Adventures in birthday cake: natural food coloring, garden ingredients, and cold weather

My sister Mary celebrated her 30th birthday last week, and we planned festivities for her here in the valley, including a parade of birthday cakes over a four-day period.

I made two of the cakes. Mary's favorite color since she was a little girl has always been orange, and I was determined to create a nontoxic cake involving lots of orange.

In the past, I've made deep red frosting with butter, sugar, and beet juice, and I've played around with various spices (tumeric, paprika) to color foods, but they add their own strong flavor and aroma to whatever you are coloring. I already had a very specific flavor in mind (cinnamon rum butter cream) for the icing, so I faced a challenging task: achieve orange without compromising flavor.

Why not just squirt in some red and yellow food coloring from the little box of brights you can buy in your supermarket? Well, to start with, I like a challenge. But I also like to provide a birthday cake that does not contain known carcinogens and/or fossil fuels. Plus, I wanted ingredients from our garden to be incorporated somehow.

Have a little coal tar with your cake!

The seven main food-dying agents approved for dying food in the US are all toxic -- most are derived from coal tar and the couple that are not are synthetic. Coal tar in my food? No thanks! Confirming the intuitive, common sense notion that ingesting coal tar is probably not good for us, studies have shown that coal tar-based food colorings are carcinogenic. Commercial food colorings are also known to cause allergic reactions, and I would argue that whether we notice an "allergy" or not, our bodies are not meant to process coal tar or synthetic dyes.

In my search for natural food coloring ideas, I came across an interesting summary of old-timey food colorings from Elise Fleming, compiled from cookbooks dating back as far as 1380: natural food colorings of yesteryear. Of course the idea of squirting coal tar or synthetic dye into food is a relatively recent notion, and the old fashioned ways were not only healthier but much more romantic as well (pressing rose petals, for instance).

But back to the task at hand. Carrots were the obvious orange ingredient, and at first I thought of grating them. But the thought of chunky frosting with recognizable carrot pieces in it did not seem like it would fly with the intended cake recipient. Instead, I tried juicing a carrot and stirring that into the icing with a little cinnamon and extract of rum. Viola! It wasn't safety zone orange, but it was definitely orange. I brightened it up by using grated orange zest and tiny flecks of carrots (conveniently left over from the juicing process) like sprinkles.

I used carrots that we grew plus homegrown nasturtiums & zinnias as garnishes, so the garden was well represented. Starfruit added more pizazz, and were in the right color family. The flowers almost didn't make it onto the cakes, because we had our first two nights of freezing weather this weekend. But we managed to protect the tender plants through the first frosty nights, long enough for them to contribute to the festivities.

Here's how the cakes turned out:





















Saturday night's cake (above) and it's sister Sunday brunch cake (below).

Both are vegan double chocolate mocha cakes (recipe below) with cinnamon rum butter cream icing.

They're garnished with nasturtiums, zinnia, starfruit, finely chopped candied ginger, carrot flecks, and orange zest.

Sunday's cake also features local limbertwig apples dipped in dark chocolate.

The recipe for the cake is one that I actually got from my sister Mary (the birthday celebrator) some years ago. I added a cup of chocolate chips to make it double chocolate.

Mary's Famous Ultra-Moist Vegan Mocha Cake

3 cups unbleached all purpose flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 cups raw sugar
1 cup sunflower oil
1 cup brewed coffee
4 tsp. vanilla
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
4 Tbs. apple cider vinegar

1. Combine all dry ingredients and mix well.
2. Combine all wet ingredients EXCEPT the vinegar and mix well.
3. Mix the wet ingredients (again, excepting the vinegar) into the dry ingredients and mix until smooth.
   
4. Add the apple cider vinegar and stir.
5. Oil a baking pan and dust with cocoa.
   
6. Bake at 375 for 25-30 minutes until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
7. Cool, ice, cover with fruit, or otherwise fancify, and enjoy!
   
   

Cinnamon rum butter cream icing
I don't have exact proportions for this one...I just winged it.

Here's an approximate recipe:

1 stick of butter
Powdered sugar
1 tsp. extract of rum
1 tsp. cinnamon
A splash of half-and-half

Start with softening the butter. Mix in sugar until you have the desired consistency, add rum extract and cinnamon, and incorporate half-and-half to achieve exactly the right spreadability.

