Yahoo! More training for my 2nd job as a walking food tour host at Foodi Tours and will be conducting my first tour next week (luckily today I have tasted all the samples regardless of how my stomach and dietitian thinks, so next week no more tasting just talking!). I am also excited that my own food tour of Surry Hills is coming together and will be launched on December 13th!
Check it out: http://www.foodi.com.au – under Sydney
For the next 5 weeks I will be running Foodi’s Cupcake and Dessert tour of Sydney CBD as well as the Surry Hills tour and I hope my Australian readers will be able to come to either tour in Sydney! (please! haha). I am a little nervous about next week as I will have 18 people to look after, thankfully I have a loud voice (thanks to years of choir and working at my other job in a open kitchen!).
So between Foodi and my other job at (yes it is time I admit were I work) Vapiano Sydney (remember I have exciting news about Vapiano next month so keep an eye out on my Facebook and twitter pages for that, it’s Whipple-related!), I will still find time to keep The Whipple Girl’s Cookbook going. No worries!
Meanwhile, it has been a few months since moving onto this PCOS/Whipple diet and I have to say, it has been a life changer – I rarely have extreme mood swings, insulin crashes, major depression periods and now with the help of the occasional gym visit I am losing a bit of weight but not starving myself. I feel happy and now have accepted that the Whipple was the best thing that has happened and I should not have been so stubborn of getting help (dietitians) in those early days – family trait. Let’s hope something more amazing happens in 2015 (I’m hoping for first contact of an alien race or the invention of a gelato that helps you lose weight. Either one).
Ok, recipe time. Now while I made this cake for my Vapiano job for Halloween, I mainly made this vegan cake for Ae (pronounced as ‘I’ – god that was hard to grasp, “Ae dropped the flour, no no I said Ae not me!!”), she came to Australia from beautiful Estonia and sadly had to return a couple of weeks a go. For my birthday Ae gave me a family cookbook for me to fill out with all my recipes and hopefully have my future children fill out too with their creations hearing about the family legend of ‘Ae the Estonian’. Ae my dear, I hope you’re reading this, I thank you for my gift and loved working with you through the fun singing times, the extremely late closes and the coolroom bitching we use to do. I hope to visit you one day when I have robbed a bank and get a plane ticket to Estonia!
Must add that this has been adapted from the Orgran’s no-egg chocolate cake recipe: http://www.orgran.com/recipes-search/15791
Ae’s Scary Vegan Cake
Prep time: 15mins – Cooking time: 50mins – Makes: 1 20cm round cake
1 1/2 Cups Gluten Free Self Raising Flour
1 Cup of Brewed Chocolate-flavour instant coffee (2 Tbsp of instant coffee into 1 cup of boiled water)
1 tsp Orgran No-egg replacer (follow instructions – i.e. 1 tsp of powder with 2 Tbsp of water)
3 Tbsp Dutch cocoa powder
1 Tsp Bicarb soda
1 Cup Brown sugar (all Australian sugar is Vegan – double check in your Country)
1/4 Cup plain oil olive
1 Tsp Vanilla extract
And whatever icing you want: I did a basic one with CSR’s icing mixture and Nutellex spread. Follow their instructions.
Heat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius and grease/line a spring cake tin.
In a large mixing bowl add the dry ingredients and mix.
Then add all the wet ingredients.
Stir, stir, stir into a smooth chocolate batter.
Pour into the tin. Tap the tin onto the counter to smooth out the air bubbles (helps to make the cake level).
Pop into the middle of the oven for 15mins.
Take out and cover top with foil, reduce the oven to 160 degrees and bake for another 40mins.
(Check after 30mins with the skewer test to see if the skewer comes out clean – if clean – NO MORE BAKING. ITS DONE!).
Allow to cool in tin for 10mins then remove from tin onto cooling rack (if in hurry, pop it into the freezer for 10-15mins).
Ice the hell out of the cake and always be amazing when serving.
If it hasn’t cooked all the way through, no worries – it’s now a Vegan chocolate pudding! Saved.
Next week, I am planning another ‘advice post’ about chronic conditions and an update of how my first Tour gig went! See you next Saturday!
Whipple Girl
The Whipple Girl's Cookbook 