RECIPE: Vegan Chocolate Cake

Can you guess what else I cooked?!

Hello!

Welcome to my recipe post for a vegan chocolate cake. I'll always tell you where I sourced the original recipe from and explain any changes I have made to it. And then obviously I can then call it my own hehehe (gotta love plagiarism.)

This was a recipe I discovered from good ol' Nigella Lawson when I was rewatching some of her TV stuff on BBC2. I had seen it before and I remembered thinking then how wonderful it looked, and then to see it again a couple of days after I had embarked on this new journey I just knew it had to be cooked.

You can find the recipe here, and to be honest I pretty much copied it instruction for instruction. It says it feeds 10-12 and for once, a cakes serving suggestion is actually spot on - this is SO decedent and so luxurious that a hefty big slice will leave you feeling sick. Enjoy this beautiful cake in lovely small splenderous pieces, and if you're feeling like a comforting warm pudding, whack this in the microwave for 45 seconds on high.. the melting coconut oil and chocolate combination is possibly the most lovely thing in the world. A giant hug say. For the mouth. And senses.

Ingredients:

225g of plain flour

1 ½ tsp of bicarb

½ tsp fine sea salt, but given I had none of that I used just table salt.. it seemed to be just as good

1 ½ tsp instant espresso powder - I used Azera

75g cocoa

I love the contrast of colours

300g dark brown sugar

375ml hot water (not boiling I believe but hot)

75g or 90ml of coconut oil

1 ½ tsp of cider vinegar

Pistachios

Pommegranite seeds

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For the icing:

60ml cold water

75g coconut butter, otherwise known as creamed coconut

50g soft dark sugar

1½ tsp instant espresso powder

1 ½ tsp cocoa 

150g dark chocolate, min. 70%) - Aldi's is lovely and cheap

Method:

1. Start with the icing and preheating the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Make sure your chocolate is mega finely chopped because you want it to melt fast. In what is described as a heavy bottom pan (which I tried to google but couldn't find anything, so I just used the pan I cook spuds in), put all the ingredients for the icing into it EXCEPT the chocolate, and bring it to the boil on the hob. 

2. Once boiled, sugar dissolved and coconut oil melted, turn the heat off completely and NOW add in your chopped chocolate. Stir like a b*tch with a grudge. Once all the chocolate is melted and you have a silky pool of heaven, put it to one side away from the oven and hob - you want that to start cooling right away. Stir it every now again/when you remember.

3. Cake time. Grease up your tin and make sure it's leak proof because the batter is mega runny. Nigella says to put in baking parchment but I didn't and it worked out fine for me, so no panic if you don't have it. 

4. In a mixing bowl, add the flour, bi carb, cocoa, salt, and espresso and give it a good mix. The advice to do so with a fork is good advice - it gets rid of the clumps in ingredients you've had for years in the cupboard. Sugar doesn't go off, does it??

5. In a measuring jug with your hot water in it, start melting your coconut oil, sugar, vinegar. Once that's all melted, pour into the dry ingredients mixing bowl and work it all through until you have a clump free, smooth batter.

6. Pour the mixture into the greased up baking tin (8cm round one I used) and bung it in the oven. Check it at 30 minutes to see if it's ready, again at 35 minutes if it hasn't, or every 5 minutes until you're satisfied it's cooked.

7. Place the cake still in its tin on a cooling wire rack and leave until completely cooled. Once it has, discard the tin and lavish on the icing you made earlier. Chop up the pistachios and scatter them about with gay abandon. Nigella put on some edible rose petals for colour contrast but I live in Barnsley - we don't have edible rose petals here duck. So I used some "it's going past the sell by date so have them for 6p" pomegranate pips from Tesco. I think the effect was the same if not a little better, and the zing against the sweet was actually very nice.

And there you go! I love it warm, I love it cold, I loved it with some soya vanilla yoghurt, I adored it with some Alpro hazelnut and chocolate soya ice cream. There is honestly nothing to not love about this cake, and I absolutely will be cooking it again.

Sublime. And pretty

Overall Score:

10/10

Next time I make this, I'm actually going to do it in little batches. I got the cutest mini heart shaped baking tins from B&M the other day and I thought it might be an idea to make say a thousand of them, freeze them and take one out a day until I die of obesity?? 

Let me know if you bake it and what you thought of it too. Mega thank you to Nigella Lawson who is a hero in every regard, and who as a staunchly straight person, I would 100% go gay for, I really hope that is taken as a compliment because I'm going to tag her. And an invitation.....

Annnyway...

Speak soon!

Bear