¡Feliz cumpleaños!

This weekend was Andy’s birthday. Because I’ve been so busy lately, I nearly accepted his wishes to do nothing. But luckily, I got an email from a friend of his and we deviously planned a picnic at the beach anyways. It started as a regular old picnic, but as the week progressed it turned into a fiesta. Andy’s friend made some pretty mean Sangria, complete with lots of boozy fruit floating around in it. There was even a piñata. Of course, it had what every birthday should have— Morning phone calls from Mum, late night text messages from siblings who nearly forgot it was your birthday, and presents...

To fit with the fiesta theme, this was the food we had.

Salsa bean dip. This was meant to be a layered dip, but the salsa and the sour cream layers mixed together, so we just mixed them up with the beans and topped with sour cream and some fiesta-ish corn, coriander and capsicum. We had this with corn chips, and everyone said it must have MSG in it because it was so addictive. Then they heard it was vegan, and it had tofu (sour cream) in it, and they were a bit surprised—but luckily it was so addictive that they kept eating.

There was a green salad which had spinach and rocket, grated carrot, raw corn, capsicum, olives, snowpea shoots, and tomato.

Andy’s favourite coriander-lime potato salad. Instead of the usual cucumber we added a yellow capsicum and some spring onions. This was another suspected MSG-dish. After everyone had finished eating, they kept sticking their forks into the bowl to steal more potatoes.

Andy and I had black bean burgers. This is basically Chickpea Cutlets but with black beans, some chilli-capsicum spread, polenta and Mexican seasoning.

For dessert... Mexican Chocolate Cake, of course! I looked around for a few recipes, but I settled on this one because I was intrigued by the use of balsamic vinegar instead of plain. Instead of using cayenne powder, I soaked a whole cayenne chilli which had been cut open in the water for the cake, so it infused some spice without being too much. However, it didn’t work well enough and the cake was more cinnamon-y than spicy. So for the topping, I made a simple ganache—1/4 cup of soy milk, a tablespoon of sugar, some cinnamon and the tiniest dash of cayenne. Bring that to the boil and then I stirred in a block of Green & Black’s 70% cocoa bar. The ganache was nice and thick, so it basically set on top of the cake but was still really easy to cut and bite through.

The cake was another winner. Everyone said first of all how good it looked, and then, after we cut into it, how tasty it was. After packing everything up, one of Andy's friends asked, 'So that cake was completely vegan?' I never understand why people are surprised when vegan food tastes good.

Happy Birthday, Andy!