The birthday girl serving the second of the two cakes...

More on brine pickling

Jars of recently brined pickles: mixed vegetables on the left and summer squash on the right.

Earlier this summer, I blogged about one of my favorite old-fashioned, probiotic ways to preserve vegetables -- pickling them in salt water. (See the original post, Coming Home to Abundance for brine-pickling instructions, references, and background).

Brine pickling has been such an ongoing, everyday part of life at our house over the past few months of heavy harvest that I wanted to write a little bit more about it, with specific comments on various vegetables for brining.

This summer, I've brine-pickled cucumbers, squash, okra, onions, garlic, radishes, beets, carrots, and cauliflower, all with good results. Fresh dill, basil, and parsley all pickle well, too, and add great flavor to brine pickles. I have a crock going now of baby squash, the last of the summer carrots, and okra with dill flowers. I'm sure I've brined other things in summers past, but I don't remember them all!

I do remember that I tried fingerling eggplants once with disastrous results (mushy and moldy), so I don't recommend brining eggplant. Other things I DON'T recommend brining include: ripe tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and lettuce. I've known friends to brine watermelon rinds (very delicious) and green tomatoes successfully, too.

I've found that squash and cucumbers do great pickled whole and then de-brined (soaked in cold water), sliced, and stored in a 4-to-1 water/vinegar solution. They'll last almost indefinitely in the fridge that way.

You can store the pickles in the original brining liquid, which is cloudy and full of beneficial bacteria, but it's generally a bit salty for my taste. I like to pour it off and save it to use for other things, including just pouring a shot of it into sauerkraut or pickles when packing into jars for storage.

Okra is really tasty brined whole and either sliced and packed or just packed as whole pods (they look cool that way). This is an outstanding way to keep up with the okra overload when your okra plants are producing faster than you can possibly come up with clever ways to disguise okra for fresh consumption.

Small carrots are great brined whole, and are a surprisingly yummy snack - salty, crunchy, and crisp.

Onions do better quartered than whole, unless they're pretty small. Pearl-sized pickled onions are GREAT.

An easy way to get started with brine pickling is to fill a crock or big jar with all the brine-able veggies that you have lying around needing to be used. Make sure they're washed and prepped as described in my earlier post and then pour a strong brine solution over them (1/2 cup salt to 1 quart water). Press down (I use a plate weighted with a full jar on top), make sure they're submerged, cover, and wait. In warm weather, the pickles will be salty, sour, and pickled in as little as 10 days. It really is like magic!

Vegetable husbandry, succession gardening, and prayers for rain

The late corn that Bud and LJ and I planted is coming along, though getting a bit choked by it's overzealous bean sisters. It's raining a little today (HALLELUJAH!!!) and I'm hoping the rain will give the corn the boost it needs to outgrow the beans a little.

Since it's such a small patch of corn, we'll have to hand-pollinate at some point soon. I'm excited for our first adventure in vegetable husbandry/wifery, which is far less daunting than the livestock equivalent.

Meanwhile, we harvested a bunch of carrots and beets over the weekend (see below), some of which we enjoyed shredded last night in a delightful salad with white beans, wild rice, sunflower seeds, parsley, celery, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar (plus salt and pepper for those of you who want to try this at home).



The rest of the beet and carrot harvest is either fermenting in one of the various crocks crowding our kitchen counters, or in cold storage (aka the fridge) to last, we hope, until the next round of roots are ready.

We're direct seeding carrots, beets, radishes, and mustards now for the fall--the photo below is C. mulching a carrot/radish bed we sowed on Saturday with heirloom French Breakfast Radish and Scarlet Nantes Carrot seeds.



The idea is that we'll keep sowing beets, carrots, and radishes every few weeks until the weather gets too cold--succession planting so that in theory we should have root crops to eat and share for a good while to come.

In the meantime, I am holding out hope for an long, steady downpour today (it's just a drizzle at this point) for our garden and all of the plants and animals, including we human animals, that are so desperate for rain after so many months of drought.

Let's have some RAIN!!!