Vegan lemon drizzle cake
Vegan lemon drizzle cake
In the last week and a half I transitioned from the Siberian cold that I’ve had to endure during my holiday in Poland, to an almost spring aura over here. I mean there is a bit of a chill in the air still, but the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and it almost feels like Madam Spring herself has finally moved in. I love that transition when everything (people included) wakes up from the sluggishness of winter.
I went running again for the first time in about 3 weeks (an illness and my holidays, which ended up lasting longer than planned, have derailed my training a bit) and even though I was totally out of breath by the end, I loved it! By way of motivating myself to be a bit more consistent with my running, I have (perhaps stupidly) signed up for a 10 km race in mid-May so I’ve got a goal to help keep me focused.
Right now, I’m only at about 4-5 km and I haven’t got heaps of time to reach 10 km comfortably, but I think it’s doable if I put the work in. As I am training, I am being a bit more careful about what I eat and I’m trying to stay off sugar as much as possible. I did have a slice of this cake, but the old me would have had way more than that. I’m trying to catch myself when I do mindless eating, which happens when I’m stressed, frustrated or bored, as it brings me no joy or nutrition.
The key, I found, is to get rid of the offending item as soon as possible. The moment I finished my photoshoot I ran over to my neighbour with a few slices of cake on a plate and packed the rest up for Duncan to take to work tomorrow. That way I get to enjoy feeding other people and I still get to eat one slice (in the name of testing, of course) and not gorge myself silly and feel disgusted with my lack of will power the moment I finish.
Anyways, ‘cos it’s almost spring, I’ve decided to make a cake that for some reason reminds me of spring – a classic lemon drizzle cake. I’m not sure why as it’s not like lemons grow in the UK anyway. Perhaps it’s the colour, like the colour of daffodils, which wink at me from all corners of our garden. The cake is light and moist, tangy yet sweet at the same time. Perfect with a cup of afternoon tea in the Spring sunshine.
- 100 g / Β½ cup neutral oil (for example mild coconut oil)
- 125 g / Β½ cup + 2 tbsp caster sugar
- 180 ml / ΒΎ cup thin & lukewarm (not from the fridge) plant milk (I used almond)
- 60 ml / ΒΌ cup lemon juice (approx. 1 lemon)
DRY INGREDIENTS
- zest of 2 lemons
- 180 g / 1Β½ cups all purpose white flour or GF cake flour mix, sifted
- ΒΎ tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 100 g / 1 cup almond meal or finely ground almonds*
LEMON AND ROSEMARY SYRUP
- 70 g / 1/3 cup caster sugar (fine sugar)
- juice of 1Β½ lemons (about 90 ml / 6 tbsp juice)
- 1-2 fresh rosemary sprigs (optional)
ICING (optional)
- 50-100 g / Β½-1 cup icing sugar*
- juice of Β½-1 lemon
- Heat up the oven to 180Β° C (or 160Β° C fan forced) / 355Β° F (320Β° F fan forced). Line a 1 kg / 2 lb tin with a wide strip of baking paper to be able to remove your cake easily.
- Melt the coconut oil gently over a low heat.
- Whisk the coconut oil and sugar together with an electric whisk. Add in the plant milk, lemon juice and lemon zest.
- Place a sieve over the bowl with the wet ingredients and sift through all the dry ingredients, except for the almond meal. Fold them in gently, until just combined.
- Next, gently fold in the almond meal.
- Transfer the batter to the prepared baking tin.
- Bake for about 50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the top is nicely browned.
- Once baked, remove the cake from the tin. Pierce the top with a toothpick in several places to allow the syrup to infuse the cake better. Brush the surface of the hot cake (that’s important as otherwise the syrup will stay on the surface) with syrup several times allowing the syrup to soak into the cake between each go.
- Once cool, drizzle with icing starting from the middle so that it drips down to the sides creating pretty drizzle marks.
LEMON AND ROSEMARY SYRUP
- Place the sugar and lemon juice in a small pot over a low heat. Add sprigs of rosemary if you wish.
