A few weeks ago I went to a party for one of my closest friends’ daughters’ first birthday. Catty, my friend, was sweet enough to make Chris and I our own little vegan cupcakes and my god were they good. They were less cake-ie more moist-chocolaty-heaven. I begged her for the recipe and which you can find here.

I woke up this morning with a need to bake a cake so I pulled up the cupcake recipe and decided to use that. I got half way through and realised that it wasn’t going to work out for me as a cake batter (in fact it wouldn’t have worked out as a cupcake batter either, it was much too dry but try it and you might have different results) so I made some little changes and here is my recipe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For this you will need:
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup sunflower oil
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup rice milk
butter for greasing, I use nuttelex

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a bowl combine the wet ingredients.

I use sunflower oil in place of vegetable oil. I worry that vegetable oil contains palm oil because they don’t have to list the types of vegetable oils used in it so to be safe I just stick with sunflower oil. If I had coconut oil in the house I would have used that instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apple cider vinegar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the vanilla essence or extract.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a large mixing bowl, sift the flour and baking soda

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and sift in the cocoa powder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add in the salt and mix it all until it combines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Create a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and slowly add in the wet ingredients while stirring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So for me, following(ish) the cupcake recipe, this is how it turned out. Still much too dry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I added in a little bit of milk.

And it was still too dry.

So then I added in about ½ – ¾ of a cup of rice milk and…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TA-DA! Beautiful, yummy, cake batter!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Add in the brown sugar and stir it through.

Now some little rat in my house likes to make his morning tea and leave the sugar on the bench all day so my sugar ends up all lumpy. Hopefully your sugar is not all lumpy because it is a pain to mix in otherwise!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After about five minutes of mixing there was still a few sugar lumps but they added to the texture of the cake. Yep, they made the cake awesome. Your cake won’t be as good without those awesome sugary lumps.

Or it will be better. Either or.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I did plan on having a beautiful photo of the cake batter being poured into the cake tin. But see that bowl? That bowl there weights about 20kgs. Now I am a pretty strong little chicken, I can lift lots of things. Like 10bags of groceries at once or my hand bag. But that bowl? I can barely lift with two hands, let alone single handily while focusing my overpriced camera and trying to get any batter in the cake tin. So this is all you get. Before…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And after!

Don’t forget that the tin has to be greased. Non-stick is a lie I tell you, a LIE!

Now pop the cake in a preheated oven at 160°C for 25-30 minutes.

And then lick the bowl clean

Mmmm cake batter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is so sad that I spilt some. Oh no, must clean up this terrible mess. WITH MY TONGUE!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the cake is cooked take it out of the oven to cool and make up the icing.

You can do whatever icing you choose I decided to make this custard/icing hybrid.

My plan was to make it a layer cake and have a centre of custard and strawberries but as there wasn’t much batter the cake ended up quite small. If I wasn’t so lazy I would have made a second cake but meh… I wouldn’t be me if I did something like that.

So instead I made up the custard using packet custard from Coles (accidently vegan! Who knew that packet custard would be animal-free!). Then let it cool slightly and slowly added 1 cup of icing sugar. I wasn’t happy with the colour of the custard icing so I added 1 cup of cocoa powder and it ended up coming together amazingly. I left it to stand on the bench while the cake finished cooling and just gave it a quick whip when I was ready to ice the cake to get rid of any of the small lumps that had formed.

I chopped up some of the strawberries and placed them around the edges.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then cut up some more and placed them on the top. You can never have too many strawberries!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cake ended up so moist, stick-to-the-top-of-your-mouth amazing and the chocolate custard icing was perfect not too sweet and silky smooth. The strawberries were needed to give that extra sweet freshness. It was so good. Please make this soon. But don’t be lazy, spend the time and make it into a layer cake maybe with soya cream in the centre. Drool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Serve it with more strawberries

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And maybe some more custard!