Avery turned 7 on April 18th and since we couldn’t have the party with all our family and friends like we had planned originally, I lined up a super fun day with a scavenger hunt that led to her gifts, pizza, cake, playing with her NEW basketball goal and a movie to end it all! For their parties, I always order a cake from my cake lady but since it was just our immediate family celebrating this day, I decided to make it myself! The first AND last time I made either of my kids a birthday cake was Avery’s smash cake…which you can see here. 🙂
I let her go ahead and tell me what she wanted and she decided on strawberry, chocolate and vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream icing. She had also seen this cake on my blog and wanted it to look like this on the outside with the dipped cherries and toasted coconut.
I really don’t enjoy making cakes that much anymore (shocking, right?!) so this was a stretch for me and it was even more of a stretch because I haven’t done many vegan cakes and I wanted this one to be free of animal products! And in our everyday lives we don’t use use refined sugar (typically stick to dates, agave, xylitol, monkfruit, etc) but man it is HARD to work with sugar substitutes in baked goods so I decided to compromise and at least use organic cane sugar and organic powdered sugar.
For the cake, I tripled this recipe and split it into thirds. I left 1/3 vanilla, added about 2 cups of strawberry puree to the other 1/3 and then 1/3 cup of cocoa powder and a touch of agave to the last 1/3. I know it’s not technically how you should make three different flavors of cake but I was looking for efficiency here, ok?? 😉 And I used this recipe from my blog for the buttercream–just subbed vegan ingredients!
It turned out beautiful and delicious and was 99.99999% vegan except I dipped the cherries in Bake Believe White Chocolate Chips which, while sweetened with erythritol and completely DELICIOUS, are sadly NOT vegan. 🙁 But I still felt good about it overall and plan to not make another anytime soon! Except for Elias’ birthday…in May….sigh. Then I’ll take the year off. 😀