- Bring the contents of the pot to a gentle simmer and cook until the sugar dissolves completely. Set aside.
ICING
- Whisk the icing sugar and lemon juice in a medium size bowl until fully combined. Add the lemon juice gradually to avoid lumps in your icing. Alternatively, you could also sift your icing sugar before combining it with the lemon juice.
*Given that the cake is already covered in sugar syrup, I recommend making a smaller amount of icing (50 g / Β½ cup icing sugar and juice from Β½ lemon) and drizzling the cake with it for decoration. The larger quantity given above allows you to cover the cake in icing completely.
I used a 2 lb / 900 g cake tin of the following dimensions: 18.5cm x 8cm x 6cm (like this). It holds 8 cups / 2000 ml liquid (to the brim), but the batter should fill no more than 2/3 β 3/4 of the 2lb cake tin or else the cake may not raise.
My 4 yrs old and hubby are fond of it.
Can't count how many times I made it !!
Thank you very much for sharing.
Best wishes from Switzerland
Caroline
I was excited to try the vegan lemon cake and to be honest, it's my first time going out of the ready cake mix. As a first try, it came out shocking though its ingredients were exactly as same as measured above !!! :( but I'm considering it as a great move to the vegan lifestyle. I forgot to add baking soda tho it was placed right in between the ingredients, eventually, it didn't rise while baking!
I want to bake again because I know it tastes different than the other familiar flavors but I don't want to repeat the same mistakes, any thoughts in mind?
The trouble is baking soda is absolutely crucial in this recipe. Together with lemon juice it leavens the cake making it light and fluffy. Better luck next time! Ania
I substituted the almond flour with normal + rice flour (because I didn't have almond meal :) ) and it's the nicest, tallest and best tasting vegan cake I've ever made before!!! :D It's super tall, light and fluffy! I'll definitely try all of your recipes!!
Thank you
Also Ania :-)
thanks.
Your blog is one of my favourites! Thank you for sharing such delicious recipes.
My only problem with this cake was that I didn't make 2!!!!
Thanks for a delicious recipe x
Thanks!
I'm glad to hear that it all ended up well in the end (almond flour is vastly different from regular flour btw and so a straight swap rarely works). As for raising, it is one of these cakes (partly due to the fact that it uses almond flour, which is heavy) that does not raise an awful lot, as you can probably see in my photo the loaf is fairly flat and low, but the cake should be light inside. I hope it will taste nicely. Ania
β’ Caster sugar :: I pulsed white granulated sugar in the food processor to create "caster sugar".
β’ Thin plant milk :: I used 1/2 cup oat milk and 1/4 cup water to thin it out.
β’ Almond meal :: I used fine almond flour.
β’ Optionals :: I left out the optional rosemary and icing.
β’ Parchment paper :: I didn't want to use parchment paper (to reduce waste), so I greased the pan with a bit of coconut oil, and it worked perfectly! :)
Thank you! <3
Yes, of course! It should work just fine. The only thing you should be aware of is that I used mild (deodorised) coconut oil so that the cake doesn't taste of coconut, if your mum's oil is extra virgin, the cake will a have coconutty taste. Hope that helps! Ania
The reason I say 'thin' milk is because I used almond milk and so I am sure that any other thin plant milk (like soya, coconut or rice etc.) will work well too. As for using thick coconut milk, it should be okay too, but as it contains more fat, I would perhaps sub some of the oil required in this recipe for it (for example 240 ml / 1 cup thick coconut milk and 60 ml / 1/4 cup oil). Hope that helps! Ania
So... I'm sure the baking soda was good since today I used it also for other cakes and they raised.
I used a 23cm round pan and I measured it with 1l of water and it seemed to be good in comparison with the loaf pan.
I used a hand wisk instead of an electric one to mix first coconut oil and caster sugar and then all the ingredients. Can it be the problem? After making the batter I had to wait about 45min before baking it because the oven was busy... π€
Maybe this waiting time was too bad for the raising process? Sometimes it happens also with other cakes but they raise the same...
