People's Kitchen cakes

I did a bit of cooking and baking over the last few days, for the new People's Kitchen in Glossop.

Recipes have now been requested and as I winged it fairly heavily I'm now going to have to do some serious thinking! Two were intrepid new cake experiments based on the old faithful chocolate cake (I made one of these too, just in case) - added to which, I made them all gluten-free (substituted Doves gluten-free flour blend), which I've never attempted before.

*Note on quantities - this makes a massive amount of batter so I recommend halving it for a normal 8"/9" cake tin. In which case also reduce the baking time by 10 minutes or so.

Ginger, lemon and treacle cake:

Ingredients
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
3-4 tsp ginger depending on personal taste
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda (a bit more if you're using gluten-free flour)
1 tsp salt

3/4 cup oil
2 tbsp vinegar (any kind will do)
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 cups cold water
4 tbsp treacle or molasses

Lemon drizzle:
140g caster sugar
juice of 2 lemons

Method
Preheat your oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6, and thoroughly grease and flour your tin.

Sift your dry ingredients (except the sugar) together in one bowl and mix them up, then mix up your wet ingredients, and the sugar, in a separate bowl. I recommend heating up the treacle or molasses before spooning it in, or you'll be stirring for hours! Add the wet to the dry and mix until just combined, pour it into your tin and bake for 30-40 minutes or until the top is springy and a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean.

While the cake is baking, mix your lemon drizzle ingredients together.

As soon as it comes out of the oven, stab it all over with a fork and spoon the drizzle on as evenly as you can. Leave it to cool in the tin. I warn you this cake was very difficult to remove from the tin! The drizzle made the middle of the cake so gooey that it has to be scooped out. I've therefore reduced the quantity of drizzle slightly in the hope of remedying this problem.

Pear and almond crumble cake:

Ingredients

3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 tsp baking soda (a bit more if you're using gluten-free flour)
1 tsp salt
(1/2 cup ground almonds would also be an excellent addition if you're feeling flush)

3/4 cup oil
2 tbsp vinegar (any kind will do)
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp almond essence
2 cups cold water

Pear filling:
Large quantity of firm-ish pears (10-15? depending on how full you want your cake tin), cored and roughly chopped
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp almond essence
1 tbsp treacle or molasses
1 tbsp cornflour
water

Crumble topping:
2 cups flour (this part is very rough as I just eyeballed it, but if you've ever made a crumble topping before you know how it goes!)
1 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
pinch salt
oil

Mix the cake ingredients as above and pour the batter into your greased and floured tin. Par-bake the cake at 200C for about 20 minutes, so that a bit of a crust has formed on top.

While the cake is in, stir together the treacle with a cupful of water to loosen it up, and then add the cornflour, stirring until smooth. Mix this in with the pears, then add the cinnamon and almond essence. When everything is coated, add some more water if needed (you want the liquid to be 1/4-1/3 of the way up the pears) and then bring to a gentle boil, stirring occasionally. Don't overcook it - the pears should still be relatively intact, and the liquid just verging on viscous.

Make your crumble topping - throw all the dry stuff into a bowl and mix it together, then add a glug of oil and stir. Add more oil bit by bit, stirring it in, until the mixture gets clumpy. Then get your hands in the bowl and rub it between your fingertips until it becomes breadcrumby. If it's too sticky just add more flour - too dry, add more oil. Taste it to check the sweetness level too if you want. (I actually would have used half oats and half flour for this stage, but then I remembered oats have gluten in them! But you can put whatever your please in your crumble topping.)

Whip your half-baked cake out of the oven and, working quickly so you don't lose too much heat, scoop your pear filling on top. It will be impossible to spread so distribute it evenly with a spoon as you go. Then tip out the crumble on top of this (be careful of the hot tin!), spread it out and smush it down.

The tin will be heavy now so be careful getting the whole shebang back into the oven! From this point I baked it for probably 40-50 minutes. It will be difficult to tell if it is done because the soft pears throw the knife test off! But by the time the crumble starts to colour you should be in business. Let it cool in the tin.

I hope they work...

