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!

Veganising - by request!

First of all I'm shocked at my own turpitude in allowing so much time to pass between posts. So I've submitted to a recent request regarding my previous post - in which I commented several times that (cake) recipes required veganising. 'But how?! How do you veganise it?'

Aha! Now I can't claim any kind of credit for these morsels of information: I learned virtually all I know (with the exception of a little trial and error) from Isa Chandra Moskowitz! So to anyone in possession of a copy of Vegan with a Vengeance or the Veganimocon, I'll be preaching to the choir, but for the rest of you, I hope some of it helps!

Ok, so replacing dairy - very straightforward, milk = soya milk, yoghurt = soya yoghurt, butter = dairy-free spread, and so forth. If you don't have any soya yoghurt, apple sauce works quite well. Other non-dairy milks can in certain circumstances be used, unless - and this is very important, I learned the hard way! - your recipe relies on the curdling of said milk, because rice, oat, almond and so forth do not curdle when vinegar or lemon juice are added! Curdled soya milk is also good in the absence of yoghurt, or if the recipe calls for buttermilk, and generally as a binder/moistener for cakes. If you want you can probably get away with using oil instead of spread, but the quantities are more difficult to get right - you need less oil than spread. And it doesn't work in any recipe that requires the creaming of butter and sugar! The best method when using oil instead or marg is the 'mix wet, mix dry and combine' strategy. If you've got a blender, chuck all the wet ingredients in it and whizz it up - the oil emulsifies very nicely.

Now the difficult part!

Eggs. The little buggers... There are several ways to replace them, but one must exercise caution when selecting the appropriate replacement for a recipe!

- the old-fashioned bicarb of soda/baking powder and vinegar method
- flax seed (linseed) powder
- soya yoghurt
- the ubiquitous banana
- silken tofu
- egg replacer (bleurgh)

I won't even mention the last, we can all do better than that and there's really no need for consuming such a vile substance. The first is tried and tested but it can be tricky to get the ratio right - some of Isa's cupcake recipes use 3/4 tsp here, 1/4 tsp there, and so on! I don't have the patience for such experimentation, but a standard cake is less vulnerable than a cupcake so a teaspoon of baking powder plus a bit of soda depending on the acid content of your cake is normally what I do - alongside a cupful or so of soya milk curdled with a teaspoon of vinegar. There's no residual flavour and if you get it right this is the best way to mimic the leavening properties of eggs - it's an old wartime technique actually, when eggs and dairy were scarce (the source of my favourite chocolate cake recipe too!).

Flax/linseed is a good one too, but it has a distinctive flavour, a sort of 'healthy' taste (which I like in general but it's not quite right for Victoria sponge, for example), so use it in strongly flavoured or oaty-type things. One tablespoon of powder mixed with three of water and left too goopify for 5 minutes equals one egg. Then just throw it in with the wet ingredients. If you can't find the powder, you can leave whole linseeds to soak in water overnight - the water will get the same goopy effect.

Soya yoghurt is good when you want a really moist cake, and doesn't leave much taste - about 4 tablespoons for an 'egg' is I think what Isa recommends. A little extra never hurts though... This method doesn't leaven though, so if you want a light, structured end result you need to combine this with the baking powder method.

Ah. bananas, what would we do without you! Those really black and squishy ones that no one else wants are the perfect thing here. I tend to use one small banana per egg. They do a grand job but bear in mind that whatever you use these in (especially if you're using more than one) will, surprise surprise, come out tasting a little banana-y. All you have to do is mash it up really well, and then add it to the wet stuff. Things with banana in also tend to brown a bit quicker so don't panic and think you've overcooked it!

Silken tofu is a slightly expensive and occasionally elusive one, but great if you want extra richness and cakeyness. Blend or mash 3 tablespoons until as smooth as humanly possible for one 'egg', then add the other wet ingredients to it and blend again.

It's always a slightly creative process, you can never be sure if it'll work perfectly, but unless you're hankering after a very specific result the chances are a cake made with any of these egg replacements will be at least servicable! Things to remember are 1) the purpose of the egg and therefore your replacer - sometimes it's just binding, like in a muffin or quick bread (which all of these achieve), sometimes it's leavening too, as in classic cake recipes like the Vicky sponge or lemon drizzle (trickier), and sometimes recipes just stick eggs in where there's clearly no need whatsoever (banana bread and biscuits being the usual culprits). The other factor is the liquid content of the recipe - replacing margarine with oil and eggs with curdled soya milk is going to leave you with a significantly thinner batter, so you might need to add more flour. You can also combine more than one method (often a good idea) if you've got, say, 4 eggs to replace and have doubts about replacing them all with just soya yoghurt or just flax seed goo.

Happy veganising... And I'm no expert but if you have any questions I will do my best to help!

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.