Anyway, the taste of this cake is delicious and I definitely will try it again!! βΊ But first I'd like to be sure that it will raise as the one in you pic! π
So having read your most recent comment, I think it is two things that are at play here. Yes, the first one is probably the fact that the batter was sitting around for a while before being baked. And the second is that your pan is a bit too big, which is not a problem per se but this is why the cake doesn't appear to have risen. I've just made another cake from almost twice as much flour (300 g flour + 150 g ground nuts) in a 21 cm round tin and it feels like the tin is still a touch too big for the amount of batter I had so I can imagine that 180 g flour + 100 g will give you a very flat cake in 23 cm tin. 16-18 cm tin feels more appropriate. Hope that helps! Ania
Sure, I think that a round pan should be absolutely fine, but I am unsure as to which size off the top of my head. You would need to calculate volume of both tins and make sure they are roughly the same. Ania
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CieszΔ siΔ niezmiernie, ΕΌe blog Ci sΕuΕΌy :) Co do cytynowca to myΕlΔ, ΕΌe wiΓ³rki kokosowe zmielone na drobno w malakserze lub mΕynku do kawy teΕΌ siΔ Εadnie spiszΔ . A jak nie masz to moΕΌe po prostu dodaj ciut wiΔcej mΔ ki (tak na oko jakieΕ 50-75 g wiΔcej chociaΕΌ z gΓ³ry zaznaczam, ΕΌe nie probowaΕam z samΔ mΔ kΔ wiΔc trochΔ zgadujΔ). Powodzenia i daj znaΔ jak wyszΕo! Ania
Yes, the thawing raspberries added unwanted moisture changing the dry to wet ingredients ratio and resulting in a wet cake. Ania
It's in the oven now but it was all lumpy because of the folding part. I hope it comes out delicious π
Greetings deniz
I hope it came out well. Not sure why you are saying it was lumpy, it shouldn't be. Hope it's nice to eat! Ania
I don't have caster sugar here so I took granulated sugar and blitzed it in the food processor a few times, and then measured it by weight according to the recipe. For the drizzle, I didn't bother blitzing it since I was measuring by weight and it gets dissolved anyway.
Omitted the rosemary. Used bottled lemon juice and skipped the lemon zest.
Skipped the icing.
Otherwise followed the recipe to a T with all measurements by weight.
I don't know if this is related to my use of the 'homemade caster sugar', but the cake didn't rise very well. It rose a little bit but then completely sank back down in the middle. After baking the edges were higher than the middle. Made it difficult to apply the drizzle evenly. Baked for 45 minutes, at which point a toothpick came out clean. I did not even open the oven until 40 minutes. When we ate it, it was very dense, I presume due to the sinking.
It was not clear when to remove the cake from the pan. Sometime after the drizzle but before the icing I presume? Mine lifted quite easily out of the pan after applying the drizzle and then letting it cool for an hour or so.
It also wasn't clear the methodology for mixing the dry ingredients into the wet. I get that they are sifted into the bowl but then you proceed straight from there to folding in the almond flour. Would love to know how long to mix, what to look for, etc. Should it still be using the electric whisk?
The flavor of the lemon drizzle was absolutely incredible. The flavor and texture of the cake itself were 3.5/5 stars. I don't want to blame the recipe since I didn't have caster sugar. But I did think the batter desperately needs salt added to it to bring out the flavors. Thankfully the drizzle just took everything over the top and mitigated any issues with the cake, in my opinion.
All of those things being said, the cake was really great. Even with the flaws, which were possibly introduced by me, it was hard not to gobble it up, and pretty amazing that it's gluten-free. I will definitely make it again, but it would help me a lot if you'd provide the clarifications I requested!
