Vegan chocolate cake

There’s a lot of chatter about vegan lifestyle choices right now. More and more people are choosing not to eat any animal products. I think even more are choosing to eat less meat, and more vegetarian or vegan foods. Eating out if you are vegan or vegetarian is certainly easier now. Personally I think I am more in the ‘eat more veg, eat less meat’ camp. I really like dairy products – yogurt, cheese and milk. The vegan alternatives I have tried just don’t really compare I’m afraid. However there are vegetarians and vegans in the family and I love vegetables so I do often cook vegetarian or vegan meals.

I bought this book recently, and it’s great! It has some very interesting and delicious meals that don’t require outlandish ingredients ( well one or two have things that you might be pushed to find in your average supermarket). Kellie Anderson aka Food to Glow is my favourite food/ recipe blogger. There are lots of vegetarian and vegan recipes on her website.

I wanted to make a birthday cake for my son’s girlfriend – they are mainly vegan. I have never made a vegan cake, but I have looked at other recipes which involved fake egg replacements and other weird stuff that you can only get at health food shops! But the one in the book above was all things you would find in your store cupboard or a supermarket.

Having said that I did end up at two different supermarkets – Lidl for the chocolate – the best dark chocolate ever, and an amazing price. And Waitrose for the oat milk, because I couldn’t find that in Lidl.

I made the recipe exactly as stated. Even that enormous amount of sugar (400g). And 450ml water. Weird! But the cakes worked perfectly. However. The ganache. I think there is a mistake in the quantities, because 300ml oat milk is a lot, and when I mixed it with the melted chocolate is was like a sauce not an icing. Even after an hour in the fridge it was still pouring out over the cake, not spreadable.

It tasted fantastic however, and I would definitely make it again. It had a good fudgy texture (400g sugar 😉) and a lovely chocolatey flavour. Everyone liked it, and my son said it was a better recipe than the one he had used in the past. Next time I would add only a little milk to the melted chocolate for the ganache – perhaps it was supposed to be 30ml?! I’m looking forward to cooking more recipes from the book, spiced aubergine linguine sounds good…