Vegan - The Cake Merchant

Vegan Dark Chocolate, Olive Oil, and Sea Salt Cookies

05.31.14

I’ve never doubted that vegan cakes could taste as good as their non-vegan counterparts, but I wasn’t quite sold on vegan cookies. There are a number of good substitutes for butter (although recently, I’ve been reading how terrible palm oil is), but replacing an egg can be tricky. I’ve tried the flax egg thing, and maybe I’m doing it wrong, but it just doesn’t taste right to me. However, my opinion of vegan cookies changed when I made these.

The egg is replaced by tapioca flour (also known as tapioca starch), which can just be dumped into your recipe as is- no grinding of flaxseeds necessary! I read about this swap in Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, and apparently, it works well with other starches like arrowroot and cornstarch, although I’ve never tried them so I can’t say for sure.

The Texas heat makes me a little sluggish and I wasn’t up for anything elaborate, so this is a total lazy girl’s (or guy’s, no discrimination here) cookie. One bowl, dump and stir, and no chilling time! Instant cookie gratification! However, the food blogger in me did want a little bit of fancy, so I busted out the good olive oil since I thought it paired nicely with the chocolate and topped the cookies with a little bit of flaky sea salt. I like a salty cookie anyway, but dark chocolate practically screams for it. If you’re not a fan of the olive oil in your cookies, this recipe will work just fine with any neutral vegetable oil or even melted coconut oil, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. I liked the olive oil/chocolate combo so much, you may see it soon in the form of a cake!

Vegan Dark Chocolate, Olive Oil, and Sea Salt Cookies

Yield: about 30 cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup (120 ml) good quality extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup (80 ml) unsweetened non-dairy milk
2/3 cup (150 grams) dark brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup (67 grams) organic granulated sugar
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon tapioca flour
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups (188 grams) all purpose flour, divided
1/3 cup Dutch process cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup (175 grams) vegan bittersweet chocolate chips
flaky sea salt for topping

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, beat together the olive oil, non-dairy milk, brown sugar, granulated sugar, and tapioca flour, and vanilla extract with a fork for about 2 minutes until the mixture thickens and looks like caramel.
Add 1 cup of the all purpose flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and mix until combined.
Mix in the remaining 1/2 cup of the flour.
Stir in the chocolate chips.
Using a cookie scoop, drop balls of the cookie dough onto the prepared baking sheets one inch apart. The dough will be a little but greasy, so you may need to use your fingers to push the dough together into balls.
Sprinkle the dough with a little bit of sea salt and bake them for about 8 minutes (9-10 minutes for a crisper cookie.
Cool completely on wire racks.

https://cakemerchant.com/2014/05/31/vegan-olive-oil-chocolate-sea-salt-cookies/

For a thicker, puffier cookie, reduce the non-dairy milk to 1/4 cup.
Baking time is based on cookies that I made with a small cookie scoop. If you make larger cookies, you will need to increase the baking time.
Natural cocoa powder will work in this recipe, but you will end up with a lighter colored cookie.

Vegan Vanilla Birthday Cake

01.28.14

I posted this recipe a little over a year ago because it is one of my favorite cakes to make, but I did not expect that it would become by far the most popular recipe on my site. It’s also the commented on recipe, as well as the most controversial. I know, it’s weird that vanilla cake is controversial, but while some people have had great luck with this recipe, others haven’t, so I want to devote the next couple of paragraphs to troubleshooting, and hopefully we will all have happy vegan vanilla cakes in our bellies.

This is a recipe that I got from one of my very favorite baking books, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. This is the book that got me into baking in the first place, and still the baking book I use the most. I love the vanilla cupcake recipe in this book, but I wanted to make a layer cake version. Since I’m a fan of tall cakes, I made a 3 layer 6-inch version, which is what you see here. I know that not everyone has 3 6-inch pans, so here are some other versions I’ve made with success.

-A 2 layer 7-inch cake (baking time should be increased slightly)
-18 cupcakes (these take about 20 minutes in my oven)
-about 55 mini cupcakes (these take about 10 minutes in my oven)
-I have not tested this recipe in a 9×13 or any kind of sheet pan.

-For the cupcake version of this, click here. You can get 12 cupcakes or 8-inch layer cake out of the cupcake recipe.

I hope that gives you some options as to the size of cake that you want. I’ve also tested this recipe with soy milk, almond milk, and rice milk. For some reason, the rice milk version turned out a little more dense for me. For the frosting, I’ve cut back as much as I could on the sugar. Any less and I got too much “greasy shortening” taste. However, it is still on the sweeter side. If it’s too sweet for you, you could try leaving the sides naked and you’ll have less frosting on the cake overall.

Now onto the trouble shooting.
-I always thought that this recipe was foolproof, but after making this cake in a few different ovens without an oven thermometer, I realized that oven temperature is key. An oven thermometer is a small investment that will help improve your results on this cake and pretty much any other cake you bake. You’d be surprised how much ovens can vary. Mine is almost 25 degrees off!
-Sift together the dry ingredients. I used to skip this and just dump everything in, but sifting the dry ingredients aerates the flour and helps it incorporate into the wet ingredients better.
-Once you add your dry ingredients, don’t over mix! Add the dry ingredients in 3 additions and mix gently after each. It’s ok if the batter still has a few lumps. This will prevent the cake from getting too tough. I prefer to use a whisk rather than an electric mixer or stand mixer for this recipe.
-No peeking! Opening the oven in the first 15 minutes can cause your cake to fall.
-Don’t over bake. Check your cake a few minutes before the recommended baking time. If they look done, use a toothpick to check the center of the cake while it’s still in the oven. If it comes out clean, it’s done.

If you are still have problems with this cake, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll do my best to help you trouble shoot. Happy baking!

It has come to my attention that confectioner’s glaze is not vegan. Please check your ingredients before choosing your sprinkles.

Read The Post

Vegan Whole Wheat Pumpkin Coconut Bread

11.01.13

Happy day after Halloween! I made you some whole wheat vegan baked goods to celebrate. You’re welcome.

We had one trick-or-treater last night, and enough candy for at least 100. This is the first Halloween in a really long time that I’ve been in a house and not an apartment, and I was sure we’d get trick-or-treaters, so I wanted to be prepared. Now we have about 10 pounds of leftover candy, some of which I may or may not have already indulged in. I think my tolerance for sugar has gone down significantly since I was of trick-or-treating age, and I definitely feel a bit of a Halloween hangover. It’s time for some detox.

This version of pumpkin bread is actually pretty healthy. I replaced the vegetable oil in the original recipe with coconut oil, and replaced the all-purpose flour with whole wheat pastry flour. Whole wheat pastry flour is a great way to sneak in whole grains in cakes and breads, since the texture is more delicate than regular whole wheat flour. You could also try a half and half combo of the whole wheat and all-purpose flours.

I’ve made a few batches of this, and decided that I could do without the white sugar completely. It didn’t affect the texture negatively when I left it out, and it was plenty sweet. I did, however, add a sprinkling of crystal cinnamon sugar to the top, which is my new favorite thing. You can find the recipe for that here.

Oh, and the best part about this recipe? It’s easy, only requires one bowl, and no mixer is needed. A dump and stir recipe is pretty much all I can handle while I’m still recovering from sugar coma anyway. Serve this with a pat of vegan butter and a side of coffee. Or a green smoothie. Happy detox!

Read The Post