Active Life Cooking

Week #9: Keeping up Motivation Offshore + Vegan Mocha Cake Recipe

I’ll just start out with that this week was hard….really hard…but I’ve come out on the other end, no worse for the wear (I think…)! I was offshore until Wednesday, but luckily got home just in time for track practice. However, that required the most of my miles this week to be logged on the trusty rig treadmill. After track practice and dinner, I decided (like my normal crazy self) to bake a cake for a colleague who was leaving us for another company. So, I baked a “Vegan” Mocha Cake (the cake itself was vegan, but not the buttercream which is easy enough to “veganize”). Read on to hear about the highs and lows of this week and for my decadent cake recipe (which by the way, is NOT healthy).

Saturday, the first day of my training week marked my 4th day on the offshore drilling rig and we had just started drilling the first well I ever lead the geologic planning for! It was an amazing experience on that Friday, seeing the casing and drill bit hit the seafloor. However, I wasn’t going to let that great experience get in the way of my training schedule. That day I was scheduled for a 6 mile run…with drilling in my future that day, I decided to get a jump start on my day and ran before the morning call, which started at 7:30am. That meant getting going by 6:30am to accomplish the task! I awoke at 6:15am and was down in the rig gym at approximately 6:35am. This was going to be a close call…

My strategy for the run was to do intervals of very fast running with slower intervals to allow my heart rate to catch up with me…and to pace myself to get upstairs for the 7:30am conference call to Houston. It was close, but I was walking into the room the moment they decided to get started reporting the previous day’s activities. Success! The rest of that day of drilling went on well and we completed the task at hand in time for me to get some shut-eye during the overnight hours (rigs DO operate 24 hours a day, which doesn’t guarantee that your specific task will fall during daylight hours).

Speaking of shut-eye…part of the reason this week was so hard for me was directly related to getting enough sleep. Offshore rigs are interesting places. You get to meet people from all walks of life and are all placed in the same small quarters in the middle of the ocean together for weeks at time. These quarters are similar to a college dormitory, but stinkier and a bit more finicky (not to mention the food is much worse, more on that later). For example, normally each room houses 1-4 people and has it’s own toilet and shower. The toilets are similar to the ones you see on airplanes, suction the waste to a centralized depository (which I thankfully didn’t have the opportunity to visit). That’s all and good, when they work. The toilet my roommate and I shared (a female engineer working with cementing the well) decided to break on my first day, not to be fixed until the night before I left. When the toilet actually was fixed, they forgot to turn the cold water valve back on, requiring us to take scorching hot showers with little water pressure.

That wasn’t the only issue with our room. Our room was located near the “company man’s” office, where there is a lot of foot traffic and voice noise from the surrounding offices (that again, work 24/7). To complicate matters, we were also located directly beneath where they stack the casing for the well. It’s interesting to be awoken by the noise/vibration of a long piece of pipe coming through your ceiling! Well, not really through the ceiling, but when you are sleep deprived from the noise/vibration of the clunking off and on for a week, it seems like it’s hitting you in the head…

The next day, Sunday, was supposed to be a rest day for me. However, there was little work for me to do on the well except getting oriented with offshore drilling that I decided to do a quick run anyway. The only downtime activities to do on the rig appear to be surf the internet/eat/sleep/read/watch tv/work out. So, I normally opt for the working out option. The television channel selection in the rooms is quite limited despite the 60 channels of offerings, as 33 of those 60 channels is live feed of various cameras on the rig, including the ROV (remotely operated vehicle) on the wellhead/seafloor. However, this day I decided to listen to my body and take it easy by not working out. Hopefully I did my body some good healing!

I knew I was going to be busy on Monday, so I decided to get my workout over early in the day. I was busy most of the day, not getting finished with my job until 1:30am (after getting up at 5:15am to run). It was a decent run, a bit tired, but at that point, what was worse, restless sleep or running in hopes to get better sleep when the opportunity arise to sleep? That day I had a decision to make to either fly back to land on Tuesday or stay until Wednesday to ensure my task was complete. Really wanting to ensure I saw the task to completion, I signed up for the Wednesday flight…

Tuesday, I decided to get a longer run in once my task was complete. So, early that morning I got my run in and showered and got on with my last full day on the rig! I got a bit done, visited the guys in the ROV office (unfortunately didn’t get the opportunity to fly the ROV) and tied up loose ends on the rig.

