Friday, May 11, 2007
Part of my mission at A Full Plate Cafe is to have a delicious, decadent, and vegan dessert every week. Chocolate Pudding Cake totally fits these requirements. Honestly, this cake tastes so rich it's hard to believe there's no fat or eggs in it. 
I doubled the original recipe and baked it in a 13X9 glass dish, but if you don't work at a restaurant or don't have a large enough family to eat this cake in a day or two, feel free to halve the recipe and bake in an 8X8.
For the Vegan Chocolate Pudding Cake you'll need:
2 c flour
4 T apple sauce
1 c water
1/4 t salt
1 & 1/3 c sugar
2 t vanilla
4 T cocoa
4 t baking powder
1 & 1/3 c brown sugar
1/2 c cocoa
3 & 1/2 c hot water
Mix the first eight ingredients together, mixture will be thick. Spread the thick batter into a 13X9 rectangular baking pan. Mix the brown sugar and 1/4 c cocoa. Sprinkle over the batter. Pour the hot water over the entire top surface of the cake. I know it looks weird, but it totally works!
Bake at 350 for about 45 or 50 minutes. You might want to put the baking dish on a cookie sheet, in case some of the pudding mixture spills over the sides. The magic of this cake is that as it bakes, the brown sugar/cocoa topping mixes with the water and sinks through the cake to form a pudding layer at the bottom. 
I like to let the cake cool for at least 30 minutes and served warm, or chill it and serve cold.
When I've made it I used 1/2 c but the cake ended up as an island surrounded by chocolate pudding so maybe it would have turned out better had I used 1/4 c?
thanks for any help! Paula xxx
When I made it, I replaced the apple sauce with canola oil (because that's all I had) and the cake layer turned out perfectly. However, the cake layer was actually quite thin and there was loads of sauce underneath. It is possible that when you wrote up the recipe you accidentally forgot to double the measurements for cake layer part of the recipe?
TO PAULA - I used 1/2c of cocoa for the sauce and it turned out well. I suspect this is a doubled-up recipe since at the start of the instruction it states that you can halve the amounts and bake in an 8x8, so when it says 1/4c later on that's probably how it was written in the original.
Many thanks,
Amber