Chocolate Avocado Cake

It's time for the Secret Recipe Club once again! (Last month, in spite of my blogging break, I made Chocolate Coconut Oat Bars.)

This month my assigned blogger was Six Kilos of Pumpkin. Emily Jane is a university student in Australia. She moved away from home "to be able to study," and now she's learning how to cook on her own. She doesn't post too often, but when she does the quick synopses of her life are cute and remind me of my own college days.

I decided to pick this recipe for Chocolate Avocado Cake to attempt because:

• It looked like something my family would eat
• Emily Jane made her own tweaks to it
• And the recipe wasn't in metric!

I actually went back through the train of who made this cake. I believe it was created by Think Write Eat, then made by Joy the Baker, then Not Quite Nigella, and THEN Six Kilos of Pumpkin. And now me!

I went back and read each of those posts, taking tips from all of them. Joy the Baker and Not Quite Nigella actually made avocado buttercream for their cakes (Joy liked it; Nigella did not). I wasn't feeling brave enough for that, so I decided to create a blackberry cream cheese frosting with the massive amounts of blackberries the kids and I picked at Crabtree Farms.

The cake is actually vegan; my frosting is not. So if you want to keep it vegan, you can always try the avocado buttercream. 

The cake is fudgy and rich and I thought it went very well with the cream cheese frosting. If you have kids with an egg allergy, this would be a great recipe for a birthday cake!

(Vegan) Chocolate Avocado Cake with (UnVegan) Vanilla Blackberry Cream Cheese Frosting

Cake
3 cups white whole wheat (or AP) flour
6 T dark cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 avocado, mashed
2 cups water
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp white vinegar
1 cup turbinado sugar (can sub regular sugar or sucanat)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease two 8-inch cake pans.

In one bowl, whisk together flour, cocoa powder, salt, and baking powder. In a large bowl, mix oil, avocado, water, vinegar, and vanilla. Stir in sugar. This will seem like a big watery mess; that's OK.

Add dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, combining until smooth. Pour into cake pans. I always whack my pans flat on the counter to release air bubbles, then make a shallow well in the middle by pushing batter to the outsides of the pan. This helps the cakes not to be as domed.

Bake 30 minutes. Cool 10 minutes in pans; then remove from pans and cool completely on a wire rack.

Frosting
4 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup butter, softened
2 to 3 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup blackberries, crushed (if I did this again, I would probably strain the blackberries through a fine-mesh strainer to try to remove seeds)

Beat together cream cheese and butter with a mixer until smooth. Add powdered sugar one cup at a time (until it's as sweet as you prefer). Add blackberries and vanilla and continue beating until well-combined.

Frost cake with frosting; garnish with additional blackberries if desired.

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