Bentovention: Vegan MoFo 2 - Power Star Cake, Recipe, Vegan Makeup Review

Hello all! Here, as promised, is a picture of my daughter's 12th birthday cake. It's a vegan lemon sponge cake with lemon marmalade filling and lemon flavoured icing. It was really moist and tasty. The shape is a Super Mario Power Star, which was nice and easy to make (unlike Triceratops cakes). I made one rectangular sponge and after cutting out roughly, a smallish circular section from one half of the cake, the other leftover parts easily made the points.

The lemon sponge is easily my second favourite cake flavour, with a strong strawberry flavoured cake ranking first place (also my son's favourite). I was a little lax with my last post about the Triceratops cake by not posting a nice, simple vegan cake recipe for you. So here goes. The following ingredients make up a single large square sponge that can be cut into 'brownies' or made into a decorated cake. Alternatively, the same amount of mixture will make two smaller round layers for a rich, moist tea time cake with a bit of frosting on the top.

Miloko's Vegan Cake Recipe

1kg of self raising flour of your choice (gluten free flour may require extra fluid to mix)
500g of sugar (I actually use any type I fancy, sometimes brown sugar is good for chocolate or coffee cake).
500g of vegan spread (such as Pure spread)
2 teaspoons of baking powder
Rice/soya/oat milk in enough quantity to make the mix as sloppy as soft peanut butter.

Mix it all very well, until your peanut butter consistency is achieved, then flavour it with anything you like. I suggest:

Strawberry oil/essence and pink vegetable based colouring
Lemon oil/essence
orange blossom oil
cocoa powder
coffee
almond oil

Bake it at 170 degrees for between 15-25 minutes, until a knife inserted into it comes out clean. Try to catch it just as the centre is baked, to retain as much moisture as possible.

And that's all there is to it. This cake recipe is one I've come up with myself after realising that all of those hard to come by or often untasty vegan substitutes for eggs just aren't necessary for a delicious cake. The texture will be very much like a moist brownie or muffin, which is how I like my cake, but isn't to everyone's liking. I hope that this ultra simple recipe reaches a few people that love it as much as I do.

Below the Bentovintage banner is a Vegan makeup review for you as an added extra to the appreciation of food. So you can have your cake and look fabulous eating it. Enjoy!

I don't own a lot of makeup because I prefer quite simple makeup routines for daily wear and I find that a few classic colours and makeup items can be mixed and matched to good effect for any occasion. I do however absolutely LOVE a particular makeup blog called Funny Face's Place. I love Lillian's vibrant sense of style and find her to be one of the prettiest makeup bloggers I've encountered, with an absolutely adorable personality that shines through in her posts and video tutorials. Take a look at her blog and find out for yourself.

As part of my love of all things vintage 1920-1940 I've been wearing a bright red lipstick every day for the past few months. It's a great, classic lip colour, and it fits in nicely with the bright hair flowers and generally 1940s air I've been cultivating through the Summer months. Now that Autumn has hit though, I've been falling in love with the more muted shades of autumnal leaves and the high street fashion colours that go hand in hand with them. With that in mind I needed to find myself a new lip shade that would fit well with my few new Autumn wardrobe items in plum, pumpkin, navy, cream, rusts and browns.

Here it is. My new vegan friendly lip duo of Barry M's lip liner in No.6 and New York Color's lipstick in Plum Rum.

Here's a look at how it works. My routine is to line the lip in my preferred shape for the day (this is a natural lip but I love a heart shape or a full cupid's bow, too), then fill in the whole lip with the liner. Next I apply a first coat of lipstick and dab it gently. Then a second coat of lipstick and another gentle dab. I put the lipstick on in this way at 6am this morning and it lasted with only a slight wear to the colour, through breakfast, lunch and a cup of coffee, only needing to be touched up by about 2pm. A very good quality product!

I am particularly pleased to discover as a vegan makeup shopper, that the vegan brands I can find on my high street (NYC and Barry M in particular) are super-affordable in comparison to non-vegan makeup brands, and as proven by this week's thorough field test, fantastic quality for that low price, too. Good stuff.