Breakfast magic

I have many a post to catch up on here, but right now I'm consuming a delicious chocolatey breakfast (for the second morning in a row) that needs documenting! I got a massive bag of bananas from Hulme market for £1 on Monday (end of day stuff), which has prompted this spell of semi-decadence. I've made this concoction before, but never for breakfast, and it was surprisingly sustaining. Normally even a big bowl of porridge and raisins leaves me starving by 12 (lunch is at 1 at work), but yesterday I wasn't really much more than peckish by the time lunch came round.

So, breakfast chocolate-peanut-banana milkshake. You'll need a blender! Throw in some soya milk, some oats (do these first so the oats can soak while you assemble the rest of the ingredients), a sliced banana, one teaspoon of unsweetened cocoa powder, a drizzle of maple syrup or other liquid sweetener of your choice, a small handful of raisins and a spoonful of peanut butter. Blend. Adjust quantities of chocolate/banana/peanut to taste. (Yesterday I got carried away with the chocolate and had to add another banana to balance it out...)

Yummy yummy yummy! And not altogether unhealthy either.

Old-fashioned recipe for old-fashioned chocolate cake

In a terrible act of complacency, I have totally overlooked writing up my most-used, fallback, failsafe vegan chocolate cake recipe. The closest I've come is this coffee and walnut-ish variation. I don't remember where I found it, though there are many versions of this method online - it's sometimes called 'three hole' chocolate cake for some bizarre reason. It's a wartime recipe, when eggs and dairy were rationed and most people were effectively eating vegan. And it certainly does make for effective eating! No one will ever know it's vegan - I was serving this happily to omnivores before I was even vegan myself. You can also modify the recipe to incorporate any number of other flavours, using the appropriate essence along with or instead of the vanilla, adding nuts, dried fruit, orange rind, and so on to the batter; and of course adding/filling the cake with whatever topping you like. My favourite thing to do with it is split it horizontally and fill it with raspberry jam, then sprinkle the top with icing sugar or spread it with a thin layer of chocolate ganache.

A word of warning though: the quantities given here make for an astounding quantity of batter - enough to fill my round 12" tin, which serves about 20 people quite large pieces of cake. For a normal sized tin, go for two-thirds to a half of the amount. Or make sure you have two cake tins handy!

Ingredients
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
6 tbsp cocoa powder (this is the most important part - even if you use supermarket basics brand for the rest, use the best cocoa you can find, Dutch processed if possible - I normally go for Equal Exchange cocoa powder or similar)
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

3/4 cup oil
2 tbsp vinegar (any kind will do, even balsamic if that's all you have!)
2 tsp vanilla essence
2 cups cold water

Method
This is so easy it's silly. First make sure you're oven is on, set to 200C/400F/gas mark 6, and that you have greased and floured your cake tin(s). Flouring is a cunning and important step that is often overlooked in baking recipes, but will prevent your cake from adhering permanently to the bottom of the tin.

Get two mixing bowls, at least one of which needs to be pretty sizeable. Combine your dry ingredients (except the sugar) in one bowl - don't worry about sifting, just use a whisk to mix it all together and remove any big lumps before adding the liquid, but make sure you do mix them up thoroughly because you want to minimise mixing of the batter once it's wet (overmixing causes the gluten strands to develop and makes for tough cake). Combine all your wet ingredients, and the sugar, in the other bowl. Now mix the wet ingredients into the dry. If you only have one big bowl, combine the dry ingredients first, then add the wet directly into the mix. Stir with a spoon or a hand-held whisk (no need for electric gadgetry here) until the dry stuff has been fully incorporated. Pour into your tin(s) and bake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes*, or until the cake is springy on top and a knife/skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Once you've removed the cake from the oven, leave it to cool in the tin - if you try to take it out too soon, I cannot vouch for its integrity. Once it's cool it will be much firmer and the structure more coherent.

*A note on baking times: this will vary depending on the amount of batter you have made, and the size and shape of your baking tins. The more surface area the cake has, the quicker it will cook - so with my large, shallow 12" pan 30 mins is fine, but if I were to put the same quantity of batter into a smaller but deeper tin (which I have done in the past), it would take much longer - up to an hour. Less batter in a tin of similar proportions probably will take less time. I'm sure there are complicated mathematical formulae to work out this sort of thing accurately, but a quick peek in the oven is a perfectly acceptable way to do it! As long as you don't peek too early on in baking process (leave at least 15-20 mins before checking), it shouldn't cause the cake to sink.