Bright and early Wednesday morning, I was ready to leave after a ~9 day visit! It was a productive visit overall and I learned a lot, but I was also worn out from life on the rig. Wednesday was filled with travel, but I did return to Houston with enough time to go to track practice with Team in Training, get a good dinner at Ziggy’s Healthy Grill and even baked a cake and prepared icing for the cake! Very productive, but wasn’t able to get into work until 9am on Thursday to finish icing the cake for my colleague and to get a bit extra shut-eye. Also, I was unable to stay at work for more than a couple of hours, as I was still dead tired and hadn’t started my laundry that had piled up for 2 weeks!

I unfortunately was too beat to complete my workout on Thursday, but I think I’ll be ok, it was only my first missed workout in 9 weeks of training…I think I’ll survive, but still feel really bad for not accomplishing my goal of doing all of the scheduled workouts.

So, with that, here is the Cliff Notes version of my training this week…

Saturday – Stef: 6 miles on rig; Mark: 6 miles with Team in Training

Sunday – Both: rest

Monday – Stef: easy 20 minutes (2.21 mi); Mark: easy 20 min with Sasha

Tuesday – Stef: 3.6 miles; Mark: walk with Sasha

Wednesday – Stef: Track Practice (1.5 mi warm-up; 4xoverpass “hill; total = 4.38 mi); Mark: rest (he twisted his knee on Tuesday and was told by the Dr. to take 2 days off)

Thursday – both: rest/walk with Sasha

Friday – Stef: quick 1.5 mile run to Kroger; Mark: rest

Weekly Total: Stef – 17.69 mi

As I noted, I also was able to bake a cake for a colleague leaving for another company this week. I had little time to prepare, so I decided to bake something “quick and easy”. I found this vegan chocolate cake on One Perfect Bite and was inspired to make this cake as it was quick and easy! I paired this cake with a coffee “buttercream” icing found on the Pioneer Woman’s website. Though the icing isn’t vegan by nature, you can substitute vegan butter for the non-vegan butter to “veganize” the entire cake.

Vegan Mocha Cake:

Cake (modified from One Perfect Bite):

• 1.5 cups All Purpose Flour (I used King Arthur Brand)
• 1.5 cups Whole Wheat Pastry Flour (for some extra fiber)
• 0.5 cup Dutch Process Cocoa Powder (I used Penzey’s)
• scant 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tbsp espresso powder
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 2 tsp white vinegar
• 1 cup canola oil
• 2 tsp vanilla extract (I used 1 tsp double strength)
• 0.5 tsp almond extract
• 2 cups cold water
• 2 oz melted dark chocolate (I used 60% Ghiradelli squares)

Coffee Icing (modified from The Pioneer Woman):

• 1.5 sticks of unsalted butter (I know Pioneer Woman likes Salted butter, but I’m extremely sensitive to salt)
• 16 oz powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp espresso powder
• 0.25 tsp almond extract
• Milk, as needed to get creaminess to icing (I used ~0.25 cups Skim Milk)

Mix dry ingredients in large mixing bowl. Combine wet ingredients into 4 cup measuring cup (this makes it a one bowl cake). Add wet to dry ingredients and mix/beat for ~2 minutes or until well combined and no clumps are visible (it will be a runny batter). Pour into two buttered/parchment lined 9″ cake pans and bake @ 350F for ~30 min or until slight crumbs appear on toothpick (may take longer or shorter depending on your oven).

Allow cake to cool completely before assembling cake.

As cake is cooling, prepare the icing…

Take 1.5 sticks of softened butter and add 16 oz of powdered sugar/espresso powder mix in parts, ensuring each part is creamed before adding the next. Once all dry ingredients are combined, add extract and milk until icing is of your desired consistency.

When cake is thoroughly cooled, ice top of one layer of cake and layer second layer on top of icing. Ice second layer using spatula. Use remaining icing to bring icing along the sides of the cake and decorate as desired.

This was my first experience using “traditional” icing on a cake, so it was an interesting adventure in icing! It came out ok, tasted great, but could have looked more professional…

One co-worker decided it looked like a medieval torture device…another said it looked like a studded collar…what says you?

I wish Stuart the best of luck in his new job and hope he appreciated the sleep deprived creation I made for his send-off!

One last picture of the “torture device”…

Again, not pretty, but tasted darn good…the coffee icing complimented the moist chocolate cake quite well!

Stay tuned next week for another update and hopefully another tasty recipe!