Avocado Chocolate Cake

This week, I have time to relax from last week's chaos. However, it's not stopping me from having my days. And yesterday was one of them.

I have become a huge fan of using applesauce as a fat replacement in cakes. While it's fabulous, it has its limitations. Recently, I've been seeing more and more recipes that call for avocado as a fat replacer. Avocados are one of my favorite foods and I don't get them often (unless my plants ever grow and go on to produce fruit, but my research tells me that could still be a few years).

Normally, my instincts say you don't cook avocados. They turn bitter. On the other hand, these recipes seem to becoming more and more commonplace. With Kirbie's Craving's (one of my favorite food blogs) started posting all kinds of recipes, I knew I'd have to try a few, and I started with the non-original one: Avocado Chocolate Cake. You can view the recipe here.

And here's where things get crazy. Mom decided on a whim last week to rearrange the pantry and the spice cabinet. So things weren't where I expected. I had the baking soda out and was digging for baking powder when my phone rang. Telemarketer, but enough to distract me.

I had every intent of actually following this recipe to a tee. I realized, however, with about 10 minutes left in the baking time (as I was cleaning up and putting all of my ingredients away) that I didn't remember adding either the baking soda or baking powder. Too late now. That was mistake number 1.

Mistake number 2 was in frosting it. I still had half a can of frosting from the mocha cake, so I decided to try the microwave-and-pour trick. Yes, it works. Except, with the cake on a dinner plate and too much frosting, it spills over and makes a royal mess. Hence the lack of an iced photo. I was cleaning it up.

Still, the cake itself tasted good, but with the lack of the baking soda and/or baking powder, it was dense and the texture was...off. But hey, isn't that how brownies were invented?

So the lessons learned:

1. Turn off the phone.
2. I need a cake plate (or maybe I should have just done it on a cooling rack)
3. As the Mythbusters would say...Failure is always an option (and, on that note, it can still taste sweet!)

Will I have another go at this cake? Absolutely. Avocados are good for you, and the chocolate does indeed overpower the taste of them (if you're not into sweet avocados. Personally, I like them both ways).

And hopefully someday, this tree I planted last year (and at least some of the seeds I'm currently trying to sprout) will give me a glut of avocados to use for cakes like this.