This recipe came about around five years ago, on my dear friend Bryanna’s birthday. Now usually, I would bake a cake using a recipe I had already developed, but B (that’s what I call her) is vegan, so none of my recipes at the time would work. So I adapted a recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum, who is basically the queen of cake. I wanted to make B something unique, like her. We lived together in Boston for three years in college, where we bonded pretty fast. One of the first things we bonded over was coffee and sweets. Our dorm was in an old brownstone that had a Whole…