CrumpArt

Paul is in the other room writing a freelance article about some sort of car thing. He hasn’t written anything for money (or equivalent rewards) for a long time now, and a couple of hours ago I heard the plaintive cry of “Writing is hard!” coming from his general direction.

I just attended two weeks worth of Professional Practice seminars for my MFA, and now have three weeks to write 2000 words about myself for assessment. As a professional writer, I agree that it is hard, so I decided to procrastinate practice with this blog post about cake.

At the end of the seminars, we had a pot luck lunch. Although I’m not actually vegan, I do cook vegan meals most of the time, especially when I have to cook for others. I get a slightly roguish thrill from proving people wrong through deliciousness.

It infuriates me when people insist that you need to use eggs and dairy when baking. Unless you are baking lemon meringue pie, which is indeed a noble pursuit, you do not need to bake with eggs. Take this date cake for example. More traditional date loaves involve the soaking of the dates in bicarb soda and water, but I wanted a more cakey number with flecks of date that resemble chocolate chips.

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Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Grease and line two loaf tins.

Finely chop 40 pitted dates and soak them in 1.5 cups of coconut cream with a splash of apple cider vinegar.

In a separate bowl, cream 1 cup of vegan margarine with 1.5 cups of sugar. Beat in a dash of vanilla essence, 2 cups of sifted self-raising flour and a pinch of salt. The mixture will be very dry at this point.

Beat in the coconut cream and dates until you have a thick batter. Divide this into the tins then bake for 45-50 minutes, or until your knife comes out clean in a poking test (heh…). Allow it to cool (hah!) then enjoy its moist deliciousness and the pretence that it’s healthy due to the lack of dairy and inclusion of fruit.