Chocolate Rye Cake
with whipped white chocolate buttercream
I once read a party without a cake is just a meeting, and I couldn’t agree more. As many of you know, both my daughters’ birthdays are on the same day, and so there’s always been a lot of cake baking happening around May 11th. There were cakes for their school celebrations, followed by cakes for their parties—always separate parties because birthdays are a sacred day in our family. And then cakes for the actual day of their birthdays.
Last year they both decided on my Italian Easter Bread in lieu of a traditional cake. This year, they each nixed the idea of a homemade treat all together. Isabella has opted for pizza at Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn, and Virginia said she’ll look for a sweet treat while we’re in the city.
After so many years of making multiple cakes—I figure I’ve made about 60 cakes just for their birthdays, this was the first year not one was requested. Is it possible they have cake burnout? Certainly they did not inherit that from me.
Old habits die hard, and so that’s how I found myself baking this cake a few days ago. It is my birthing day, after all, and this year it falls on Mother’s Day. I’m worth celebrating, and as we’ve already established, a celebration without cake is not a celebration at all.
The nice thing about making a cake just for myself is I can go in any direction. This is a very grown up tasting chocolate cake, thanks to the addition of rye flour. It may seem like a lot of sugar for such a small cake but I promise it’s not sweet. On the contrary, the rye flour tames the sugar and adds an earthy note which I think really compliments the chocolate.
This chocolate rye cake also happens to be vegan, using flax meal instead of eggs. If you don’t want to use flax meal, or don’t have it on hand, you can swap in one egg, omit the flax meal, and use 3 tablespoons less water.
There’s lots of notes at the end of the recipe, so be sure to read them before you start baking. You can choose to serve this unfrosted with just a sprinkling of confectioners’ sugar but the whipped white chocolate buttercream is really lovely, so I strongly recommend you give it a try. —xo, j.
P.s. you’ll notice there’s no nutritional information, and that is not a mistake. Sometimes you’ve gotta just enjoy life, and leave the calorie counting for another day.
