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...

Days Ten and Eleven: Espresso Cake and Burrito Pie

A two-in-one blog/food bonanza!

Today was the end of a 6-day week at work for me, so I've had a lovely day off, getting up late, dashing around for last-minute ingredients (fortunately, for some reason my corner shop now sells silken tofu) and making a royal mess of my kitchen.

 For some reason, Mexican food incurs a maximum amount of mess and bowl usage. By the time I'd got this thing in the oven there was quite literally not a square inch of counter space left. It didn't help that the cake was sat on one of the hob rings (not lit, obviously), and my other half was busy frying tempura veg at the same time.

I've renamed this dish Mexican Lasagne due to its layered construction. For once I also ventured into vegan cheese territory, normally avoided like the plague, and in fact it worked rather nicely. It was even fed to a non-vegan with success. The whole thing was very delicious, despite some of my misgivings about baking avocado and pureeing salsa.

The tortillas fitted perfectly into the bottom of the dish, but the slight taper meant that by the time I got to the top the avo was poking out around the edge.

On to the cake.

Having had a slight advantage in being a day late in that I could read the other challengers' comments about this recipe first (is that cheating?!), I adjusted some of the ingredients a little to avoid over-heavy pitfalls. It was still on the solid side, but in a good hold-it-together way, rather than a lead-in-your-stomach way. I added a little baking powder, doubled the apple sauce (to which I added some Chinese brown sugar block in order to cut down on the white sugar), and increased the amount of flour by a touch to compensate. It was only as I was mixing the whole lot together that I realised this is a fat-free cake! My apple sauce wasn't smooth so there were lumps in the finished product, but that didn't matter. I did add a bit more soya milk too to get it to mix better, it looked far too gungy for my liking. Difficult to get into the tin - in my experience cake batter is normally a lot runnier. And as others have said, it didn't really taste of coffee, though I suspect it added a little je ne sais quoi.

By the time we'd finished our mains I was ready to glaze the cake, but alas hadn't read the instruction about putting it in the fridge for an hour to set! So instead I served it as warm chocolate sauce, yum. I halved the amount of margarine though because frankly it sounded a little disgusting. It wasn't. Though I'm not convinced that I'd ever use this again over a simple ganache.

 
Despite this, as you can see it all came together rather deliciously:

There was a little soya cream drizzled over too, but my picture of that step didn't come out so well. Alas though despite our guest quota there's still half a cake left in the fridge... (But not for long, I suspect)

CLF offerings of a very tasty nature

Having been galvanised into action by the challenge, I've finally got round to posting some cake that I made! I've got a big backlog, but this was the most recent batch - and IMHO some of my best ever.

Made for the Cake Liberation Front meet last month, may I present Lemon and Raspberry Sandwich-Drizzle cupcakes:

I used Isa's basic vanilla cupcake (with oil) as a blueprint, added 2 tablespoons of lemon zest (to the batter after combining) and a tablespoon of lemon juice (to the soy milk-vinegar mix - also means adding a touch more baking soda). They rose so spectacularly that I changed my original raspberry topping plan to a raspberry filling. I sliced off the tops, made a lemon drizzle mix (just lemon juice and sugar - 1 lemon, 40g sugar) which I poured over both cut sides, then spread them with a layer of delicious raspberry goo based on the pineapple cupcake topping. 1 punnet raspberries, a few spoonfuls water and lemon juice, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tbsp arrowroot, 1 tsp vanilla, mixed together and cooked until bubbling and thick, stirring all the time. A dollop of soya whipping cream on top for decoration/good measure, as I had some leftover in the fridge.

I also made a black forest gateau style batch, which was pretty much just the basic chocolate cupcake with amaretto added to the batter (couldn't find kirsch - anyone know of a source in Manchester?!), amaretto/cherry jam glaze and an amaretto whipped cream topping with a dollop of cherry jam in the middle, covered with grated chocolate. In retrospect I should have either added the jam before cooking, to sink into the middle, or at least dug a hole in the baked cakes to squish it into. But I was feeling lazy and couldn't be bothered! They were pretty good though.

Vive le cake!

This weekend was the bi-monthly meet up of the Cake Liberation Front, and as last time I had failed to bake anything, this month I determined to put my baker's hat on and get to it!

First, a little run-down of what it's all about. The CLF is based in Manchester, and is a group started by a small splinter cell of vegan bakers and cake-eaters to promote and eat vegan cake. Free cake from animal ingredients is the general idea. You don't have to be vegan to come along, just willing to eat and/or bake vegan cake! I can assure you that any doubts you may have had about the credentials of vegan sweets will be immediately be assuaged. It's held every two months at the Friends Meeting House behind Central Library, and it's £1 to get in if you bring cake, £2 if you don't. That's a pretty small price to pay for the best selection of cakes and other baked goods that you're likely to find in Manchester, not to mention that all the drinks are free! All the info you need is on the CLF website though, so I won't run on any more - let's get to the recipes.

