Cookies and Cream Cake

This is a seriously late post, but I seemingly misplaced my recipe somewhere in the Highland Park house. Things are a little slow nowadays in the pharmacy, so I had time to dig up a recipe from online. The photo credit goes to Kate, who took great pictures at the wedding. They're the only documentation I have of the cakes! My sister and I made about 7 cakes total, most of them vegan. I will be posting more cake recipes from the wedding in the future.
Anyways, my duties have been shifting to English teacher here! Lots of people want to talk to me to practice and I've taken on 2 students so far. I don't feel I'm qualified to teach although I'm perfectly willing to chat. In exchange for my time, I get fed. The ladies here cook me lots of food (vegan!) and pick up fruit for me from the market. I'm really grateful because lately I haven't been into eating meat. The hospitality here is phenomenol. Today I got coconut water and some apple-like fruit. Nick also gets food just because he's my husband and the ladies think he's cute. In fact, everyone that we have met has decided Nick is the nicest person ever. Our co-workers infer this via his mannerisms as he can't actually speak to anyone. As for me, everyone has decided I'm nuts which is about right. I get a pass because of my Vietnamese blood, though. Haha.

This recipe is from the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. I used the basic vanilla cupcake recipe and made it twice. Then I added oreos to the batter. Can you believe I could not find a single vegan vanilla oreo cake on the internet?

	1	cup almond milk
	1	tsp. apple cider vinegar
	1¼	cups all-purpose flour
	2	Tbsp. cornstarch
	¾	tsp. baking powder
	½	tsp. baking soda
	½	tsp. sea salt
	⅓	cup canola oil
	¾	cup pure cane sugar
	2	tsp. vanilla extract

10 Chocolate Newman-O's

Directions

Prepare 2-8 inch round baking pans by greasing them, lining the bottoms with parchment paper, and greasing again. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Measure out the almond milk in a liquid measuring cup. Stir in the apple cider vinegar and let sit for 5 minutes to curdle whle measuring other ingredients.
Place the Newman-O's in a large freezer bag and go to town crushing the cookies. You don't want them to turn into crumbs, more like small to medium chunks depending on what you like.
Whisk the dry ingredients together in a small mixing bowl. Mix the wet ingredients in a medium mixing bowl until uniform. Then fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until no streaks of flour remain. Do not overmix! Then fold in the crushed cookies.
Pour the batter into one of the prepared baking pan. Bake for about 20 minutes until a toothpick can be removed from the center cleanly.
While the first cake was baking, I made the batter for the second cake. I did this instead of doubling the recipe because the cake was on the smaller side so I decided to turn it into a layer cake. Bake the second cake and let both cool completely. Then remove them from the pan by turning onto a cooling rack and removing parchment paper.
While the cakes are cooling, make the frosting. There's really no exact recipe. I think I used vegan margarine (you can also use flavor neutral coconut oil), powdered sugar, vanilla, and almond milk. My sister was in charge of the frosting. We were trying to re-create that sugary Oreo filling. She just played around with the ingredients until they reached a perfect consistency.
After frosting and layering the cake, we froze them on little cardboard circles covered in aluminum foil. After 20 minutes or so, we wrapped the cake with plastic wrap and foil until the day before the wedding. It was a lot of work and without my sister I couldn't have done it!