Vegan Chocolate Cake/Cupcakes

I made this recipe for this month’s Twitter’s Hottest Home Baker challenge – but the end results looked a little too poo-like for me to enter. They were delicious though!
I’m not vegan, but I have an eight year old cousin who can’t eat eggs or nuts, so these were made with him in mind. My mum’s gluten free – so for her, I’d take out the flour and a tablespoon worth of oil, and use 1 cup of ground almonds and ½ cup rice flour instead. Winner.

Ingredients

1 ½ cups standard flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/3 cup cocoa
1 cup sugar
½ cup canola oil
½ cup water
½ cup pulp-free orange juice
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tsp malt vinegar

Method

Sift flour, baking soda and cocoa together, stir in sugar.
In a separate bowl, combine canola oil, water, orange juice and vanilla essence.
Mix wet and dry mixtures together, then stir the malt vinegar through just before pouring the mixture into your cake tin/muffin tray.
I baked mine in a silicone muffin tray at 180 degrees celsius for 10-15 minutes, and found that they only rose up a little bit.
For icing, I used icing sugar, cocoa, orange juice and a tiny bit of canola oil.

It’s Twitter’s Hottest Home Baker time again, (what?) and now bakers can suggest themes to go into the pool. On Friday at midnight this month’s theme was drawn – Caramel!

Caramel Slice sprang to mind immediately, I love the stuff. It’s so so bad, but so so good, and I actually haven’t tried making it before.

I had a look through my recipe books, and did a little browsing through some baking sites. In the end I chose the best sounding aspects of a range of recipes, and melded them together into my own little plan of attack.

Instead of the baked flour base most recipes seem to have, I went for a base that I use for cheesecake and just adore – it makes the slice a little crunchy too as it’s baked. I added ground almonds to the base but it would also rock with desiccated coconut.

Most recipes use two spoons of golden syrup in the caramel, but I like it to be darker so doubled that to great effect. I was using lite condensed milk (haha!) which is a little less sweet than the normal one, but the slice is still really rich.

Whittker’s milk madagascar chocolate has a very distinct flavour, it matches beautifully with the caramel.

This time I cranked out the tripod and took photos all the way through too.

Check out (and vote for!) my entry in the competition on the Twitter’s Hottest Home Baker website.

Crunchy Baked Caramel Slice

Ingredients

Base:

½ packet Super Wine biscuits
100g butter
40g ground almonds

Filling:

1 tin lite sweetened condensed milk
4 tbsp Golden Syrup
30g butter

Topping:

250g Whittakers Milk Madagascar Chocolate

Method

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.

Blend the biscuits to crumbs, and add the ground almonds.

Melt the butter, mix it incrementally into the biscuit mixture, it looks a bit like wet breadcrumbs.

Line your baking pan with baking paper, and give it a spray of cooking oil to help with the sticky factor.

Press the biscuit base into the baking tin, I use a big, quite flat spoon. Pack the crumbs in tightly and evenly. Put the base into the oven for ten minutes.

Combine the condensed milk, golden syrup and second measure of butter in a thick-based pot and stir over medium heat. Be careful not to burn the caramel – it starts to stick to the base quite quickly. You can remove it from the heat when the butter has melted and the mixture has thickened slightly.

The base should be out of the oven by now, pour the caramel over the base and spread it evenly. Put it back in the oven for ten minutes.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler (my preference) or in the microwave. If you don’t want the chocolate to set solidly on your slice, add a tablespoon of oil or cream as you’re melting the chocolate.

Pour the melted chocolate over the slice and spread it so it covers the slice evenly, up to all edges. Let the slice cool a little longer, then put it in the fridge. In about fifteen minutes, take it out and cut the slices before the chocolate has set hard. Put it back in the fridge.

When it’s all set, you can take it out of it’s pan. It apparently keeps in the fridge for about four days – if you/family can resist eating it for that long!

Quite often on Sundays I find myself amidst a yMedia “working session” at my house, where people take over my dining room table and we make the magic happen.

Today I snuck in some muffin making, much to the delight of my visitors. Here’s what I made, with the photographic evidence because they haven’t lasted long.

Crunchy Lemon Muffins

A variation of an Alison Holst recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups self-raising flour
¾ cup sugar
75g butter
1 cup milk
1 egg, preferably size 7
grated rind of 2 lemons
¼ cup Lemon Juice
¼ cup Sugar

If you want to be a bit healthier about it, you could substitute the butter for 5 tbsp canola oil, and use 5-6 tbsp of honey instead of the first measure of sugar.

Method

Preheat your oven to 200°C, and mix together the flour and first measure of sugar.

Melt the butter, add the milk, egg and lemon rind and beat with a fork.

Pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients, and fold together until the ingredients are just mixed – muffins get tough and rubbery if you stir them too much, so stop when all the flour is wet and the mixture is still lumpy.

Spoon the mixture into a greased muffin tray or use paper muffin cases in your tray, and bake for 10-12 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the muffins comes out clean.

When the muffins are done, add the second measure of sugar to the lemon juice without dissolving the sugar, and brush onto the tops of the muffins. Let them stand and cool slightly – the topping will harden to form the crunchy part.

Twitter’s Hottest Home Baker is a project conjured up over sashimi one lunch break.

We were dissatisfied with the cupcake making on a television baking competition, and thought it would be great to compete with all of Twitter.

Priya took this little concept, and ran with it. Very far.

There’s a random mystery theme, a countdown till bakeoff, and soon the oppurtunity to add your own theme. Entries are submitted via twitpic with the hashtag #hothomebaker, and can then be rated by anyone.

These are my sweet little Strawberry cupcakes, rate them!

BANANA CUPCAKES

¾ cup sugar
¾ cup canola oil
2 eggs
1 cup mashed bananas
1 ½ cups standard flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 180C, and line your cupcake or muffin tray with paper liners.

Place the sugar and oil in large bowl and mix well.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly before stirring in the mashed bananas.

Combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and sift into the banana mixture. Stir in gradually until just mixed, don’t stir too much or your cupcakes will be rubbery!

Spoon the mixture into the paper liners. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a skewer pushed into the middle comes out clean.

Stand the cupcakes for a few minutes to set them, then remove the cupcakes to a wire rack to cool. When cold, spread with icing. I used chocolate icing but cream cheese or lemon icing is delicious too.