My first creation was a variation on a tried and tested favourite, Vanilla and Chocolate Marble cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I suppose I ought not to post the recipe due to copyright and all that jazz, but frankly if you haven't got a copy of this life-enhancing book yet, you deserve to be duly tantalised until you crack and go and order it.

I'm not generally a fan of icing, so instead (normally I leave them plain but this was a special occasion) I thought up something a bit different. The cakes have quite an almondy slant to them already, so I decided on a creamy-custardy-almondy thing, being as for my next batch I would also require a custardy thing, and as I'm making it already, etc. And I also used another apparently 'patented' Isa trick (though I've been slicing the tops off cupcakes and dolloping icing in the middle since I was old enough to hold a wooden spoon - it's just that we called them fairy cakes back then) to get the custard in: digging out/slicing off a circle of cake, filling it up with as much custardy cream as possible, then popping the little hat back on top.

Ta da!

For the topping, I made up a batch of custard (recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking, but any custard recipe will do, as long as you make it quite thick), then to give it extra body and toppingyness, I mixed it together with a tub of soya whipping cream, using an electric hand mixer to make sure it was good and whippy. I split the batch (it made tons) and flavoured half just with vanilla extract, and half with some vanilla and some almond.

My second batch was rather more experimental, and requires a bit of tweaking, so I won't post a recipe just yet. Rhubarb and custard cupcakes. Yes, that's right. How have I never thought of this before? I adapted one of Isa's more fruit-based cupcakes recipes for this, but my method lacked a little something. Basically, I need it to be more rhubarby, and more custardy! Plus I stewed the rhubarb for a bit too long - I would have liked some little chunks of fruit in the cakes. And Next time I think I might push the boat out and put real vanilla seeds in the custard.

Here it is.

They'd barely touched the serving dish before they all disappeared! That's a good sign I suppose. The Vanilla and Chocolate seemed to be the winner though, many people asked who made them and said how good they were.

Also, if you're wondering about the baking parchment 'cases' - I only did it because I'd run out of cupcake cases, but they look quite good! I just cut some baking parchment into squares and then gently smushed and folded them into the tray. They did get in a way a bit when dolloping the batter in, and more than one became a bit black and burnt around the top where I'd removed rogue splodges!

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!

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...

To-cook list...

A list of recipes I've been salivating over but haven't got round to trying out yet!

Blackberry and apple crumble cake (also requires veganising, more fun for me!).

Banana walnut cake with date-sweetened chocolate frosting (sugar free, yay, but needs veganising).

Just this minute noticed another yummy sounding confection on that same site that had passed me by somehow - carob brownies.

Some version of this Thai coconut soup.

Urid Dhal with feungreek - I love fenugreek, and now it's growing in my garden there'll be nowt to stop me!

Chocolate coconut pudding.

This one's for a cold grey day! Spelt macaroni with cashew cheese.

Chinese dumplings a la Vegan Dad - he never fails!

This one sounds so exciting that it's probably going to be my next dinner party/celebration meal recipe. Tofu, sesame, spinach and miso napoleons.

I've been googling shortcrust pastry recipes like there's no tomorrow since my new-found success with it - and found all kinds of potential deliciousness! Spinach and mushroom quiche, sausage rolls (obviously to be filled with vegan sausages/some vegetable-based treat instead of pork), pesto pastry wheels (again filling to be transformed into cruelty-free goodness), and (om nom nom, really shouldn't but you know you want to) treacle tart. I might even attempt to de-sugar it a bit with dates and that sort of thing.

That should keep me going for a while!

What's for dinner?

Tonight, I had the magic of roasted cauliflower. If you've never roasted a cauli before, do it immediately.

Cut the cauli into bite-size florets, put them in a roasting dish, add a pinch of salt and drizzle liberally with olive oil. This is really all you need to do, but if you really want a taste sensation, add some chopped almonds or hazlenuts (or pine nuts, if you suddenly win he lottery), some garlic (I use lots because I like big chunks of roasted garlic in my food. I should probably seek help for my addiction), and a few spices - tonight I used a dash of nutmeg, a sprinkle of ground coriander, and a smattering of paprika. Mix together and whack them in the oven for about half an hour, or until the edges start to brown.

Once the cauli was done, I sprinkled on some lemon juice and left it to cool while sorting out some tasty cous coust complete my splendiferous repast. I admit, I can't quite manage yet to thoroughly enjoy the taste of cous cous alone - it's probably some fundamental failing as a vegan - so I cheated and mixed a teaspoon of bouillon powder in with the grains before adding the hot water, and a few sprigs of fresh rosemary for good measure. A few chopped cherry tomatoes later and my culinary delight was all ready.

