Review 1: Vegetus cake, my favorite cake recipe

Hi! Thank you for visiting my blog today. I hope you are doing well. I am fine, I’ve just been busy with job interviews and organizing new vegan activism, so I had less time to write and post on my blog. But, today I will share my to go to recipe for cake/cupcakes! This recipe is made by Martine from a blog called ‘Vegetus‘, who is also the person behind the blog gewoonvegan.nl in which you can find most vegan products in the Netherlands. I use this recipe all the time because it’s easy, contains simple ingredients yet it’s super delicious, so I wanted to share it with you. Her blog is in Dutch, you can find the original blog post here, but because most of my readers don’t know Dutch (because they are from other countries), I asked if I could share the translation of the recipe here. The original recipe is for an orange cake which I’ve made before and find delicious too, but if you substitute the orange juice for plant-milk and leave out the orange zest, you’ll get a beautiful vanilla cake batter, to which you can also add blue berries, raspberries, chocolate chips, coconut flakes and go on. Enough said, let’s get baking!

Ingredients – for about 17 cupcakes

• 260 g (2 cups) flower
• 2 tablespoons of corn starch
• 3 teaspoons of baking powder or 1 teaspoon of baking powder + 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract or a some vanilla sugar
• 200 g of sugar (1 cup), I used crystal sugar, but the recipe says cane sugar so you can use that too)
• 360 mL (1 1/2 cup) unsweetened plant-milk, I used oat milk for this batch but have used soy, cashew and almond milk for this recipe before.
• 120 mL (1/2 cup) oil or melted vegan butter, I used Wajang butter
• Optional: blueberries, raspberries, chopped up dark chocolate, coconut flakes or any other ingredients that you like

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C.
2. Mix most of the dry ingredients (flower, corn starch, baking powder) in one bowl.
3. Add the sugar, vanilla extract/sugar, plant-milk and melted vegan butter to another (larger) bowl and whisk it until the sugar is dissolved.
4. Add the dry ingredient to the larger bowl too and whisk it until most lumps are dissolved. It’s okay if there still are some lumps in the batter.
5. Add one or a few additional toppings to the batter or divide the batter in two if you like to try two cupcake flavors. This time I added raspberries to the first half of the batter and chopped up dark chocolate to the second.
6. Grease the cupcake malts and add the batter to the malt, I used two spoons for that and that worked well. I know for cupcakes you could also use paper malts to pour the batter in, but I try to reduce my waste and it’s just as easy to get them out (if you have greased it!) of the malt without.
7. Once the oven is preheated, pop them in for about 20 minutes!*
8. When the cupcakes are finished, keep them inside the malt until they have cooled down.

*: If you prefer to make one big cake rather than cupcakes, you could use a (greased) malt with a width of 22 cm. The cake will then be done after about 30 minutes.

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So, there you have it, my favorite recipe for vegan cakes! Like I said, I’ve made these plenty of times and it always is a success! I came across this recipe in a Dutch baking group on Facebook (Heel Holland Bakt Vegan) and I remember I already used this recipe three times in the first two weeks. I was a bit nervous about baking vegan since I love desserts and thought it would be hard to veganize them, but there really is no need to worry and this recipe is a great one. I know Martine from Vegetus also has some recipes on how to make seitan and vegan cheese on her blog, so I might try those too. I got a cheese cloth for my birthday, so I can now finally try to make my own oat milk and cashew cheese! I will keep you posted on how that will go, if you have made one of those before, do you have some tips for me? Also please share what your favorite desserts/sweets are and if you would like to see a vegan version of it. Have a good rest of your day!