Recipe: Vegan Vanilla Cake

Over the weekend, my vegan friend and I met up to do some baking. I found this recipe on the Vegan 8 blog, and since Tammy already had a lot of the vegan ingredients (I don't keep vegan yogurt on hand, for example), it was pretty easy to throw this cake together. 

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups + 2 tablespoons (336g) regular all-purpose flour
• 1 cup + 5 tablespoons (252g) fine granulated white sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon fine salt
• 3/4 cup + 1 tablespoon (195g) room temperature canned "lite" coconut milk
• 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons (150g) room temperature dairy-free sweetened vanilla yogurt
• 3 tablespoons (45g) HOT water
• 1 1/2 teaspoons (8g) vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon (5g) apple cider vinegar

Directions

1. Make sure the milk and yogurt are not cold and are room temperature! This is very important because if they are cold from the fridge, your batter will be hard to mix up, making the batter overly thick and cause overmixing to happen, which results in a tough/dense cake. Lighter cakes are the result of room temperature ingredients. 
2. Preheat the oven to 350°F and spray a 9x13 glass pyrex dish with nonstick spray. Wipe off excess oil if too much is sitting on the bottom or in the corners, but be careful not to wipe too much off, otherwise the cake will stick.
3. To a large bowl, add the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt and whisk very well.
4. To a separate bowl, add the coconut milk, yogurt, hot water, vanilla and vinegar. Whisk until smooth.
5. Pour the liquid over the dry ingredients and use a large spoon to gently stir together the batter until moistened and just mixed, making sure to scrape from the bottom. Do not use a whisk, as this will overmix the batter. You want to stir until just mixed and moistened, do not overmix, as this can result in a tough/chewy cake. The batter will be quite thick, this is normal, do not add more liquid. It is okay for the batter to look thick and lumpy, as long as it’s mixed.
6. Pour the batter into the dish and spread out the top evenly into the pan and in the corners. Don’t worry about the top looking perfect, it will magically bake up perfectly and smooth on top. Bake for 20-25 minutes. It is done when a toothpick is clean from the center.
7. Cool completely before frosting. Cover the cake with foil tightly so it stays moist and store the cake at room temperature.

The original recipe really harps on getting a food scale (hence the measurements listed in grams). But neither of us had one (nor do we plan on buying one). Because of this, you have to add some extra tablespoons to some of the ingredients, like the flour and sugar; the way the recipe is written, it seems like you should keep the smaller portions separate for later use, but that is not the case. All the dry ingredients get mixed together, all the wet ingredients get mixed together, and then you put the liquid over the wet (so use a larger bowl for the dry ingredients first!). Very easy to put everything together, and then the baking time is half of what I would normally expect from a cake.

Rather than buying or making icing, we decided to make an icing glaze, which is just confectioners sugar with really any liquid you want (we used rum, vanilla extract, and some vanilla soy milk). Because the cake itself is just a light vanilla flavor, it really picks up whatever flavor you choose for the icing. For us, this cake tastes like RUM. But it's good! The cake itself is a little dense but not stodgy, and it's quite pleasant in its simplicity. We easily could have added fruit or sprinkles to the top of the cake to add a little something-something. Easy enough for a quick vegan cake!