Vegan chocolate layer cake

By Tracy

I made this today to welcome in John and John A. who were cutting the grass all day, to get it down before deadline (fire safety). 6 steep acres with many large and small rocks. It's mostly wild oats, with some wild barley (apparently harder to cut than the oats).

Anyway, because the cake turned out a little lopsided, Tim and I had to sample it first to make it look more symmetrical...




Recipe

For cake:
2 cups SR flour
1 scant cup sugar
1.25 cups soy milk
4 dessertspoons cocoa
3 tsp egg replacer (made up with about 2 dsp water)
1 tsp vanilla essence

Sift flour, sugar and cocoa into large bowl. Mix egg replacer with the water till fluffy, add to bowl; add oil and vanilla essence, and use beater to add soy milk little by little until the consistency is of a good thick batter.

Pour into greased (Nuttelexed!) and floured cake tin, bake at 180 deg C for 45-50 min, depending on your oven.

Icing/filling
2 cups icing sugar
3 dessertspoons cocoa
1 dessertspoon Nuttelex or other vegan margarine
splash of soy milk as needed

Sift icing sugar and cocoa into bowl, fold together briefly. Add the Nuttelex, and little by little add small amounts of soy (very little) as you beat (electric beater does this more easily). If you're too hasty or heavy with the soy milk, the icing will be runny.

To make up: Halve cake horizontally with large knife; fill with half icing and put halves together, then ice the outside. While the icing is still unset, you can grate vegan chocolate over it as I did this time.

Vegan chocolate cream tart

By Tracy

Today seems to be vegan cooking day. Every day (for us) is vegan cooking day -- but this one more than usual.

You need:

Vegan shortcrust pastry base* -- prebake at approx 180 deg C until golden, pricking with fork and flattening as needed if it puffs up or bubbles (takes about 10 min). Let it cool.

When the base is cool, make up the following to pour into it and chill:

5 dessertspoons cornflour (sifted!)
5-6 dessertspoons sugar
3-4 dessertspoons cocoa (sifted!)
2.5 cups soy milk

You proceed as if making custard -- that is, take two small-to-medium saucepans, and in one, mix the dry ingredients with a little of the soy milk. In the other, heat the soy milk with the vanilla essence till it nearly boils, then take it off the hotplate and pour it into the dry-mix saucepan, stirring the whole time. Put this now-full saucepan onto the hotplate and, still stirring to prevent lumps forming, bring it up to the boil. Remove from heat when it has thickened like any custard. Pour immediately into the pastry shell.

(If you don't stir evenly and continuously, it will burn or form lumps, or both! But it's actually very easy.)

Leave the whole tart to cool, first outside the fridge and then inside if it needs longer. If you put it in the fridge too soon, condensation can make it a little soggy and water droplets spoil the top (but it still tastes good).

When it's completely cool, make a mock cream as follows: whip four dessertspoons of Nuttelex (vegan margarine) with four dessertspoons of sifted icing sugar, and pipe around the inside rim of the pastry shell.

Let the cream piping set in the fridge, and then it's ready to eat.

It tastes luxurious but is very inexpensive, and easy to make from ingredients you could already have in the cupboard, etc. -- needs nothing fancy.

My pictured effort is a little rough because the pastry was slightly too small for the pie dish, and I made it very fast while preparing dinner! -- but even a ragged-edge tart tastes okay...

All recipes detailed in this blog are my own; when I use someone else's, for copyright reasons, I indicate the books where you can find them.

*Borg's and most varieties of Pampas frozen pastry sheets are vegan: see the Vegan Network of Victoria. They also list many other ready-made products that are suitable for vegans, and they carefully update their pages. You can also make shortcrust pastry from scratch, using Nuttelex and flour. Anchor Lion Pastry Mix (dry, in a box -- you add water) contains no animal fat and they confirm it is vegan too. So there are many easy options for vegan pastry.

