Vegan Chocolate Cake

Rich, chocolatey and delicious. We'd been looking for a recipe which would replace our favourite non-vegan chocolate cake for quite a while and then we stumbled across this one. We've made a few minor adjustments and we think we've perfected it! Enjoy!

Ingredients:

300ml almond milk (or milk alternative)

Big squeeze of lemon – the more you use, the thicker the milk becomes.

150g Stork or other hard vegan butter.

3tbsp maple syrup

1tsp espresso coffee granules

275g plain flour

175g caster sugar

4tbsp cocoa powder

3tsp baking powder

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method:

1. Measure out the milk and squeeze in the lemon. I recommend a big squeeze to ensure the milk becomes curdled (don’t worry, it’s meant to do that!) which creates buttermilk!

2. In a saucepan, melt the stork, coffee granules and maple syrup. Once melted, leave to one side to cool.

3. Mix together the dry ingredients: plain flour, caster sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder ad bicarbonate of soda. Most people advise that you use a sieve, but unless your dry ingredients are super lumpy – and if they are, what have you done to them?! – I often forgo that advice!

4. Add in the two sets of wet ingredients (the butter mix and the almond milk mix) and whisk in by hand. The batter should be smooth and look chocolatey!

5. Pour into two prepared tins. Top tip: to make them the same size, carefully weigh out the batter using measuring scales to ensure there is an equal amount of batter!

6. Cook for 30-35 minutes (or until a knife or skewer comes out clean) in the over at 180C or Gas Mark 4.

7. Once you remove it from the oven, leave it to cool in the tin for five minutes before removing. To ice, I often use the accidentally vegan Betty Crocker chocolate icing, but you can make your own using stork, cocoa powder and icing sugar to make a butter-cream style frosting.

Adapted from this recipe