If you’ve been reading my most recent blogs, you will know I’ve been making food-as-medicine chakra-cakes.

On the weekend I made a decision-making cake, using the colours we find in the aura of excellent decision-makers: yellow and orange.

Yellow gives us clarity, vision and inspiration. Orange helps with goal setting, motivation and enthusiasm. Another way of thinking about this is that yellow provides and stimulates a really good idea, like a light-bulb flashing on….. while orange provides the inner-child vitality energy needed to pursue the idea into reality, with all the inner child’s marvellous ability to playfully side-step obstacles and turn lemons into lemonade. Orange makes us adaptable and resilient, flexible and creative.

So this is a belly chakra, solar plexus cake!

For me this was basically an experiment in colour and flavour. I began with a pink cake mix I had used earlier to create my love potion cake, and then I added marvellous things to make this layer turn orange.

I added carrot, turmeric, marigold petals and some herbal Chen Pi…. which smells deliciously like mandarines! I think i even threw in a bit of St Johns Wort at one point! The kitchen was a bustle of slightly feverish cake-creation energy and i think I entered an altered state. Very useful for cake-making, but not helpful when you need to remember what you did afterwards. Don’t worry: I have purchased a new blank book to begin recording recipes in. BUT I can’t promise to behave myself and always write down what I do… or even repeat a previous recipe twice. Sometimes the true joy lies in creative abandon and sensible behaviour doesn’t get a look in.

Then I made the yellow/gold layer. I started from scratch, using bananas and dates as the base, then I added ginger, turmeric and yellow marigold petals. How good does that sound!

I then put my wee little cakes into the freezer to let them set and waited.

The first hint that they might taste half-decent came when my husband stuck his head in the door with a slightly amazed look on his face saying “What was in those cakes?!” My taste-tester had done his job, sneaking into the freezer and by-passing all the caramel, chocolate, mint and bilberry creations in favour of a new but strange looking orange cake….

“Oh!” I said, delighted. “How did it taste?”

“Interesting. Intriguing”, came the reply. Yes, but did they taste good?, I wanted to know. Apparently they did, because they started rapidly disappearing. A friend came over for a medicinal, naturopathic cake-potion and after we made her cake and put it in the freezer to set, we sat down to a small meal of previously-made raw vegan cakes, including the Decision-Making Cake.

This was my first taste and I have to say, I am totally in love with it! What an incredible flavour!

My friend liked it too, but it was eclipsed from the perspective of her taste-buds by my Peppermint Avocado Chocolate Cake, which didn’t surprise me given that the cake we had just made for her had a mint layer. I gave her some to take home with a strict warning: “Only have very small slices. I put too much peppermint in and it wipes you out if you’re not careful!” She said she didn’t have a sweet tooth, but I’m not sure I believe her now, because that was the sweetest one we tasted. Part of what I absolutely love about the last few cakes I’ve made is the subtlety and complexity of flavours. Sugar has never really agreed with or interested me all that much, and getting to the point where I’m integrating vegetables (like carrots and beetroot), into my vegan cake recipes, is making me very, very happy.