Dan Lepard's Chocolate Passion Cake

If. like me, you haven't had any really good experiences with Vegan cakes, or you are just prejudiced against them for some reason, then I urge you to give Dan Lepard's recipe  for Chocolate Passion Cake a try. It's certainly made me adjust my ideas about baking cakes without eggs; until now I haven't baked anything that I'd really want to make again, and at least one attempt at a  vegan chocolate cake has ended in the bin, with no-one wanting to eat it.

Here, the addition of the other ingredients - date purée, carrots, nuts and spices - hides the blandness that is present in a lot of cakes made using neither eggs nor butter. Both the texture and the flavour is much improved - I would willingly put this cake up against a conventional carrot cake and defy anyone to notice that it was a vegan version!

This is a cake which I would happily make again, even if I didn't need a vegan cake (I didn't need one this time - I was just browsing Dan's book, Short and Sweet, for a cake recipe with either oil, or only a small amount of butter). It was light and moist and packed with a whole bunch of flavours - nuts and spices as well as chocolate. If I have one criticism it's that it's a little on the delicate side - it has a tendency to crumble rather than slice neatly. In addition, I wasn't completely happy with the spice flavour; although it wasn't bad, I think it might be better to use just cinnamon, rather than the stipulated mix of ginger and mixed spice.

Even CT, who has always maintained that he didn't like carrot cake, was happy to eat this! I thought about not telling him there were carrots there, as I had grated them finely, and they couldn't be seen in the dark coloured crumb, but I owned up before he ate any. His acceptance made me wonder if I ought to tell him about the beetroot in the chocolate cake a few weeks ago, which he ate quite happily, if unknowingly, even though he refused to try the Cherries, Berries and  Beetroot cake I made a few days later, because I had to tell him what the pink flecks were!

I didn't change anything in the cake recipe, but I did make a different frosting - my usual fudge frosting (see this recipe) which has less sugar than glacé icing. As I don't have a large food processor, I used a stick blender to purée the dates and blend in the oil and vinegar to make an emulsion. This appears to have been an acceptable way of doing things. I chopped the dates and nuts in a mini processor, but I processed the nuts for slightly too long - I should have stopped while the pieces were a bit larger. The recipe appears complicated on first reading, but the cake was really quick to put together and baked quite fast too.

Apologies for the picture quality - I had the usual problems with making brown cakes look attractive!

Eggless (Vegan) Brownies - a step too far!

I really wanted to like these brownies! I saw them on Cake, Crumbs and Cooking last month, and C is someone who's taste and opinions I really respect; if she says something is good, then I expect it to be so. She found the recipe here, on the vegan blog, Maple Spice, and made one alteration - to use light olive oil instead of vegetable oil. I went back to sunflower oil and used a slightly bigger tin than C - an 8" (20cm) square tin.

I followed the recipe precisely, and took the brownies out of the oven after 25 minutes - they were still quite wet at the suggested 20 minutes. Although they did have the lovely papery, flaky top so desirable on a good brownie, this was the only positive point, in my opinion!

I  guess it's all down to personal taste - I found them dry and heavy (almost biscuity) and too sweet. I used a good quality chocolate but still didn't think the taste came through in the recipe - the over-riding taste was sugar, and an aftertaste of soy, which I didn't like at all. They were also far too shallow, which might be why they seemed dry, although I'm sure I didn't overcook them; C used a 7" tin and Debbie at Maple Spice actually used a 6" tin

If I were a vegan, and hadn't found a better recipe, I'd be tempted to add a little raising agent to the recipe. As it was, I couldn't help thinking that an egg or two would probably improve things considerably! Removing eggs from this sort of bake just seems a step too far, if it isn't necessary for ethical or dietary reasons.

Not one to be repeated, I'm afraid, especially as I already have a couple of better recipes with low saturated fat levels.

Note - 24 hours after first tasting! In fairness to the recipe, I have to add that the brownies seem to have 'relaxed' or mellowed somehow, and aren't quite so dry and heavy now. A much more pleasant texture, but I'm still not keen on the flavour, although Hubs and CT liked them more than I did.