Vegan Cake Recipe and Pictures

Hurray, this weekend is over and now I can relax!!  Actually, I'm not really complaining -- it was just one of those busy weeks.  Good thing the girls were with my folks -- poor Kevin had to fend for himself, thankfully he was nice enough to bring me home take-out every now and then.

I was going to be this awesome blogger and post pictures from my kitchen, showing all these wonderful ingredients, cakes in the pan before baking, etc..... I even cleaned my kitchen so all the mirrored backsplash wouldn't refect all the dirty counters.  But as luck would have it -- I couldn't find the charger for the camera battery and the girls weren't home, so who knows what black hole it ended up in :-)

But the cake turned out wonderful.  I needed a pound cake consistency, something a little more dense than your typical cake box cake -- this was a decent sized wedding cake, not the biggest I've done, but still a lot of weight.  So after much trial and LOTS of ERROR, here is the recipe I came up with.

2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups sugar
1tablespoon EnerG egg replacer
1/4 c warm/hot water

3 cups all purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 medium sized lemon -- zest

1 1/2 cups soymilk  ( I used half unsweetened SILK and half SILK Almond)
4 teaspoons vanilla
juice from the two lemons that were zested (approx. 2 Tablespoons)

And then the fun begins --

Take the oil and sugar and beat it till combined, add the egg replacer powder and warm water and beat it to death.  I mean lots and lots on high speed.  I turned my Bosch on and let it go while I put together the rest of the ingredients.

In another bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt and lemon zest.

In another small bowl, combine the milk and vanilla.  Squeeze the lemon juice into the mixture and give it a good stir.  It will curdle a little.

Alternately add the flour mixture and the milk mixture and mix until well combined.

Pour into a 8 or 9 inch square pan that's greased and floured.  Bake at 350 approx 50 minutes, or until done.  It should raise a little and pull away from the sides a tad.

That's it!!  I thought it was pretty good.  The cake I made was 2 layers of each size with raspberry jam between the layers.  The middle tier had homemade lemon filling (that needed to be vegan too, so store-bought curd didn't work).

This was a really moist cake and it had good flavor -- well if you like lemon!!  That was the bride's request.  You could certainly change it by omitting the zest, but I would still put in the juice to curdle the milk.

Here's the cake once all the layers had been filled with jam, they were all crumb coated with icing and then covered with fondant, and then stacked with all the necessary support system :-)

Once it was all stacked and ready to go, we hit the road to the reception hall.  (Oh, there was another big cake that was not stacked -- it wasn't proportionally good, so I just made another one to cut and serve, not to look pretty, although it looked pretty good too!!)

Safely arrived at the hall and proceeded to decorate -- here's the finished project.  Tablescape and all.  Notice the "crooked" wine glasses!!

Here's another of just the cake

The white flower is a rose of some sort, the rest are hydrangea's of different colors and then the peacock feathers.  You can't see the icing work from this angle, but I'll show you a close-up. Each tier had designs on it.  The bottom two are pieces of wood covered with fondant and ribbon.  Kudos to my dear brother for cutting them for me!

Notice how the bride is standing on the suitcase.  This is especially true of this couple, he's a pretty tall dude.  You may not be able to read it, but the tag on the suitcase says "Honeymoon Bound."  The color is not the best, but the ribbon is a dark teal - not a color you see everyday, in fact it was impossible to find ribbon to match, so Bonny (the groom's mom) actually made it!  It really was a pretty cake!  I think it's a great one to end my cake decorating career on -- Nothing like going out with a bang :-)