Thanks for your detailed feedback! What makes this cake rise is a combustive reaction between baking soda and acid (in this case lemon juice) so unless you skipped either of those, which sounds like you didn't, it should rise just fine. I'm pretty sure that that's the reason why the cake turned out dense as I have had it tested by several people (neighbours, friends and Duncan's co-workers) and all of them commented on how light and airy the cake was - you can even see that in the cross-section photo. So I think all the issues you describe stem from the same thing. Is it possible that your baking soda was out of date and therefore lost its fizz? If that's not the case, I am really not sure what to suggest - I really don't think your sugar hack was to blame. I have had lots of people make this cake already and send me pictures across Facebook and Instagram and none of them reported any issues so I'm puzzled. As for the instructions not being detailed enough, my apologies, I might have made too many assumptions here - will edit them now. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that it wasn't inedible and that you enjoyed it after all. Ania
Thanks so much!
Jayna
Sorry for the delay, but I'm on the European time zone! I've never used granulated sugar, but it seems like it would work better than powdered. Also, brown sugar/ demerara should work well too. Ania
Oh, and I was lazy and simply pureed 180ml of water with 100g of almonds, that works just fine - the consistency is a bit like a batch for soft meringue. I guess folding in the almond meal is supposed to create a similar effect?
Sorry if I
Glad the cake turned out well in the end:) Not sure what you mean when you say 'it became chunky' - I assume you used melted coconut oil, not solid? The cake is supposed to be fairly moist and then the syrup makes it even more so, but it shouldn't be so wet that it's falling apart. I took mine out of the pan very easily thanks to the strip of paper I had at the bottom of the pan. I hope this helps! Ania
You could sub it for desiccated coconut, ground up finely in a food processor or coffee grinder or simply use more flour. I'm guessing (as I haven't tried making it without almond meal) that 50 g of extra flour will do as flour is more absorbent than almond meal. Hope that helps! Ania
Beautiful recipe but too much refined sugar. to make it healthy and refined sugar free can sub it with Xylitol, Sukrin or Natvia
Love your recipes
With regards to your previous comment, apologies for the delay in replying but we were sleeping! We are on European time zone, as you probably know. I'm glad to hear that you like my recipes.
As for the sugar, while I am trying to keep my recipes healthy if/when I can, veganism isn't a diet, it's simply an avoidance of animal-derived products so this is my key focus when creating recipes. I am not a fan of sweeteners myself and they do produce very different results when used in baking so that's why I don't include them in my recipes. As for alternative sugars, I am fairly convinced that the so called 'healthy' sugars are not treated by our body any differently, they are all metabolised in the same way (Dr Greger has done a video recently explaining that there are marginal benefits to swapping regular sugar for sugars which are often considered as healthier, like coconut sugar, for example).
My approach is to have sugar occasionally and in moderate quantity and so baking a cake is an occasion that calls for sugar, in my opinion. You are, of course, welcome to substitute it with whatever serves you better. All the best! Ania
As for white refined sugar, which is sweet poison it does make a difference to ones metabolism, and health. my friend is diabetic, natural sweeteners do not affect her insulin. Artificial sweeteners are even worse. The world is plagued with obesity and diabetes etc, processed foods are laden with refined sugars, and people are not aware of the damage refined sugar will do if used in excess.
But it's okay i do understand you're vegan I actually love vegan foods, so healthy, so I may as well keep it healthy and not use refined sugars, even though I'm not vegan. I just wanted to mention the damage refined sugars can do.
I made the Lemon Cake with a healthy natural sweetener it was so yummy, thank you so much for the recipe. Love your blog.
I want to make the lemon drizzle cake, but want to know the nutritional summary before I make it. What are the sugar and carb numbers/
Thanks for offering these wonderful healthy alternatives!
We've looked into that, but unfortunately there is no plugin that provides reliable nutritional value calculations, and so the only way to provide them is to research every single item and do the calculations manually. Given that I have over 300 recipes on my blog calculating it and updating all by hand is a massive job, as you can probably imagine, and I simply don't have the time to do that at this moment. Thanks for your understanding! Ania
Lemon drizzle cake is my favourite. It's especially lovely with poppy seeds through it! I can't wait to try this. What flowers do you have on top?