Vegan Cake Making

Last night in response to there  being only 1 tiny piece of Christmas cake left I made 2 quick ones, one for Master Shoestring and one for Mr Shoestring, Mr Shoestring can't have sugar, Master Shoestring can and prefers sugar to cake sweetened with carob syrup, which is what I use for Mr Shoestring's treats.

I made a vegan citrus drizzle cake for Master Shoestring who can't eat eggs or dairy and a Date and Ginger one for Mr Shoestring.

The vegan sponge cake recipe is easy and can easily be adapted for many different flavours, so yesterday I made an orange flavoured cake by including some grated rind from tangerines and sprinkling tangerine juice and sugar on top.

The basic recipe is :- 2 cups self raising flour, 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of oil, flavouring of choice, 1 cup of water.

Mix well together and place in a greased 9 in pan and bake at 180C for 40 minutes or until a knife comes out clean. Then sprinkle juice and sugar on top as a glaze.

Master Shoestring ate 2 pieces before bedtime ! Cakes like this don't keep well but there is no problem with that in this house !

The Date and Ginger recipe is from Rose Elliot's Vegan Feasts cookbook but I adapt the recipe to replace the sugar with carob syrup, the replacement is half the amount of syrup in place of the whole amount of sugar. I just weigh out the syrup straight into the mixing bowl with the bowl on a kitchen scale. Since you are replacing sugar with something more liquid you also have to adjust the liquid you add to the final mixture. I also use sodium free baking powder which I order specially from some lovely people in the USA.

Apart from the 'they get stale' quickly we find that vegan cakes are just as nice as other ones and are much cheaper to bake.

So my challenge for today is :- Have you baked a vegan cake ?