How to Make a Vegan Birthday Cake

It was my mummy's birthday on Saturday! Happy birthday, Mum!

Mum recently turned awkward vegan. I wanted to make her a lovely cake, but all my normal recipes use eggs, milk, butter, yoghurt, etc. etc. The only one I know of that doesn't is carrot cake, but Dad moans like a 3 year old if you suggest a cake with vegetables in it!

Luckily Google is my friend and after a few minutes searching I came across the Vegan Society's website, and more importantly their birthday cake page. I liked these recipes because they used ingredients most people already have, rather than the bizarre concoctions found on other websites.

I chose to make the chocolate cake recipe. The only ingredient non-vegans might not have is vegan chocolate for icing, but you can get this in a lot of health food shops. Alternatively, I just decided to make a chocolate-flavoured “butter” icing instead.

The cake ingredients:

200g self raising flour
2 heaped tsp baking powder
25g cocoa
75g Barbados sugar (this is muscavado sugar)
100ml vegetable oil
550-750ml cold water (I only used 500ml. I think if you used the full 750ml it would just be chocolate flavoured water!) 

My chocolate-flavoured "butter" icing:

50g vegan margarine (eg. Vitalite, which is made from sunflower oil)

100g icing sugar

1tsp cocoa powder

The recipe says to just blend all the cake ingredients together in a food processor, but I didn't have one to hand. For the non-technologically advanced, I suggest the following:

1. Sieve the flour into a mixing bowl. Add the baking powder, cocoa and sugar, then mix together.
2. Mix in the vegetable oil.
3. Add the water in little by little, mixing it until it has the consistency of normal cake mix; pourable, but not too runny.
4. Divide the mixture evenly between two greased cake tins (I used 8 inch tins) and cook for 25-30 minutes at 180ºC (380F, gas mark 4).
5. Once cooked, cool on a cake rack.
6. Make up “butter icing” (beat 50g vegan margarine, 100g sugar and 1tsp cocoa together) and use to sandwich the two halves together.
7. Decorate by sieving icing sugar over the top!

It turned out a LOT better than the last birthday cake I posted on this blog.

The Reviews

“It's the best cake ever!” - Mum, the vegan. (Possibly slightly biased? :D)

“It's actually not that bad” - The Boyfriend, he likes meat.

“You wouldn't know it's vegan” - Dad, a compliment by his standards!

I think it tasted pretty nice. If you go for the chocolate icing that the website recommends, then I would add more sugar to the cake mix as the sweetness of mine mainly comes from the “butter” icing.

Mum was happy to be able to have cake for once! :)