Green Options

If your family is anything like mine, your kids will be begging for dessert every night.

The problem with desserts is that they can fill kid’s bellies with tons of sugar right before bed, and the high cost of the ingredients can break your budget.

Having a recipe for a simple, healthy dessert made from ingredients you have on hand will help meet everyone’s needs. Full of fiber and sweetened with honey, this cake recipe is nutritious, filling, and cheap to make. Kudos to my wife for creating this knock-out dessert that satisfies the sweet tooth and fits our budget.

Does anyone really need an excuse to bake a chocolate cake? I know I don’t. But it happened that I had a couple of ingredients at home that I was looking to use up. I was excited to discover a great recipe I could adapt to fit the bill.

I have an abundance of fresh mint from my herb garden. Drinking Mojitos with every meal seemed a little impractical, so I did the next best thing and combined my mint with chocolate. While scouring the internet for a basic chocolate cake recipe. I was so excited to find this great recipe from FatFree Vegan Kitchen that included an unusual ingredient: beets!

Beets are admittedly not high on my list of favorite vegetables. But a co-worker brought me some from his CSA and assumed the office vegan would know what to do with them. They’ve actually been sitting in my crisper for weeks, so I was quite happy I got to use them before they went bad. Here’s the (only slightly modified) recipe for this delicious cake, published with permission.

When I first became a vegetarian and during my stint as a vegan, I had a hard time making a good cake. My egg-free cakes always ended up dense, more like the consistency of bad brownies. Then, one year on my birthday, my friend Liz made for this delicious, airy, vegan chocolate cake. This recipe is super simple and easy to clean up. In fact, the whole thing is mixed right in the baking pan! You may balk when you see that this cake recipe includes vinegar, but I think the vinegar reacts with the baking soda to make the cake rise up and be light without the presence of eggs. Of course, organically grown ingredients are a must!

Vegan Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour an 8-inch square pan. Combine in the pan (not a separate bowl):

1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour

1 cup Sucanat or brown sugar

1/4 cup sifted unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

Editor's note: We're pleased to welcome Colleen Patrick-Goudreau to the Green Options writing team! Colleen has taught vegan cooking classes in Oakland, California, for seven years, and is a columnist for VegNews magazine, and a contributing writer for KQED radio's Perspectives program. Her first cookbook, The Joy of Vegan Baking: The Compassionate Cooks' Recipes for Traditional Treats and Sinful Sweets, will be published

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