Hello!
Today is my husband’s birthday. Yay! He’s 27 today.
We don’t usually celebrate very big. He’ll actually be going to work tonight like always.
But one thing that I always do is to make him a special Birthday Bowl. This dessert was actually invented by mistake, but he loved it, so it became a special treat.
Early on in our marriage, I was experimenting with different plant-based cooking techniques. One of these ideas was to substitute applesauce for oil in baked goods. I had tried this before, and it had worked fine, so I tried substituting in a boxed cake mix. The problem, that I didn’t realize at the time, was that the cake mix I used called for a lot of oil. As I was using applesauce, the cake turned out way too moist and didn’t hold together at all. It was barely cooked through, and some of this may very well have been user error.
The “cake” did taste good, though, and I couldn’t stand the thought of throwing it out, so I went ahead and crumbled it all up. Then I got two tubs of whipped cream out and dumped the cake crumbles in. I also through in some chocolate chips for good measure. Then I folded it all together in the bowl.
When my husband asked what it was, I told him it was a mistake, and he took one bite and loved it. Ever since then, I make it every year for his birthday.
I usually bake the cake part the night before so it has time to cool, but this doesn’t really have to be done.
TDLR: Bake a boxed yellow cake but substitute all the oil for applesauce. When it’s done (it’ll have a weirdly moist consistency), crumble the cake up and fold together with 16(ish) oz whipped cream and 11(ish) oz chocolate chips.
This dessert bowl is not visually attractive at all. There’s some sexy food out there. This isn’t one of them. But, apparently, it tastes super good. Please enjoy if you make it.
Frugal Treehugger 