Vegan Chocolate Baby Shower Cake

 

One of my friends has just had her second baby, another boy, the day before her own birthday. We - my group of school friends - all went to see her a couple of weeks ago for a combined birthday and baby shower celebration.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go until the last minute as we already had two other things on that weekend - a relative visiting and my father in law’s birthday - but we were able to arrange things so that we were able to go.

Making cakes for celebrations when we get together is usually my thing so I couldn’t turn up empty handed, but I didn’t have the confidence I would have enough time in between taking care of my five month old to make anything really elaborate so I decided to keep it simple.

One of my friends is vegan and I remembered seeing a recipe for a vegan chocolate cake in Tea with Bea, the recipe book from the Bea's of Bloomsbury café.

I'm also publishing this recipe on my new parenting blog, Mini Moo Life - if you're interested in all things baby, parenting and family related, hop on over and have a look! Or follow the blog on Twitter @MiniMoo_Life or Instagram @mini_moo_life.


I used white wine vinegar instead of the red wine vinegar given in the recipe as I had a bottle in the cupboard already (and white wine vinegar is often used in vegan baking so I knew it would be ok). I made a simple vegan buttercream from Pure dairy-free spread, icing sugar and cocoa powder.

The guideline cooking time was given as 40-55 minutes with an extra 5-10 minutes if necessary, which is quite a large range. I found the cake needed the full 65 minutes, in fact I think I left it in even for slightly longer and it was still really light and moist.

I bought a gold cake pick with the word 'baby' from my local party store to go in the top and sprinkled the top with edible gold lustre dust. The cake tasted really good - if you are new to vegan baking and need reassuring, this cake tastes even better than a lot of non-vegan chocolate cakes!

Here's what I did
To make one 8 or 9 inch cake you need:

275g plain flour
100g cocoa powder
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
450ml soya milk
2 tsp red wine vinegar (I used white wine vinegar)
320g caster sugar
320ml sunflower oil (I used vegetable oil)
2 tbsp. vanilla extract

For the buttercream
200g vegan spread eg Pure
400g icing sugar

Here's what I did

Preheat oven to 160C. Mix the flour, cocoa powder, bicarb of soda, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.

In another bowl, mix the soya milk, vinegar, sugar, oil and vanilla, whisking until combined.

Fold into the dry ingredients and mix well.

Grease an 8 or 9 inch cake tin and spoon in the prepared mixture and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour (I've increased the cooking time slightly from the original recipe). Test the middle with a skewer and bake for another 5-10 minutes if needed.

Allow to cool in the tin then turn out onto a baking rack.

When cool, make the buttercream - cream together the marg and icing sugar. Carefully slice the cake through the middle and spread with the buttercream.

You can spread buttercream over the top and around the sides as well if you wish; I left mine plain and decorated the top with edible gold lustre powder.

I'm sharing this with the final We Should Cocoa linkup over at Tin and Thyme and also with CookBlogShare over at Easy Peasy Foodie.

Lotus Biscoff Chocolate Mousse

 

If you haven't discovered Lotus Biscoff spread yet, I urge you to try it now. The little caramelised biscuits you often get with a cup of coffee in cafes have been turned into a spread that is the consistency of Nutella, but tastes like biscuits!

The company's website suggests it as a breakfast food spread on toast which I think might be a bit sweet - I don't even eat Nutella on toast though I do have it on croissants, but otherwise I use it in desserts. Or eat it straight from the jar with a spoon!



I wanted to make an easy dessert for a barbecue with family and found a recipe for Lotus Biscoff and chocolate mousse on the Ocado app. The recipe had  step missing - it didn't tell you what to do with the egg whites that were listed in the ingredients - so I took a punt, and will explain here what I did.

I didn't buy any of the actual Lotus Biscoff biscuits as they are for decoration only and make the recipe quite expensive if you need to buy a whole packet only to use a few, unless you are going to eat the rest of the biscuits later!

The recipe says it serves 8; I did it for 5 and for 8 people the portions would be quite small, so you could use this quantity to serve 6

You need:
200g Lotus Biscoff smooth spread (see link above)
200g dark chocolate
5 eggs
200ml whipping cream - I used double cream as I couldn't get whipping cream and it worked fine

Heat the chocolate and Biscoff spread in the microwave until melted- I did on the 5 setting (medium heat) for 2 minutes.

Separate the egg and in one bowl, beat the egg whites with a whisk until stiff and set both whites and yolks aside. Whip the cream and set aside.

