My first daring baker's challenge

This is my first DB challenge and for various reasons, I decided to go vegan on this one. This month we had to make a Dobos Torte, the absolutely divine sponge cake layers divided by chocolate buttercream and filled with nuts. The origin of this torte is also quite interesting, you can read all about it here.
The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

For my version, I used an eggless sponge cake recipe from the lovely Sunita's blog

Sponge cake
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups of whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 cup of brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
6 tbsp of canola oil
1tsp vanilla essence
1 cup of water
a pinch of salt

Method

Preheat the oven to 350F.
I cut out two parchment sheets each about 8 inches diameter and laid them out on two sheet pans.
In a bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder.
In another bowl, whisk oil, water and vanilla essence. Add this mixture to the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon (there is no need to over do here)
Tip this mixture onto the parchment paper and spread evenly (to get a nice thin sheet, mine was anything but evenly spread!)
Bake for about 20 minutes or until the edges turn brown.
Once out of the oven, cool it completely and using a 2 inch cookie cutter, cut the sheet into mini circles.

Vegan Chocolate Buttercream (I got help on this one from here)

Ingredients
1/2 cup earth balance, natural shortening (softened)
1 3/4 cup light brown sugar (powdered)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 oz chocolate
about 4-5 tbsp almond milk

Method

Melt the chocolate in the microwave (be careful not to overheat the chocolate, the man who was helping me did this and trust me burnt chocolate does not smell good at all!)
Mix shortening with the sugar, until it is creamy. Now add the chocolate, milk, and vanilla extract. Whisk until smooth and creamy.

Now spread the buttercream on to each of the sponge sheet layer (my mini-torte had 3 to 4 layers and I could make about 5 tortes from the two 8 inch rounds). Spread it on the outside too and garnish with whatever you like, I used toasted hazelnuts.

I also tried making caramel but that turned out to be a bit of a disaster, not because of the consistency or anything but because I could not stand the lemon flavor in the caramel so I made one mini-torte for myself without the caramel.

Judgement

It was a really moist cake with a yummy yet not-so-buttery buttercream layers. There is nothing better in this world than chocolate and hazelnut...so you give me that and I am good to go!