I wanted to make a birthday cake for my vegan friend, and that meant no milk, no butter, and no eggs. I decided to search for vegan alternatives, and came up with several awesome looking ones. As a side note, chocolate is easy to make vegan. However, I didn’t have the ingredients for most of the cakes I found. I did what I usually do, however, and I took an existing recipe and re-made it in my own image. That’s right, I am a Food Goddess! This is my lovely sweet treat: Orange Cake
Ingredients
- 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp white vinegar
- 5 tbsp canola or vegetable oil
- 1-1/2 tsp orange extract
- 1 cup orange juice
Preheat your oven to 350*F. Line a 9×9″ pan with parchment paper, leaving an inch over each side overhanging, for easy removal.**
In a large mixing bowl, add your dry ingredients and mix well. Form three depressions in the dry mixture. In one, add the vinegar . In the second, add the orange extract , and in the final one, add the oil. Pour the orange juice over the top and, using a whisk or wooden spoon, mix together until fully combined.
Transfer your cake batter, which will be quite runny, to the lined baking pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes and then check. It will probably take close to 45 minutes to bake entirely, but you need to start checking every five or ten minutes after the 30 minute mark. Continue to bake until a skewer comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes before transferring it to a wire rack to cool completely. If desired, frost the cooled cake.
** I used a round springform baking pan, fully lined with no-stick-sprayed parchment paper. You do have to allow the cake to cool completely before removing the parchment paper, but it works very well. I used a 9 inch diameter pan that was about 1-1/2 inches deep.
I had frosting for this cake. We didn’t use it. We literally ate hunks of it with our hands. It was moist, sweet but not unbearably, and delicious. I would recommend removing 2 tbsp of orange juice from the cup, if you plan to frost the cake. It was so moist, if I had tried to frost it, it would have fallen apart despite having good crumb.