Vegan Cake with Vegan Frosting

Yields: 1 (10 inch) cake.

And I never thought I'd be making anything vegan ever. But hey, turns out it's not even hard at all to make this cake. I might even say that it's much much easier than regular cakes. You know all that creaming process of butter and sugar in the beginning and having to put the egg one-by-one. And how annoying is it, having to wait for the butter to come to room temperature.
By the way, after a lot of googling... I mix and matched some recipes and it turned out b-e-a-utiful. Do you know that soaked chia seeds can actually replace egg in baking? Now that's fascinating.

Anyways, no I'm not turning vegan. I still love my egg and cheese (so much, so much).

The reason I decided to make this is because I couldn't find any vegan cake for my friend's birthday. The cakes I found on the Internet were mostly raw cake, and doesn't look very much birthday-ey. So, then I thought why not try and make one. So here you go mon frere...
A vanilla and citrus sponge cake, rose-scented "buttercream" frosting (I folded through some desiccated coconut), toasted coconut flakes, and the toppings.

INGREDIENTS:

Cake:

1 cup soy milk
1.5 cups all purpose flour
1 cup white sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup rice bran oil
1 tbs lemon juice (optional, can change to rosewater)
1 tbs vanilla extract
zest of 1/2 an orange
pinch of salt
1 tbs chia seed + 3 tbs water (soak the chia seed)

Frosting: 

500g vegetable shortening
soy milk
icing sugar
rosewater
desiccated coconut

METHOD:

Preheat your oven to 180C.

Okay, it's very easy. Basically it is like making a muffin batter. Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder and salt). Separately, mix the soy milk, oil, chia seed, lemon, orange zest). Then once everything is mixed in, pour the dry ingredients into the wet and fold just until it comes together and not lumpy. Do not overmix.

 

 


Prepare your cake tin. I sprayed mine with canola oil spray and lined it with baking paper. See the baking paper was crumpled cause I used it twice for the second batch of cake. I'm either that lazy to cutout another paper. ha ha.











But anyways, this Le Bakers baking paper is so durable and prolly the best ones I've used so far.

 

 

Bake in preheated oven for around 30-35 minutes. Mine was done exactly 35 minutes.

It is very important to let your cake cool down in the tin for at least 10 minutes. And once you flip it to another surface, make sure you line the surface with baking paper to ensure the top of the cake does not stick to it.

By the way, I didn't cut mine into half. But if you were to make a 4-layer cake and you have to divide this cake into two, use a large serrated knife. And more importantly, let the cake cool completely. Crumbly cake ain't pretty... :)

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And now moving on to the froooostin. 

I know this might be the worst frosting-recipe-writing ever. 500g of shortening and the other ingredients have no measurement. He. Well, I never really measure how much I put in my frosting. Basically you keep adding the icing sugar and soy milk until you get the consistency and sweetness you prefer (icing sugar to make the frosting sweeter and thicker, soy milk to thin it out).

I used desiccated coconut in the frosting, but this is totally optional. I just like another texture to the frosting, rather than plain creamy.

Dice the vege shortening and microwave it for about 20 seconds to soften it, before whipping it. I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted waiting for it to soften on the kitchen counter. But it's definitely unlike butter, this is 100% fat :).

So microwaving does the trick.

I top up my cake with my all time favorite topping of strawberry, pistachio and edible rose.

I like to brush my strawberry with glucose syrup to make it glossy.

Again, microwave the glucose syrup for 10-20 seconds to make it runnier, so that you can brush it on the strawberry.

This is double the recipe of what I've listed above. This can easily be a 4-layer cake if only I'm patient enough to wait for it to cool down. 

Anyways, it was really moist, fluffy and citrusy. Perfect with strawberry, rose "cream" and the toasted coconut flakes was a pleasant addition to the texture. 

Would definitely make this again for snack some time in the future...