Vegan baking disaster

As promised, I set about baking a cake from the Sinfully Vegan book. Complete disaster. I rarely throw food away but this stuff was hopeless. I don't blame the book, not at all. I blame myself for bodging. Everybody knows you shouldn't bodge when it comes to baking - looks as if this is especially true when it comes to vegan baking. The recipe called for orange essence, didn't have any, but I had some overtired oranges, so I substituted some finely grated orange zest. It called for a massive amount of maple syrup, which almost certainly would have improved both the taste and the texture, but didn't fit in with my policy of using what I had to hand and trying not to spend too much. I used Agave nectar, languishing at the back of the cupboard, and topped it up with golden syrup. By this stage I knew I was taking some silly risks. Got blase with the mixture, whacked as much orange juice into it as I thought fit, had no choc chips so roughly chopped some dark chocolate - this has worked nicely for me in the past, chocolate is much more exciting in chunks than in chips.

Baked it for an hour or more, couldn't get it to firm up and ended up with a cake that was so dry as to be unsliceable. I even contrived to burn it a bit - and it's a long long time since I burnt a cake.

So much for cooking and blogging. No photo of this one. By the time I'd scraped it out of the tin it was looking disastrous, covering it with orange icing would not have saved it. I'd have done better to eat the chocolate and drink the freshly squeezed juice. At least I didn't spend a lot of time over it. The last time I had a disaster like this was with some cupcakes from the Babycakes book - you have to bake some apples and turn them into apple sauce with a load of maple syrup before you can even start. Took forever, cost a fortune, yielded little rubber cakes. Bah. To hell with baking, I shall go back to raw food and just eat apples.

Maybe.