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!

Hazelnut Praline Muffins

This recipe comes from a little book called the 'Muffin Bible', which I found recently in a charity shop. Some of my best books have been bought second hand in this way, and most of them look as if they have never been opened, let alone any of the recipes used. It's obviously where impulse buys after TV series, and Christmas presents, end up after a year or two!

Up to now, I haven't been that keen on muffin recipes, but I'm growing a little fonder of them now that I'm baking more with oil instead of butter - they are quick to mix and cook when other tasks, away from the kitchen, seem more pressing. The book turned out to be an Australian publication from Penguin, and the recipes, including several for savoury muffins, are written in a quirky mix of weights and volumes in the same recipe - half a cup of sugar, but 50g of chopped chocolate, for instance. This recipe for Hazelnut Praline Muffins is the first I've tried, although several more are bookmarked!

For this recipe I had to make praline, which was a first for me - the recipe called for boiling sugar and chopped nuts together, until the sugar was melted and golden brown. I could smell the nuts getting overheated long before the sugar showed signs of melting, so cautiously added a couple of tablespoons of water to slow the heating and start to dissolve the sugar prior to caramelising it. This seemed to work OK, although the proportion of nuts to sugar was so high it was difficult to see the colour of the liquid sugar. My guess at the endpoint worked for this praline, but I'm not sure it would have been right for making a caramel!

The muffins weren't much to look at, but they made up for this with the little pockets of praline, which gave bursts of nutty flavour and crunchy texture when eaten. The caramelised sugar really intensified the flavour of the hazelnuts. They didn't rise a lot, either, so I think it would have been better to make 10 larger muffins than try to squeeze 12 out of the batter.

Ingredients
1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts - I used ready toasted nuts
1/2 cup sugar
80mls sunflower oil
150g caster sugar
1 egg
150mls milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
225g plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
demerara sugar for sprinkling (optional)

Method
Make a praline from the chopped nuts and first quantity of sugar - boil them gently together until golden brown, and allow to cool on greased foil. Break into pieces then crush into smaller pieces with a rolling pin.
Whisk the oil, second quantity of sugar, milk, egg and vanilla in a large bowl then add the flour, baking powder and praline and mix lightly until just combined.
Divide between 12 muffin cases, sprinkle with demerara sugar, if using, and bake at 190C for about 20 minutes.

Blueberry Traybake with Lemon Streusel

I didn't really follow the recipe at all, except as a guide to quantities, but this cake was inspired by this recipe on the King Arthur Flour website. I just loved the idea of candied lemon pieces in the Streusel topping, and blueberries and lemon are a classic combination.

To keep the cake low(ish) in saturated fat, I used my standard recipe for a yogurt and oil cake, although I did keep the butter in the streusel topping. I read on one of the blogs featuring the same cake that there was an awful lot of streusel crumbs, so I reduced it to a half quantitiy, then wished I hadn't, as it didn't cover the blueberries well enough and the cake rose around the little lumps of streusel. I also made the streusel  by my favoured method of melting the butter and mixing it with the other ingredients - this ensures the streusel isn't powdery at all.

This was a really good cake, and it would also make a tasty dessert if served still warm. It was very moist from the blueberry juice and the little pockets of crunchy lemon streusel gave a lovely contrast in flavour and texture. What started off as a potential problem - not enough streusel - ended up being a positive feature of the cake! It was also just the right size for the four of us to eat in two days - one problem with fresh fruit cakes is that they don't keep long, especially in the sort of unexpectedly hot weather we're having at the moment.

Ingredients

Streusel - 75g plain flour

50g light muscovado sugar (or demerara for more crunch)

2 tablespoons finely chopped candied lemon peel

a few drops lemon extract

grated zest of half a lemon

75g butter, melted
Cake - 200g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

200g caster sugar

250g low fat natural yogurt
115g sunflower oil
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

200g frozen blueberries

Method
Pre-heat oven to 180C and line a 12 x 8" (30 x 20cm) shallow baking tin with parchment.
Make the streusel by mixing the melted butter into the other ingredients and leaving to cool. It will be one big lump at this stage, but will crumble nicely when it's cool.
Make the cake by mixing the flour, baking powder and sugar in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk the yogurt, sunflower oil, eggs and vanilla together until emulsified, then mix into the flour. Don't overmix - just stir briskly until there are no signs of dry flour.
Transfer the batter to the baking tin, then scatter the frozen blueberries evenly over the surface.
Crumble the streusel topping evenly over the surface, then bake for 35-40 minutes, or until a test probe comes out clean. Cool in the tin

Mocha Traybake

There are two ways to use coffee and chocolate together in cakes - one is to use a little coffee to deepen the flavour of the chocolate, which often means the coffee isn't detectable in the flavour, and the other is to use more coffee and less chocolate to make a cake which tastes of the coffee as much as the chocolate. The second is what I tried to do here. The flavour was successful, but the grated chocolate that I added to the batter disappeared during baking, so I didn't get the flecky appearance I was hoping for. I was worried that the very wet batter wouldn't support chocolate chips, but my grated chocolate was too fine and melted into the batter.

This was yet another adaptation of this Annie Bell recipe, which is the nearest I've come to getting the texture of a sponge cake, using oil instead of butter. In this case, I left out all the lemon flavouring and dissolved 3 teaspoons of instant coffee in the milk before mixing the batter. I then folded in 30g grated plain chocolate before baking.

For the topping I made my favourite chocolate fudge frosting - melt 175g plain chocolate and 30g butter over a low heat, then beat in 2 tablespoons golden syrup and 3 tablespoons milk, leave to cool but use while still spreadable - and finished off with a light sprinkle of 'cappuccino pearls'.

