Yellow Cake

Today Hortamatic is taking on CAKE. How to veganize it properly?

Arguably, vegan bakery has greatly improved over the last five years. One of the challenges I initially experienced, however, was locating a piece of cake that did not crumble in dry bits upon meeting my fork.

The other challenge was finding a good vegan yellow cake recipe. It seemed that both bakeries and individuals had contracts with the cocoa growers to exclusively manufacture chocolate cake. I love chocolate as much as the next vegan, but give me a little yellow cake love, please.

A few years ago, while searching for Vasilopita recipes for a New Year’s party, I accidentally stumbled upon a cake recipe that required about 14 eggs. Not one to give up easily, I decided to take it on, Vegomagic-style. The resulting recipe can be adapted in various ways noted below so that you can eat more of it by celebrating virtually everything (holidays, birthdays, Thursdays, etc.).

The cake is moist, sweet, and undetectably vegan.

Enjoy!

HortaMatic Yellow Cake

Ingredients:

• 1 cup earth balance or other vegan margarine
• 2 cups white sugar
• 3 cups all purpose white flour
• 1 cup warm soymilk
• 1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• ½ t salt
• Fluffy stuff #1: 3 t baking powder, 1.5 t baking soda, 1/4 cup + 2 T flour, 1/2 cup + 4 T water
• Fluffy stuff #2: 1/2 cup soy vanilla yogurt OR 1/2 cup orange juice; 1/4 cup coconut milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 10 inch round cake pan.

Mixing:

• In a large bowl, cream the earth balance & sugar with a beater.
• Stir in the flour & salt and mix until the mixture is mealy.
• In a separate bowl, whisk the fluffy stuff #1 ingredients together until fluffy. The mixture will foam up like a rabid egg. Slowly mix this into the margarine/sugar mix.
• Mix together then add the fluffy stuff #2 to the margarine/sugar mix.
• Warm the soymilk, add the lemon to it, then fold this into the margarine/sugar mix.

Baking:

Pour the mixture into the greased pan. Bake for 45-50 minutes. Cool on the rack for 10 minutes before putting onto a plate.

Dressin’ ‘Er Up

Frost when cool. Optional: put a mixture in the middle of two cakes, such as Tofutti cream cheese and strawberries. Or a coconut cream mixture.

Frost with:

• 3 sticks of Earth Balance shortening & spread (2 sticks shortening to 1 stick spread is nice)
• 1 bag or box of confectioners’ sugar
• 1 t vanilla OR ½ t almond extract and 2 T cocoa powder
• 1-2 T of Coconut Milk fat (for added fluffyness)

Variations:

• For a White Russian style cake, 1/2 replace the OJ or soy yogurt with Kaluha. Add 1 T vodka to t frosting.
• For cupcake minis (see picture below) decrease baking time to 18 minutes.
• To make chocolate minis, add 2 T cocoa powder to the mix.