Vegan "cheese" scones

By Tracy

Here's the recipe, adapted from ordinary scone-making:

2 cups SR flour
2 tsp vegan margarine (Nuttelex in this case)
3 quarters of a cup of soy milk
approx half cup grated Cheezly*

Rub margarine into flour until mix resembles breadcrumbs, then add half the grated vegan cheese and stir through. Mix in the soy milk, reserving a tiny amount for glazing if you want browned tops. Halfway through baking, use the remaining grated vegan cheese to top the scones**. Bake about ten to fifteen minutes at 190 deg C.

*I used Edam-style Cheezly; there are other vegan cheeses. Not all of them melt. If you can't get a commercially made vegan cheese, you can give food a similar flavour by using nutritional yeast (Engevita, for example, or Healtheries Savoury Yeast), though this won't melt on top and can't be grated; it's a flaky or powdery substance, depending which sort you use).

**Cheezly melts fast, so I add it as topping halfway through -- same when making pizzas.

My first-ever vegan sponge cake

By Tracy

<--BEFORE

Rose Elliott is a vegan-recipe genius.

I've never tried making a vegan sponge cake before, and many people think it can't be done, because traditional non-vegan sponges are so egg-reliant.

But since Rose Elliot's Vegan Feasts, as I mentioned before, was so good for the vegan cream recipe, I decided to try out her formula for this too. (My first impression of her book, years ago, was that it was a bit simple and obvious -- but I had overlooked her gift for "veganizing" traditional items. A friend of ours in England used to make a really popular chocolate cake that she had adapted from a Rose Elliot book by doubling the cocoa!)

The trick is in using a small amount of soy flour mixed in with the ordinary wheat flour. The cake also contains orange juice, not enough to give it an orange flavour but enough to add colour.

I overfilled the cake (not that anyone complained) with strawberry jam and vegan cream, so it's a bit messy, but the taste and texture met with all-round approval.

<-- AFTER (& there is even less of it now...)

Cheer-you-up cakes

By Tracy

Tim (6) has a cold... and a theory that cakes "cheer you up" when you are unwell. (A theory that is not in any way self-serving, of course.)



My icing spirals are a little unsteady, but they still taste okay. There are now only two cakes left, in the time since the photo was taken!

If you want to make cakes like these without dairy or eggs, you can simply substitute with non-dairy plant milks (I used soy, cup for cup) and any of various "egg replacers" -- I used Orgran's "No Egg", because it never fails and you can keep it in the cupboard for ages (it's powdered, made of potato starch basically). Other things you can use instead of egg:

Half a mashed banana (always works, but your cake will have a banana-ish tang, which you may or may not want!)
Mashed soft tofu (neutral taste), about 4tbsp
Apple sauce (works beautifully to make a moist chocolate cake, for example), about 3 tbsp
Ground flax (have never used this myself, but How It All Vegan says about 3 tbsp)

and another one I've never used, but it sounds good -- Wakeman and Baskerville's The Vegan Cookbook also suggests 4 tbsp of pureed mango...

Instead of butter, you can use a vegan margarine (Nuttelex, in Australia), or light vegetable oil, which I find makes a good texture (canola or sunflower oil -- a quarter cup per two cups of flour in the cake/s). Sometimes, when using applesauce, you don't even need extra fat content at all, because the cake is moist without it. You can also use coconut milk, but it's not super-healthy.

Vegan quiche

By Tracy

After a sweltering last week of 2008, this morning was the first one cool enough to do some cooking. This vegan quiche was still hot when the photo was taken. The filling is based on whizzed or mashed silken tofu, which sets firm when baked; you can add any vegetables. You just prebake a pastry shell for about ten minutes, then add the filling and bake for another twenty or twenty-five, at about 180 deg C.

I have made this quiche in the past when we had armsful of silverbeet from John's veganic garden. But today it's spinach, mushroom, onion and a scattering of corn kernels. There's a pinch of curry powder in it too, for extra flavouring.

Vegan "Pirate" Party, Part Two

By Tracy

Sequel to previous post, showing Vegan Gingerbread Pirates



















and Vegan Choc-Vanilla Pirate Ship, no weapons on board, port and starboard view...

Getting it down to the school was interesting, especially on a hot day, but we made it.

(The cake is not only vegan but free of artificial colourings.)