts) and put the rest away and bought myself some chocolate icing today. (The icing is probably not vegan. I didn't look, but I don't really care because I'm not vegan anyway.)

I didn't really want to ice the cake because I didn't want the sweetness that icing invariably adds, but it does make for a better picture - there's some contrast in the colour, at least - and it was cheaper than a bag of icing sugar.

Anyway, now that it's all iced, it's sitting in the fridge waiting for someone to eat it, but since I'm the only chocolate eater in the house, it'll probably get tossed before it's done. Still... that's the easiest scratch cake I've ever made in my life, and it came out better than pretty much any cake I've tried to make. So I'm pretty impressed with my single bout with vegan baking. Who knew it'd be so easy to make a good cake without using any eggs?