Beat the egg yolks one at a time into the chocolate mixture then fold in the beaten egg whites. Finally fold in the whipped cream.

Spoon into individual serving dishes and chill for a few hours until set; these will also keep overnight in the fridge.

The mousse was very rich but really light in texture, this is definitely something to make again!

 

I'm sharing this with CookBlogShare hosted by Everyday Healthy Recipes and We Should Cocoa hosted by Tin and Thyme

Chocolate Orange Christmas Bundt Cake

This cake is delicious and a special treat at any time of year but especially at Christmas where chocolate oranges are often a popular gift (though I also asked for a Terry's chocolate orange at Easter some years!).

I had decided to make it before finding out I had gestational diabetes and still wanted to bake the cake, as I was planning to take it to my brother in law's on Boxing Day for everyone to eat anyway - it's not like I was going to eat the whole cake myself. Depending on my blood sugar readings and what else I've had I may be able to have a very small piece of it anyway - the diabetes midwife did say it wasn't a case of not being able to ever have anything sweet, but it has to be a small amount on rare occasions.

Terry's chocolate oranges are, as I said, pretty iconic at Christmas. A month or so ago Tesco had a really good offer of 3 for the price of 1 (no that's not a typo) so I think I paid £3 for three. I decided at the time to give my husband one for Christmas and use the other two for baking.

I thought the chocolate orange slices would look great across the top of a bundt and that the cake itself should be chocolate orange flavour. I'd like to be able to say I developed my own recipe but these days I'm so busy preparing for the baby as well as doing everything else, and I am very tired all the time - I actually baked three different things today and had a nap in between as well! So I used a recipe I found online at Marsha's Baking Addiction.

 

It was easy to make and delicious (according to my husband who ate the offcuts when I levelled the cake) - really moist and you can taste the orange with the chocolate. I definitely recommend this recipe!

 

The cake came out of my Nordicware bundt tin easily after I sprayed it with PME Release A Cake Spray 600 ml - sometimes I've had problems with cakes sticking in my metal bundt tins but I really wanted to use it because the ridges around the cake are beautiful and I thought would be perfect for this particular cake.

To decorate the cake once it had cooled, I melted a whole Terry's chocolate orange (broken into segments) and stirred in about 50 ml double cream.

I planned to pour this over the top of the cake but it was still a bit thick so I spooned and spread it into the ridges, and topped each one with another piece of chocolate orange (using half of another one so you need one and a half in total). As a final touch I added some Dr. Oetker gold pearls.

 

I'm pleased with the way it turned out and my husband loved how it tasted so I hope the family enjoy it on Boxing Day!

I'm sharing this with We Should Cocoa hosted by Tin and Thyme and Cook Blog Share, hosted by Recipes Made Easy.

Boozy Brownies

 

These chocolate brownies are definitely not suitable for children! They're great for an adults-only party or barbecue, though I made them as a gift for a friend who had been through a tough time lately. He seemed pretty pleased with them when I described what was in the brownies!

The recipe comes from Bake in Black - Music-Inspired Baking by Eve and David O'Sullivan which I reviewed when it came out. I hadn't made anything from this book in a while so when I decided to bake something for my friend, had a flick through until I came to a recipe I could make fairly quickly and easily and that I could package up to give to him. Chocolate brownies it was!

The recipe is actually called Whiskey in the Bar- all the recipes in the book are inspired by music and this one is apparently Thin Lizzy. They are raisin and whiskey brownies with an Irish cream liqueur glaze - they came out gooey even though I extended the cooking time, and they taste amazing!

 

Makes 12
150g raisins
4 tbsp. Irish whiskey - though I didn't have any and used Jack Daniels
250g milk chocolate
200g butter
250g caster sugar
3 eggs
60g plain flour
60g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder

for the glaze:
50ml Irish cream liqueur
75g milk chocolate

Soak the raisins in the whiskey for at least half an hour.

When you are ready to begin baking, preheat the oven to 180C and grease a 20x20cm square cake tin.

Melt the chocolate either in the microwave or a bain-marie. Meanwhile in a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar and beat in the eggs. Pour in the melted chocolate and mix gently so it is all combined.

Add the raisins and the whiskey and fold in the flour, cocoa and baking powder. Pour into the baking tin and level the top; bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes [mine took more like 45, after I checked it a couple of times] until still squidgy but not raw in the middle when you test with a skewer. The skewer should emerge a bit sticky but not with raw brownie mixture on it.

