My first cake recipe veganisation

After last week’s successful Sticky Ginger Cake I made two more, and a Vegan Chocolate and Ginger version from the same site, too. Vegan Richa is one of my favourite vegan bloggers, and a go-to for reliable cake recipes. However, I decided that it was time to have a go at veganising (or customising) some of my own recipe collection. I was taught to bake by my mother who was a fantastic cake-maker and stalwart of her local church garden fete and Cats’ Protection coffee mornings. Most of my recipes have been inherited from those days, along with her tried-and-tested techniques, like weighing the eggs for sponge cake and using the same quantities of sugar, butter and flour and creaming butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. I wonder what she would have made of vegan baking? Time to find out.

I decided to start with a small tray-bake type cake. It’s one that brings back very fond memories of caravanning in the beautiful Forest of Dean, sitting out under the awning after a long walk with a cup of tea in a green melamine mug dating back to the 1950s and the smell of damp bracken and warm grass. My mother’s Date and Walnut Squares were a great fete favourite too, and I knew that OH would devour them if I could manage to recreate the crunchy outside, soft inside texture.

My mother would only cook in pounds and ounces, she had no time for metric and everything was weighed on an old-fashioned set of Salter balance scales (I’ve still got them on the dresser). Some time ago I’d converted the recipe to metric, but nowadays I actually prefer to cook in US cup sizes. It makes measuring ingredients so quick and easy, especially using my trusty plastic cup measure that came free with a bag of dog food! So, I placed the cup measure on my scales and noted down the quantities.

The only ingredient that I needed to substitute to make the recipe vegan was the egg. The original called for just one egg, and as I’d had great success recently with flax eggs I decided to sub in one flax egg made up of one tablespoon of flax meal and three tablespoons of water. I mixed these and left to one side while I mixed the remaining ingredients. As the original recipe used good old-fashioned English self-raising flour I needed to add some raising agent to my French Bien Vu farine de ménage. I noticed that usually Vegan Richa’s recipes use proportions of 1½  tsp baking powder/ ¼ tsp baking soda to 1 ½ cups of flour. I’ve successfully replaced this with an 11 g (2 tsp) sachet of levure chimique, so using about the same proportions I decided to add 1 tsp of levure chimique to 1 cup of flour. The butter I decided to sub with oil – I used colza (rapeseed oil) in this version, although I plan to try again with coconut oil just to see if this improves the mix at all as it did not meld fully with the other ingredients when warming.

The whole mix can be created in a saucepan. Just add the oil, sugar, chopped dates and black treacle, warm through until well mixed, then stir in the flour, nuts and fax egg. Mix well and pour into a square brownie tin. The batter should be stiff, and you’ll need to spread it out to the corners with a spatula. The scrapings from the saucepan brought back childhood memories of ‘licking the spoon’. Just 25 to 30 minutes in the oven at 180 and it was perfectly cooked. Following Mum’s instructions to the letter, I sliced it in the tin and left to cool completely. We did sample it the same day, but as Mum always told me, it tasted much better the next day when the flavours had started to develop. I think she’d have approved.

Vegan date and nut squares

Vegan date and nut squares

1 cup plain flour

1 tsp levure chimique (baking powder)

½ cup brown sugar

¼ cup chopped walnuts

¼ cup chopped dates

1 dessertspoon black treacle (or golden syrup)

1 flax egg made with 1 tbsp flax meal and 3 tbsp water

60 ml vegetable oil

·         Put sugar, treacle, dates and oil in a saucepan, warm gently until all melted and   well-mixed.

·         Mix the flour and raising agent, and stir into wet mix in saucepan

·         Add nuts and flax egg, mix well – the dough is quite stiff

·         Pour into lined square brownie tin (6 x 6), spread mix out and smooth to fill   corners

·         Bake at 180^oC for about 25 minutes, until golden brown

·         Cut into squares in the tin while still warm and allow to cool fully in the tin

·         Best eaten the next day – if you can resist!