It has taken me a while to make a vegan cake recipe worth sharing. What I needed was to learn about what the ingredients actually do in combination with each other to make cake, and also to ignore recipes which try to replicate the ‘egginess’ of traditional cake.
Anyway, for my vegan daughter’s 16th birthday, I think I finally cracked it. She had specific requirements: One layer, chocolate and ginger, not too sweet, not too much icing.
I headed online to do research and found The Best Vegan Chocolate Cake by Kate on Veggie Desserts. Now that was very much on the right lines, but not quite what was required, so I amended it. The result was a soft, moist cake, which was really easy to make and tastes fabulous.
Vegan Chocolate Ginger Cake
Ingredients
300ml soya milk
1 tbsp lemon juice
150g vegan margarine (Pure Sunflower Spread)
3 tbsp maple syrup
275g self raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
150g caster sugar
4 tbsp cocoa powder
50g chopped Bourneville chocolate (from a 180g bar – the rest goes in the icing)
50g crystallised ginger finely chopped (I used Whitworths Fiery Ginger)
100g bar of plain chocolate
60ml Oatly single cream
Oven: Gas mark 4/180 degrees C, warm a large oven proof mixing bowl in the oven
8 inch/22cm round springform cake tin, lined with baking parchment (or use a cake tin liner)
Method
- Stir the lemon juice into the soya milk and put to one side. It will thicken up almost immediately.
- Rescue the mixing bowl from the pre-heating oven (use oven gloves!) and put the margarine and syrup into the bowl and mix thoroughly. I have discovered that melting the margarine makes things very oily. It’s naturally quite a soft spread anyway, so all it needs is needs warming up just a little, so it’s a nice soft consistency.
- Sieve the flour, cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda into the same bowl and add the sugar, chopped chocolate and ginger (I chopped them together in my food processor.)
- Add the lemon/soya milk mixture to the bowl and stir everything up QUICKLY. Speed is of the essence here; as soon as the acid in the lemon juice meets the raising agents in the flour and the bicarb it will react – this is what makes the cake fluffy.
- So put it into the lined cake tin and get it into the oven asap!
- Bake at gas mark 4 (180 degrees C, 350 F) for 45 to 50 minutes, until a cake tester or skewer poked into the middle comes out clean.
- Cool for a few minutes in the tin then turn out onto a cooling rack and peel off the baking paper or cake tin liner.
Icing
- Melt the rest of the Bourneville chocolate (about 113g) along with 100g bar of plain chocolate (this could be Bourneville, but I used a 74% plain chocolate bar).
- Add 60ml Oatly single cream.
- Leave to cool in the fridge until it has thickened up, then whisk with electric beaters until it goes a bit lighter and is fluffy and fudgey.
- Dollop it on top of the cooled cake and spread it out with a knife.
- Enjoy your cake!