Allow the brownies to cool in the tin. Make the drizzle when the brownies have cooled; heat the cream liqueur in a pan or a bowl in the microwave until just bubbling. Add the broken up chocolate and stir until smooth. Spread over the top of the brownies; the glaze will harden and you can then cut the brownies into squares.

I love Baileys but didn't have any and drinks like this don't actually keep that long - so if you have a bottle on the go that's great but I would advise against opening a new bottle for this recipe if you then aren't going to drink the rest (not on your own obviously!). Instead I found something really handy in Lidl a few months ago - a box of cream liqueur pots, like the milk you get in hotel rooms; you can open one or two as you want them and the rest will keep. Great if you just want the occasional drink or want to use in a recipe (or pour over ice cream perhaps?).

 

I'm sharing these with We Should Cocoa over at Tin and Thyme  and Treat Petite hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer.

Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Birthday Cake

I just had to share this with you even though it's not my own recipe. It's not only the best vegan cake I've ever made, but it's up there with the best cakes I've made, full stop.

Unlike other vegan cakes it doesn't contain a cupful of oil (I read the number of calories recently in a bottle of vegetable oil, and am still reeling). But it's still incredibly moist, so much so that you need to eat it with a fork rather than fingers, and really chocolatey. The peanut butter filling and topping are delish - even my husband loved this and he doesn't really like peanut butter. All together, it's a gooey cake that feels very indulgent - a real treat both for vegans and non-vegans alike.

I made this the day after my birthday as I had a couple of friends coming over to do a room escape game (which was brilliant by the way, I can't recommend them enough). One friend is vegan and I wanted to make a cake she could eat, so had a look online and found this recipe on Dora's Daily Dish - pop over and have a look.
The recipe was quite interesting - as I said a lot of the vegan cakes I've made use oil. This one uses melted vegan margarine, flax seed, almond milk and coffee.

It's really easy to make, you just mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients.

 

Here the cakes have just come out of the oven

The frosting unusually doesn't use icing sugar and is just peanut butter, vegan margarine and agave nectar. I spread half in the middle of the cake and the other half on the top.

A fairly simple, classic cake - the two layers were pretty deep, this is a good recipe in that sense - and in fact in every sense!

 

I'm sharing this bake with We Should Cocoa at Tin and Thyme.

Strawberry and White Chocolate Unicorn Cake with a Surprise Inside

Scrolling through the messages on my Blackberry on a day off, I spotted a message about a bake sale at work for Comic Relief the following week. I always bake cakes when there is a charity bake sale and occasionally there has been a competitive element. I won the work bake-off two years ago with this floating malteser cake:

The following year I made this 'surprise inside' Mini Egg ombre piñata cake, but was out done by one of the other entrants (my sponge was a bit dry)

This year I wanted to make something special again and spent a while browsing the internet to get ideas and find out what current cake trends were, and decided to make a unicorn cake. I chose a strawberry cake recipe, bought some of the ingredients, spent time planning exactly what I was going to do... and when I got back to work and read the email properly, I realised that while all cakes were welcome for the bake sale, there were three competitive categories: tray bake, savoury cake, and chocolate cake. And I wasn't going to make any of those.

I considered scrapping my plans and making a different cake entirely but still wanted to do this one, and hit upon an idea: I could make a strawberry cake with white chocolate. I had a feeling that the other chocolate cake entries would all be milk chocolate or plain chocolate so having something with white chocolate might be a nice change.

In the end there weren't that many entries in the chocolate category after all so I won the bake off hands down! The cake tasted delicious, was really light and moist and I hid some white chocolate covered strawberries in the centre, which tumbled out when the cake was cut. It wasn't actually that difficult to decorate either and if the comments I received are anything to go by, it was definitely worth doing!

I didn't want the strawberries to overpower the white chocolate but also didn't want them just in the filling, so I decided to puree the strawberries in a blender and swirl it through the cake mixture in the tin before it was baked. To make sure the white chocolate flavour came through, I made a white chocolate buttercream for the filling and a white chocolate ganache to coat the outside of the cake before covering it with fondant.


Strawberry and white chocolate cake - an original recipe by Caroline Makes

I used a 6-inch cake tin (which is pretty small) as I wanted the cake to be tall but not too large and heavy as I had to carry it into work. This quantity makes four layers of a 6 inch cake.