Sound delicious? I can assure you it was.

Now for the really fun part. Because cake is the one thing that can motivate me to get organised, I managed to put together a batch of cake batter in the time the cauli was in the oven, seamlessly transferring the batter-filled tin into the oven as I removed the tray of cauli. This is my brilliant totally guilt-free sugar-free cake (sounds boring but I promise it's great), veganised from the Vegetarian Society's Good Food recipe book. The pages containing this recipe are totally ruined.

Apple and Date cake:

225g self-raising flour (or if like me your a cake snob and can't bring yourself to purchase generic self-raising pap, plain flour of any variety, plus teaspoon of baking powder and a bit of salt)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp lemon juice
150ml soy yogurt
2 blackened bananas, mashed to a nice egg-replacing goo
100ml vegetable oil
225g apples, cored and diced (I totally failed to weigh mine but I used two - the recipe says Bramley, last time I used Discovery with good results, this time I've got one Bramley and one Cox)
100g chopped dates

Preheat your oven to 350F and grease an 8" cake tin. Sift your dry ingredients into a big bowl. Whisk together your wet ingredients and add to the flour. Beat together (it will be pretty thick, but don't worry) and fold in the fruit. There's barely enough batter to cover the fruit, in my experience, but don't let this bother you! It's like complaining that there's too much jam in your roly poly.

Once you've somehow scooped, wedged, spread and mashed your mixture into the cake tin, bake it for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Cool in the tin for 5 mins, then turn out onto a cooling rack (might seem unnecessary but I really really recommend it - no one wants a soggy cake). The book says serve cold but what do they know?! Warm with vegan ice cream or custard, or on its own, is marvellous, as is cold with soy yogurt. And probably with vegan ice cream or custard too. I eat this cake for breakfast as well. Ok, so that's nothing new, I'll eat any cake available for breakfast, but I don't feel guilty about eating this cake for breakfast! Tomorrow I may even experiment with spreading it with jam.

The first announcement

I am vegan. There, I said it out loud. (Sort of.)

And I love being vegan. I've been operating covertly for the last two months, partly out of embarrassment, partly out of fear of judgment, and partly out of experimentation. I was veggie for a few months prior to this, but if you'd asked me at Christmas whether I'd ever go vegan I'd have laughed at you.

So how and wherefore did this happen? I slowly stopped eating meat after moving into a veggie household (well, mostly - two hardcore veggies and one occasional meat eater). The less I ate it, the less I wanted to, until eventually I realised I just couldn't bring myself to do it anymore. During this time I also started seeing a vegan, and had more contact with a heavily vegan community. So many people asked me when I told them about my exciting, ethical new lover, if I'd go vegan, and I vehemently denied this possibility, hence feeling slightly embarrassed. Plus my family weren't exactly supportive when I told them I was giving up meat, let alone the whole animal shebang.

Still, I never though I'd be able to give up cheese. Plus, yannow, I hate raw tahini. And that's obligatory eating for vegans. But as I cut down (due to the company I kept, and in my new quest to rid myself of excessive bad habits - also renouncing caffeine, cigs and later alcohol) I found, just like with the meat, that the less I ate the less I craved it. Where once it would have been the first step before consuming a meal to smother it with cheese, I reached a point where I didn't even think about doing that unless asked, and even then I wasn't over-enthusiastic. My suspicions about the addictive qualities of cheese are confirmed. I've never liked milk, cream or butter, and soy yogurt is basically the same as dairy yogurt.

At the same time, I was beginning to look into the values and details of veganism - why people did it, the nutritional facts and so on - and the more I found out the more I felt that I couldn't be vegetarian without being vegan. (This site had a big impact - the philosophy of living with the planet rather than pillaging it struck me.) It's all the same big factory-animal-killing-exploitation-unhealthy pie. The dairy industry creates just as many, if not more, problems as the meat industry. We'll discuss this later.

So I decided to give it a go and see if I could do it, and if so, how I felt about it. I'd already stopped eating eggs and honey at this point so it was pretty rare I actively ate large chunks of animal product. Soon I was checking packaging for lactose and whey powder like any seasoned vegan. The only thing I really found tricky i not being able to just eat whatever is sitting around - biscuits at work being the main problem (unless some kind soul has bought hob nobs instead of custard creams :D). Though I'm definitely better off not eating them!

Since discovering the magic of vegan cakes I've pretty much been sold. It wasn't so much a desperate animal rights issue that spurred me to do it as a knowledge that I was questioning the right way to live, being healthier and greener, and eschewing the general horrors of commercial farming. Though since making the transition the reasons seem more and more clear to me. Sometimes I sit and wonder that everybody isn't vegan. The physical and mental clarity is liberating, cooking is a new and marvellous challenge, and a new vista of previously unknown ingredients and techniques has opened up.