Easy vegan vanilla slice

By Tracy


This one is simple: a no-bake (stove-top & fridge), veganised vanilla slice.

Ingredients:

Packet of plain square vegan crackers
(e.g. Jacob's cream crackers)

Vegan custard made up as follows:
4 tbsp custard powder (Bird's and Orgran are vegan and have no artificial colourings)
2 tbsp sugar
1 pint (about 568 ml) plant milk (I used soy).
(Basically it's an ordinary vegan custard but made with double measure of powder, so that it's thicker)

A cup or so of icing sugar. You can either mix it with passionfruit pulp & juice to the right, spreadable consistency, or use a little plant milk plus a drop of lemon extract -- something slightly tangy or acidic to offset the thickness of the filling.


Method:

Place one layer of crackers in the base of a deep-sided rectangular tray. You may have to bevel the corners to make them fit; you can see I also used some thinner strips at the edges. On a pyrex dish, I didn't need to grease the base.

Make up your vegan custard to the thick consistency you see in the picture:

Spoon the custard as evenly as you can over the base. You have to act quickly or it will get too firm:

Place the next layer of crackers over the top of the custard and press down to get it as even as you can. It doesn't matter if your "paving" is slightly bumpy because these are the lines you will cut along to serve, anyway:

Quickly mix up your icing and spread it over the top layer of crackers. It doesn't matter if the icing is quite wet, as the crackers will soften by absorbing some of the moisture from below and above.




Place in fridge to set and chill. The longer you can leave it, the better the crackers will soften. Using the crackers is a lower-fat approach than using pastry (and no baking involved), and you virtually can't taste the difference.

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.