450g butter, softened or margarine like Stork
450g caster sugar
8 eggs
450g self-raising flour
200g white chocolate, grated
50ml milk
227g punnet strawberries (or roughly that amount), hulled, chopped and blended in a food processor until pureed

for the strawberry centre:
75g strawberries
50g white chocolate

for the buttercream:
175g butter, softened or margarine like Stork
350g icing sugar, sifted
100g white chocolate, melted
pink food colouring
PME Cake Release or butter/marg for greasing the cake tins

for the ganache:
60ml double cream
120g white chocolate

to decorate:
about 1kg fondant - I find it easier to have extra for rolling out
PME gold edible lustre spray
black food colouring or a black edible ink pen
a wooden dowel or similar, about 8 inches long
star-shaped piping nozzle and piping bag

First if you want to fill the cake with chocolate-dipped strawberries you need to start by making these. The other thing I'd recommend using for the centre of the cake is Rainbow Drops - I had been planning to use these as I thought I had some in the cupboard but then couldn't find them!

 

If you are using strawberries: Melt the 50g white chocolate in a small bowl in the microwave or a bain marie and dip in some chopped strawberries and leave on a wire rack to set. I actually did these the night before I needed them, though they don't take that long to set.

Preheat the oven to 180C and grease two loose-bottomed 6-inch cake tins. or spray with Cake Release.

 

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and the sugar then beat in the eggs. Fold in the flour then grate in the white chocolate, then carefully stir in the milk.

Spoon a quarter of the cake mixture into each of the two tins (so you will fill four in total).

Take a few spoonfuls of the strawberry puree and swirl through the cake mixture in the tins. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes, until the cakes are cooked through but still fairly soft.

 

Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin, then turn out onto a wire rack.

Wipe out the two tins, grease or spray again and spoon the rest of the cake mixture into the two tins. Bake for 20-25 minutes and leave to cool as before.

Make the buttercream by creaming the butter and the icing sugar and stirring in the melted white chocolate.

Make the chocolate ganache by heating the cream in a small pan until simmering. Remove from the heat and add the white chocolate and stir until melted. Set aside until it has cooled and thickened to a spreadable consistency.

When you are ready to assemble the cake, carefully level the cakes - if they have risen unevenly, slice a thin amount off the top of the cakes so they are flat.

Place the bottom cake on a cake board. Then take the next two layers and using a round cookie cutter, cut out a circle from the middle of both cakes. Spread some buttercream on the bottom layer, place the second layer on top and spread buttercream on top, leaving the hole free; place the third layer on top and repeat. Reserve a little of the buttercream to make the unicorn's hair.

You will now have a three-layer cake with a hole in the middle and a solid bottom layer. Pop your chocolate-dipped strawberries or sweets or whatever you are using into the hole, and place the solid top layer of cake on the top.

Spread the white chocolate ganache around the outside and on top of the cake.

Roll out the fondant on a mat dusted with icing sugar until it is large enough to cover the cake. Lift by draping it over a rolling pin and place on top of the cake. Smooth down the sides and trim the bottom.

Using the offcuts, roll two thin sausage shapes and twist one over the other, tapering as you get to the end - this will be the unicorn's horn. If you want you can use flower paste and the horn should stand up on its own; I used fondant which is too soft, so I poked a wooden dowel into the horn, leaving about an inch and a half at the end, which I later used to insert into the cake.

Place the horn onto newspaper or kitchen paper and spray with PME gold lustre spray. Leave to dry.

Using more of the fondant offcuts, shape two ears - I made these quite thick so they would stand up. Colour a small piece of fondant with pink food colouring and cut two flat pieces to stick inside the ears. I then used a cocktail stick inside each ear to attach them to the top of the cake.

I bought an edible ink pen by Rainbow Dust which has a thin end and a thick end; it took me about ten minutes to get the lid off one end and the other one wouldn't budge at all! So I could only use the thin end. It would have worked better if I'd waited for the fondant covering the cake to fully dry but it was already 11pm so I drew on the eyes, with the nib of the pen cutting into the fondant more than I would have wanted, and I would have preferred a thicker line, but it looked ok.

Add a little of the pink food colouring to the rest of the buttercream and using a piping bag and star nozzle, pipe some hair on top of the unicorn's head. Finally take the horn when the gold spray has dried and fix onto the top of the cake.

When you cut into the cake, the strawberries inside will tumble out, which is a nice surprise - you can just about see the strawberry swirl through the cake as well.

This cake would be lovely for a little girl's birthday I think - and of course it won the Comic Relief bake off!

I'm linking this up with Cook Blog Share, hosted by Eb at Easy Peasy Foodie.

 

I'm also sending it to We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme.