Best-ever vegan chocolate cake with vegan chocolate ganache & edible flowers

Name: Best-ever vegan chocolate cake
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 40 min
Ingredients: 1 cup plain flour; 3/4 cup good quality cocoa powder; 1 cup sugar; 1 tsp baking soda; 1 tsp salt; 3/4 cup neutral oil (eg canola oil); 3/4 cup water; 2 tbsp vinegar; 1 tsp vanilla essence; 3 tbsp simple syrup for brushing (just like you would use for cocktails)

August 15, 2020
Uncategorized

This vegan chocolate cake is my childhood cake. It’s cheap and simple, so I made it a lot. And I still do. It contains: flour, sugar, cocoa powder, canola oil, vanilla essence, baking soda and vinegar.

Seriously – cheaper than chips and it comes together in a single bowl. No fancy ingredients like ‘eggs’ and no special equipment like ‘a beater’.

And I still make it because it’s just a good cake – especially with the tweaks I’ve made to the original recipe.

Jump to Recipe

Vegan (but not deliberately)

My vegan chocolate cake recipe is not vegan by design. The original recipe is called ‘Crazy Cake’ because it’s ‘crazy’ to have a cake without traditional en-richening ingredients (eggs, milk, butter), and with barely enough baking soda to raise it. That’s where the vinegar comes in – it puffs up the baking soda like science lesson ‘volcanoes’.

If you’re from Australia or New Zealand, you’ll recognise Crazy Cake as a Dame Alison Holst recipe. Her Big Red Book taught me how to cook, and while some recipes did not hold up past the rubicon of the millennium, I still make modified Crazy Cake.

Turns out it’s the ‘weird’ lack of butter that gives this vegan chocolate cake its tender texture.

In Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (the book, not the TV show), Samin Nosrat lays out the science under a section entitled Tender Cakes:

Tender Cakes

For years, I was disappointed by almost every single cake I tasted, whether I’d baked it myself or ordered it in a restaurant or bakery. I dreamed of a cake that was moist yet flavourful. So many cakes were one or the other: store-bought cake mixes yielded the texture I was after, but were relatively flavourless, and cakes from fancy patisseries were rich in flavour, but often dry or dense. I figured it was an either-or situation. And I resigned myself to it.
Then I tasted a chocolate birthday cake so moist and rich that I nearly fainted from delight. For days, that slice of cake haunted me, so I begged my friend for the recipe. … I noticed it was made with oil and water rather than butter.
There was something to these oil cakes. I flipped through my mental recipe box and realised that many of my favourite cakes, including classic carrot cake and olive oil cake, are made with oil instead of butter. Even cake mixes, which produce the ideal texture I’d been trying to emulate, direct you to add oil. What is it about oil that yields such moist cakes?
Science holds the answer. Oil efficiently coats flour proteins and prevents strong gluten networks from forming, much like soft butter does in shortbread. Gluten development requires water, so this oil barrier significantly inhibits gluten formation, leading to a tender, rather than chewy texture. As an added bonus, less gluten means more water in the batter, and ultimately a moister cake.

Cake, but make it fancy

This is a perfect everyday cake with a little icing sugar dusted over the top. This vegan cake can veer towards the dry side: fix that issue by brushing it with simple syrup while still warm.

Vegan chocolate cake piled with raspberries and edible flowers

When I made this cake recently for a friend’s birthday (attended by two vegans and one dairy-free person), I made this a little more special, basically with styling:

Two layers rather than one
Spiked with sugar syrup for a moister cake (if you attended you’ll know I went a little overboard – I’m not sorry)
Vegan chocolate ganache
Topped with fresh raspberries
Decorated with edible flowers from the balcon jardin because I was 110% showing off, I’m not sorry for that either

Ready for the recipe?

Best-ever vegan chocolate cake

Deliciously moist and chocolatey, and vegan too! No fancy equipment, this all mixes up in a single bowl. And because this best-ever vegan chocolate cake is also dairy-free and egg free, your friends with food sensitivities can enjoy it too!

Print Recipe

Prep Time 15 mins

Cook Time 40 mins

Course Dessert

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour
3/4 cup good quality cocoa powder
1 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup neutral oil eg canola oil
3/4 cup water
2 tbsp vinegar
1 tsp vanilla essence
3 tbsp simple syrup for brushing just like you would use for cocktails

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees, and oil or line your cake tin.
Sift all the dry ingredients into a large bowl. This is quite essential – it helps the cake rise.
Tip in all the liquids – except the simple syrup – and stir together with a fork or a whisk.
The mixture may be slightly too wet or too dry depending on the cocoa powder – if it is too dry, still in another quarter cup or oil or water. If it is too wet, add in two more tablespoons of cocoa powder.
Bake for 40 minutes, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.
Leave to rest in the tin, and brush with simple syrup while still warm.

Keyword cakes, vegan

Other recipes have more detail about the vegan chocolate ganache. But basically: gently heat full-fat coconut cream (I used half a tin) and add dark chocolate (I used about a 250g block). Mix to melt the chocolate and make sure everything is smooth. Pop in the fridge to get it to the right, spreadable consistency.

If you are using edible flowers, google them carefully and wash them well. And pop them off before eating, just in case. I used red geranium – which happen to be the birthday girl’s favourite. I added a couple of flowers from my oxalis, and a single nasturtium flower.