I should also add a note on 'cups' as a measurement. They are fairly well known in the UK now, with the recent influx of cross-pond baking recipes, but to clear up any confusion for the staunchly British, a cup is a volume-based measure, equivalent to 284ml. So find a receptacle that measures roughly this amount of liquid, and use this to measure out your ingredients. Or if you're feeling pedantic, find an online conversion calculator to ascertain the exact weight/measurement of each substance contained within a cup, or portion of a cup.

Happy caking!

Finding an old friend

Me!

I've just been re-discovering old blog posts that I made a few years ago - some are completely cringeworthy, but others are surprisingly witty and compelling. Funny how I can have written these things, and have almost no memory of them. There are a whole host from pre-vegan days too, which are interesting to read. I feel I may have lost some kind of acerbicity (is that a word?) and lucid enthusiasm. Here it is, if anyone is in the slightest bit interested: http://sophym.livejournal.com

The reason I started this trawl through the annals was to check whether or not I had actually ever written up the chocolate cake I am always referring to. It seems not, and this is a massive oversight. I've noticed that there are many posts in which I mention the super-easy never-fail chocolate cake, as though everyone knows it already (doubtless because it is so familiar to me) - but I've never posted the recipe!

I must rectify this situation immediately. Even if I'm wrong and it is there hidden away somewhere I just can't see for looking, it's not really possible to post too many recipes for chocolate cake, is it.

Accidentally great cake

On settling into our new abode in Manchester, I decided that a high priority was to test the baking power of the oven.

A plan formed in my head over the course of the morning - my never-fail chocolate cake mixed with walnuts, coffee essence and a ganache topping made with half dark, half white vegan chocolate.

The usual cake recipe makes and extraordinary quantity, so I made 2/3 this time (mostly to avoid having an excess of cake in the flat). I also used no caf instead of just water as we don't have coffee, but if you wanted a fully caffeinated cake it's probably best to use real coffee! I thought the no caf lent a nice malty quality to the finished product though. It may be impossible to ever actually recreate the flavour of the cake as I made it as my coffee extract is a year out of date, but I'm pretty sure that if your coffee extract tastes of coffee, the cake will still be delicious.

Not-quite-coffee, chocolate and walnut cake

2 cups wholemeal spelt flour
2 tbsp cornflour (to compensate for the denseness of the whole spelt flour)
1 1/3 cups sugar (I used 1 cup raw cane, 1/3 muscovado)
3 tbsp cocoa (more if you want more chocolatey and less coffee-y)
1 rounded tsp baking soda
1 scant tsp salt
1/2 cup oil
1 1/3 tbsp vinegar
1 and a bit tsp vanilla
1 and a bit tsp coffee extract (more or less to taste)
1 1/3 cups no caf (or water, or coffee)
1/2 cups crushed walnuts

Preheat oven to 200/mark 5. Grease and flour the tin. As usual, mix wet ingredients, mix dry ingredients, then stir until just combined before adding the walnuts. Now, my book says bake 30 minutes and that's usually been fine, but i used a deeper tin and an uinknown oven, and I have to leave it in for aaaages this time. So start with 30 mins and add more in 5/10 minute increments if necessary. You can test doneness by sticking a sharp implement into the middle - if it comes out with goo on it, it's not done.

Ganache topping

1/4 cup soya milk
30g chocolate - normally just dark but this time I used half vegan white and half dark for a mellower taste (as a result I omitted any further sweetner due to the huge amount of sugar in the white choc, but if you're going with all dark, add 2 tbsp maple syrup or agave)

Heat the milk until it's just boiling, then remove from the heat and stir in the chocolate. Keep stirring until the mixture is smooth and delicious-looking.

Make sure the cake is completely cool before covering it or the topping will get too runny. If you're feeling particularly decadent, the cake can probably stand a double quantity of ganache! Don't forget to add some walnuts to the top before it sets completely.

Also, we don't have a fridge yet so I couldn't do this, you might want to consider splitting the cake horizontally and adding some whipped soya cream in the middle...