Lovely vegan ideas for luscious lemon cake and scrumptious scones

The quintessential lemon drizzle cake is a much-requested favourite from the cake stall at Twilight Open Day events. As my repertoire of vegan baking continues to build, I was keen to track down a reliable recipe for this perennial top-performer. If you’re planning to try out one of these recipes, you need to be careful of the pricing of lemons in French supermarkets. There’s a tendency to price individual fruits like limes and lemons by the kilo, at shocking rates, too. I once paid €1.36 for one lime! The four-packs of unwaxed lemons seem to be the best value, or often you can pick up a net of Spanish lemons in Grand Frais for a couple of euro.

Lemon drizzle cake

It was high time to add a lemon drizzle cake to the new vegan recipe store. My go-to for great cake recipes is Vegan Richa and I was not disappointed. There’s no refined sugar in the recipe - sweetness comes from the half cup of maple syrup. As with many vegan cake recipes the process is so much simpler than traditional cakes - no need to cream butter and sugar, or worry about eggs curdling the mix. Just mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl, mix the wet in a jug and add wet to dry. Hey presto! Mix thoroughly to a thick batter, into a tin, into the oven and forty minutes or so later, a lovely light, luscious lemon cake.

If I were making this for a charity sale then I’d make up a simple glaze from sucre glacé and warm water and drizzle this across the top. I’d probably also swap out the maple syrup for its cheaper vegan alternative agave syrup, though it does give a delicate maple flavour to the sponge.

Luscious Lemon Cake

The greatest success of the baking week - scones

There was about half a cup of dried fruit left over from last week’s Krentenbollen, so rather than it disappear in ‘snacking’ I was inspired to have a go at making scones. I must admit that in pre-vegan days baking scones was always a bit hit-and-miss. Sometimes they’d turn out more like rock cakes than scones, other times they barely managed to rise off the baking sheet. And all this despite following my Mum’s personal, Good Housekeeping-style recipe.

There are vegan scone recipes aplenty on the internet. I based these scones on a recipe from LovingItVegan, but with a few tweaks. Although the recipe listed soya or plant milk and lemon juice, it was an all-in-one type mix. Since I discovered the technique of souring soya milk with lemon juice to make buttermilk in the apple muffins I’ve been experimenting further with this useful egg replacer and decided to use this method here. Next, remembering my mum’s advice that scones always needed plenty of baking powder, I used one-and-a-half sachets of levure chimique (3 teaspoons baking powder). This was particularly important as I wasn’t using self-raising flour, just plain old cheapo T55. My final tweak was to throw in a couple of handfuls of dried fruit.

I can honestly say that these were the best scones I have ever made. They went down well with the chief taster, too. Scones are usually best eaten just cooled from the oven, but even a few days after baking these were still entirely edible. I shared the photo to some Facebook baking groups, including some non-vegan pages, and I was delighted to receive several requests to share the recipe. Hopefully, little-by-little a few people may become more open to the possibilities of vegan baking.

Vegan scones

Scrumptious scones

3 cups plain flour

1/2  cup of vegan spread

1 ½ sachets (3 tsp) levure chimique (baking powder)

4 tablespoons white sugar

¾ cup of soya milk (must be soya)

2 tablespoons lemon juice

½ cup dried fruit

Method:

Mix lemon juice and soya milk in a jug and set aside to curdle. Mix flour and levure in a bowl, then rub in the vegan spread with fingertips until the mix is like breadcrumbs (you can also do this in a food processor). Stir in sugar and dried fruit. Pour in the jug of ‘buttermilk’ and mix well. Turn out onto floured worktop and knead lightly. Flatten with palm to about 2 cm. Use a round cutter (I used 3”) to cut scone shapes, place on greased baking sheet. Bake at 190c for about 20 minutes and cool on wire rack. Best eaten on the day of baking.

Tip: if you find yourself inundated with lemons - maybe you’ve been lucky enough to score a €1 gaspi box full in Lidl as I did last year - then you can halve and freeze them, or as I did, squeeze all the juice and freeze it in an icecube tray. Each compartment is holds about 7.5 ml so you can just take out as many lemon cubes as you need in future.