Girl Eats Food - Ube Cake

This recipe is for all of you emotionally and physically constipated young adults who, like all my ex-boyfriends, still subsist on a 12-year-old's diet of Lunchables and HotPockets.

by Joanna Fuertes Knight

August 10, 2011, 12:00am

This recipe is for all of you emotionally and physically constipated young adults who, like all my ex-boyfriends, still subsist on a 12-year-old's diet of Lunchables and HotPockets.

The ube is a bright purple yam. It is worshiped in the Philippines. While Filipino cuisine is delicious, they’re kind of anti-fiber Nazis over there, with all the mains being meat with a side of meat. So if your bowels are screaming because you're slack about getting your five-a-day, this special cake will get you loose and regular before any horror stories occur. Like, I heard there was a big chunk cut out of Jamie’s School Dinners where the kids who lived solely off Iceland Foods party snacks got so constipated they vomited shit? I may have just made that up, but it’s still a lesson to us all.

Perfect this method of hiding the healthy under several pounds of sugar and fat, and you'll be closer to the day you and your housemates can look back and laugh at the time they found you giving yourself a Nescafé enema in the shower.

Ube Cake

This recipe requires some frantic wrist action and is a little more complicated than the others, but I feel like we’ve been on quite an emotional journey already. It’s time to take the skill level to second base, am I right?

Ingredients

1 - cup of grated ube yam
3 - cups of self-raising flour
1 - tsp of baking powder
Two thirds - cup of milk
Half - cup of butter
2 - cups of caster sugar
4 - eggs
4 - tbsps of canola oil
Half - tsp of vanilla extract

And for the frosting…
1 - blob of Ube
Half - cup of butter
1 tsp - of vanilla extract
3 - heaped cups of icing sugar
A little milk (eyeball it)

Step 1.

The purple magic, available from all unfriendly Asian supermarkets.

Step 2.

So, grab bowl one, and sieve all your dry ingredients into it.

Step 3.

Bowl two is for the ube, milk, and vanilla extract. Mix that shit till it's malleable purple slurry.

Step 4.

In bowl three, you need to beat off your butter and sugar until it's firm, then at the last minute chuck in the eggs and oil till you have a mix of yellow spooge. (That's spooge as opposed to slurry, the differences are subtle, but with time you'll grasp them.)

Step 5.

OK, if the bowl situation isn’t looking like this you fucked up. I don't want to get too Choose Your Own Adventure, but for the failures among us Step 6 is go grab the Nescafé out of your flatmate's cupboard and remember to lock the bathroom door this time.

Step 6.

Still with us? Good. Gradually alternate your dry mix and your yellow spooge into the purple slurry until you end up with this.

Step 7.

Slop into a greased-up tin and bake at 350f for 40 minutes, or whenever the stabby knife cake-testing trick says it’s cooked.

Step 8.

While your cake is baking, dump all the frosting ingredients into a bowl and beat off again. Then throw in even more scrumptious ube.

Step 9.

I totally wanted it to look like a huge novelty cupcake with a cavernous flange on top. This is definitely what you’re aiming for, rather than something that's level and evenly cooked.

Step 10.