burgers i have known

we had a visitor for a couple of weeks this february/march and wanted to make something special to celebrate his arrival. since his last name is burgerman, we naturally wanted to make some special fancy burgers, but in a cruel twist of luck, we discovered he is a vegetarian. maybe his vegetarianism is borne out of a deep concern with the over-commercialized meat industry, or the growing negative effects raising cattle has on our environment, but it could also be fear of not being able to fully live up to the name "burgerman". being a vegetarian just seems easier, i guess.

with a lack of traditional options to choose from, we knew this was the right time to attempt the "BURGERCAKE". friends, i deeply, deeply, regret not showing this to you sooner. it is the pride and joy of this blog and was truly the best burger i have known. (jon, you're a close second!)


after doing loads of online research on burgercakes, we settled on the following items to represent the traditional burger ingredients:

bun: yellow cake, 2 large layers (one bigger than the other)
sesame seeds: puffed rice- rice krispies would have been fine, but since our co-op doesn't carry scary GM food, we had to settle for the hippie variety.
meat: chocolate cake, we only used one round for this, and cut it in half with dental floss. also, carefully cut along the edges of the cake to create the rough, meat-y, look.
mayo: white icing, from a can. i didn't see any other burgercakes with mayo, but grace is from the south, so that means mayo on everything. i'm happy to oblige, because mayo is damn good.
ketchup + mustard: dyed white icing. we used gel dye from wilton. the colors were very rich, but we did use quite a bit of red for the ketchup.
lettuce: dessicated coconut dyed with a bit of green food coloring- i think it's an amazing resemblance!
cheese: if you know me, you know i think a burger without cheese is worst than no burger at all, which is why this burgercake has large slices of mango sandwiched between the two faux meat patties.
there was also quite a bit of chocolate frosting hidden between the layers, because, well, why not?


here is my cheeseburger CD case beside the burgercake so you'll have an idea of scale, i would say it was about 1:4. also, i'd tell you how much it was, but since it was a gift of sorts, it would be a little uncouth. what i can tell you is that the amount of sheer pleasure i got at opening the fridge to this mega-burger was worth at least 10 times the cost.