Note added 23rd March: At Baking Addict's suggestion I am entering this in the AlphaBakes Challenge, a new monthly baking challenge hosted alternately by The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline Makes. Caroline is hosting this month and the letter M has been randomly chosen. M for Mocha, obviously!

Cherries, Berries and Beetroot Cake

This could almost have been a Random Recipe - I'd love to enter Dom's monthly challenge, but I couldn't do it honestly and still stick with the baking theme of the blog. I'd have to tidy rearrange my bookshelves to put all the baking books in one place first. The randomness comes from the fact that I wasn't looking for a cake recipe - I picked up Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet to check the recipe for Lemon and Almond buns, and it fell open at the page for Cherry Beet Cake (here's the same recipe from the Guardian).

I had half a pack of beetroot left over from the recent chocolate beetroot cake, and had recently stocked up with a pack of dried Berries and Cherries, and  Bonne Maman Berries and Cherries jam. They sounded like a good enough substitute for sour cherries and cherry jam, to me. No fresh cream for the filling, but it looked the sort of sturdy cake which would cope with a cream cheese frosting used as a filling.

There were no problems with the recipe, except that I thought there was far too much streusel topping, and only used about half of it, which gave an even coating on the top of one layer - any more and I don't think it would have stuck in place during baking.

The batter was a lovely pink colour after mixing, and I although was a little disappointed that it turned brown when cooked, there were still pink flecks of grated beetroot visible. This is how I like to see a beetroot cake - the beet itself playing a visible part in the proceedings, rather than hidden behind chocolate!

This was a solid, quite dry cake, and definitley needed the jam and cream cheese  filling. I used cooked beetrrot, and it might be that raw beetroot would make a moister cake. The flavour of the spices were predominant - the family thought it was a very Christmassy cake, and Hubs said it tasted like mince pies! The jam and the lemon in the cream cheese filling added a zing and a touch of  freshness to the flavour.

The recipe for the cream cheese frosting was also from Short and Sweet - I made a half quantity with 200g cream cheese, 100g unsalted butter, 100g icing sugar, the grated zest of half a small lemon and a teaspoon of lemon juice. The recipe advised to beat half the cream cheese with the other ingredients first, then beat in the rest of the cream cheese. I don't know if it was the addition of the lemon, or the proportions of cheese, butter and sugar, but this was one of the best cream cheese frostings I've ever made. It stayed thick and even set to hold it's shape - the photo shows an extra helping of the frosting beside the cake (in case I hadn't put enough in as filling, you understand!)

Beetroot and Chocolate Cake

This is another Good Food recipe, this time one recommended by Foodycat (or should that be Mr Foodycat?).  It has the features I need in a chocolate cake - dark, moist and low in saturated fat. It wasn't quite as easy for me as the 'blitz and bake' technique described in the recipe, as I don't have a large food processor, but it was fairly simple to make in a bowl with a hand-held electric mixer, once the beetroot was puréed in my mini-chopper.

Or, it should have been fairly simple! I had carefully lined my deep loaf tin and scraped all the batter in; the cake had even been in the oven 5 minutes before I realised I'd forgotten to add the baking powder! My language would have disgraced a gang of navvies! Out the tin came from the oven. the batter was scraped back into the mixing bowl, and the baking powder was stirred in as quickly and thoroughly as possible. By now, the lining paper and the baking tin were a real mess, and the only option was to quickly line an alternative loaf tin. This was much longer and shallower than the one I intended to use, and I think in the end this resulted in the cake being a little over-cooked, as I didn't take the shape into account, and reduce the cooking time. But at least it rose!

I took note of some of the comments saying how bitter the cake was, so used milk chocolate chunks to add to the cake, as the only alternative I had available was quite strong and dark.

I have tried another recipe using beetroot in a chocolate cake - it was raw beetroot in that recipe - and once again I found that I didn't notice any flavour from the beetroot at all. Puréeing cooked beetroot meant that there wasn't even the texture of grated vegetable in the cake, as there was in the other cake. This cake wasn't quite as rich, but it was much more economical than the first recipe I tried. This is quite a good chocolate cake, but I prefer beetroot cakes to have more evidence of the beetroort - even if it means leaving out the chocolate!  Here, the beetroot seems an unnecessary gimmick, although I guess it helps retain moisture and adds to the sweetness in a natural way.

One point which I thought quite important - with some oil based cakes there's a certain blandness which tells you the cake is made with oil rather than butter, but that wasn't noticeable here.

Orange Drizzle Cake

Once in a while I go to the Good Food website and put 'cake' into the recipe search. I then tick the box to order the search to show the most recently added recipes first. This is how I found this recipe for a 'light' version of the classic Lemon Drizzle Cake, made with oil and yogurt instead of butter. It also contains ground almonds and polenta to add to the texture and improve the moistness. I didn't have lemons available but did have oranges - I used the zest of two small oranges in the cake, along with a teaspoon of orange extract. I didn't want the full volume of syrup to drizzle over, either, so used a syrup adapted from another recipe - 2 tablespoons of golden syrup blended with the juice of one orange.

The recipe was simple to follow and there were no problems in mixing or baking. After I removed the cake from the oven, I didn't think it had risen much. Worried that it would be too heavy, I made a berry compote and whipped some cream to serve with the cake as a dessert.

I needn't have worried; although the cake hadn't risen as much as I expected, the texture was still very good. It's wasn't really light - more like a madeira cake than a sponge, and not as light as this Annie Bell recipe, also made with oil,  for a lemon drizzle traybake. However, I like the texture of cakes made with polenta and ground almonds, so it was good to find another successful recipe to add to my repertoire. I think this would make a good everyday cake, without any extra syrup added after baking.