Almond/ Carob Celebration Cake

This is a cake I made for Govardhana Puja at the end of October, but you could use it anytime as a celebration cake. To get the shape, I cooked the cake in a greased and floured stainless steel bowl (to represent the hill). You could split, fill with frosting and reassemble the cake if you want, but I didn't bother and it was yummy anyway. The frosting was date syrup, carob powder and Sweet Freedom syrup (fruit concentrate and carob extract), with desiccated coconut shaken up with a few drops of green food colouring (for the "grass"). you could use buttercream if you like, but I wanted to make this cake vegan. To the basic cake recipe (see my post 16.12.10) add a couple of generous teaspoons of natural almond essence; this makes the flavour a bit more special. To finish, I just put a few nice flowers and some flat-leaved parsley from the garden on top and around the bottom- et voila! I also surrounded the cake with "rocks" of peanut butter/ carob sweets (peanut butter, icing sugar and carob powder) and made some chocolate cupcakes too.

Btw, you may have noticed 2 new widgets on this blog; one is on the sidebar at the top, and one is at the bottom, under "Popular Posts".  Now I'm not really into being very commercialised but I did want to increase my traffic and reach more people by referrals, so I joined "The Foodie Blogroll", a great site for linking up with other foodie bloggers. I've also subscribed to "Ptitchef", which is a fantastic French cooking website with hundreds of vegetarian recipes on it. (I've already found quite a few I want to try out!) You can click on the widget and go straight there if you're interested.