My First Vegan Cake
I’m always excited to take on a new baking challenge and this week I decided to tackle a vegan cake with vegan buttercream icing. My cousin decided to go vegan several years ago and we were planning to celebrate her birthday so I volunteered myself to make her cake from scratch.
I used “The Best Vegan Chocolate Cake” recipe from www.noracooks.com/vegan-chocolate-cake/
I’ve never made a cake without eggs so this was going to be quite an adventure! Overall, the recipe was very easy to execute and didn’t have any weird ingredients. I’m not a fan of having to buy something that I’m only going to use once before it expires. The batter looked almost normal until the final step where you add boiling water. While I knew the purpose of the boiling water was to bloom the cocoa powder (an important step for any chocolate cake), my first reaction was how can you add that last, it will cook the eggs?! Oh wait, no eggs.
I chose to bake mine in a 9×9 pan and a ramekin to create the final product I was going for – an avocado! The 9×9 pan took about 35 minutes to bake and I regularly checked it with a toothpick to see if it was done. Don’t want a raw cake! But wait, there’s no eggs…so it doesn’t matter?
To create the icing I went a little rogue from the recipe and just combined 4 sticks of Earth Butter (one package) with 6 cups of powdered sugar and 8 tablespoons of almond milk by using the hand mixer. I don’t recommend this if you’re trying to create true white icing because it had a yellowish color to it (possibly from the almond milk).
I split the icing in half and set aside half of it for chocolate icing. The other half I divided in 3 to make the three shades of green for my avocado. The vegan icing reacted a little oddly to the coloring and ended up separating just enough to look a little gross but I was able to re-incorporate it and salvage the icing. To create the chocolate icing I just added a 1/4 cup of cocoa powder and mixed that in with the hand mixer.
I cut up my cake and let it hang in the freezer for about an hour. The crumb of the cake was very loose and I was worried that icing it would be a total disaster. Letting it sit in the freezer firmed it up enough to successfully ice it and voila! An avocado cake! (With no actual avocado in the recipe).
If I hadn’t told anyone I bet they wouldn’t have even realized this cake was vegan! If you need to make a vegan cake for yourself or a friend/family member I highly recommend this recipe from Nora Cooks.
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