Never bake when in a bad mood

In recent years I’ve made it a resolution not to make any new year’s resolutions – I’ve even blogged about it. But this year, as time creeps on, I have resolved to do three things: daily Yoga With Adriene, crack vegan baking and regular writing, oh, and learn Wordpress. I guess that makes it four. There are a few other ancillary ‘nice to haves’ floating around, too, like resuming the slow jogging that was curtailed by the dog tripping me up in the summer and finally getting down to my target weight, but I’ve got to be realistic. I started out with good intentions on the last of my intentions, and I’m already a third of the way through an Udemy course on Wordpress. The new January 30 days of YWA “Dedicate” is on its fifth day, and I’m keeping up, so all that’s left is some recipe research.

Never bake when you’re in a bad mood. I think I’ll make that a new rule. Whenever I have to turn out cakes in a hurry or under pressure there’s inevitably a failure. No one ever posts about their failures: overcooked, burnt offerings; cakes that refuse to rise; cakes that get stuck in the tin. I’ve had a lot of these recently. Christmas Eve, when I was worried that the Polish Poppy Seed cake dough was not rising [it did eventually], I decided to whip up a quick lemon sponge batter cake. By this time, I was getting a bit stressed and fed up. Needless to say, the cake rose too much, stuck to the sides of the non-stick tin despite copious amounts of greasing and ended up in the bin.

What did I do wrong? I’d followed a BBC recipe, which is usually a reliable source. Well, I’d not actually followed it to the letter – the recipe called for soya milk, but we happened to have only oat or almond milk in the fridge. Never mind, I thought, subbing with oat milk will be fine. Only it wasn’t. That mistake it turns out was the key. Cakes need a raising agent to rise and in this recipe this was the soya milk and white vinegar. Apparently, the vinegar reacts with enzymes in the milk to coagulate and go ‘lumpy’ (I’d ignored the absence of lumps). Soya is the only type of plant milk that has sufficient enzymes to perform this crucial task.

So, lesson learned, I decided it was time to turn my culinary attention to vegan baking in 2019 and develop a repertoire of reliable vegan cakes. My recipes collection is already full of fail-safe recipes for vegetarian cakes (i.e. egg-based) so I need to explore the alternatives. Eggs are the main difference between a vegetarian cake and a vegan cake, and what a big difference it makes. In cake baking, eggs perform three functions: they provide moisture, they bind the other ingredients together and they act as a raising agent. All that’s needed for a successful vegan cake is to find vegan substitutes for these roles.

My research revealed at least twelve different vegan egg substitutes – there’s a great pictogram on the Peta website. They range from plain old baking powder and bicarb to uber-trendy aquafaba. Some of these need to be used in combination; for example, a flax egg will usually also need baking powder/bicarb [French readers: levure chimique will work here] and also often vinegar.

When I started this new project, I had only a handful of vegan cake recipes that had never let me down: Banana Nut Muffins; Vegan Carrot Cake (OK, but tendency to break up and very sweet); Vegan Chocolate Cake (only tried this once and it was OK-ish); Vegan Cinnamon Rolls (fabulous! But not a ‘cake’); Vegan Coconut Cake (from @lovingitvegan – very reliable, have made this several times but does contain some expensive ingredients). I also had a few other dessert recipes for things like Vegan Chocolate Mousse, but what I really wanted to tackle was sponge-cake type baking.

I don’t have many cook books; I got rid of most of them when we went vegan, so when I need a new recipe I usually turn to the internet. There are some great vegan bloggers and websites out there, and among my favourites for reliable recipes are The Minimalist Baker, Loving It Vegan, Connoisseurus Veg and Vegan Richa. And when a Vegan Richa recipe for Triple Ginger Cake turned up in my Facebook feed I decided to give it a try. My main motivation was that the recipe called for molasses and I happened to have an only-very-slightly-out-of-date tin of genuine English Black Treacle in the cupboard. The ginger cake was everything that the recipe promised and more: moist, fruity, spicy and sticky. I’ve since made several more, they don’t last long in our kitchen, and it’s now become the first new addition to my vegan cake repertoire.

Triple Ginger Cake

Notes for French Friends

The Triple Ginger Cake recipe uses a flax egg (1 tbsp ground flax seeds mixed with 3 tbsp water, or milk in this case – see actual recipe for quantities). Flax seeds are easy to get hold of in France. They’re called Graine de Lin  and are available in both dark brown and golden varieties.  You can buy them en vrac in bio shops and some of the larger supermarkets that have a bio section. The cheapest flax/linseeds I have come across recently were in Action.

This is an American recipe which refers to baking soda. This is just plain old bicarbonate of soda, which you can buy in France, known as bicarbonate de soudre. It’s making a bit of a comeback for traditional cleaning so be sure to look out for food grade quality. Lidl stock it from time to time. For the baking powder and baking soda combo I did just use a sachet of Levure Chimique with great results.

Molasses are also available in France and I will give them a try once my tin of black gold has run out. Called mélasse, it’s available from bio shops, the bio aisles of large hyper markets and online. Alternatively, if you still order from the UK you could pop a genuine red and black tin into your basket, or buy a jar of Meridian organic from H&B.