Piece of cake?
How about a slice of lemon pound cake? A classic pound cake seems such a simple product, you can either buy one in the supermarket (usually not that tasty), at your local bakery, or if you can bake a bit you bake one yourself.
Vegan version of lemon pound cake might be a bit of a challenge
But a really tasty vegan cake seemed like a bit of a challenge, if not impossible to us for a very long time, since eggs play such an important role in the lightness and silky texture of a great pound cake. If you omit the eggs, the cake soon collapses after baking due to a lack of support which the eggs provide. How to solve that? You could add more starch, but that didn’t turn out to be the best solution. Surely you expect a good pound cake to have a certain luscious richness, both in flavour and texture. So we experimented a lot in our test kitchen, with sometimes disappointing, sometimes reasonable results. Quite a few kilos of flour, plant-based butter and sugar had to pass through our hands before we were on the right track. The discovery of certain special ingredients also helped.
The thing with vegan baking and cooking is, sometimes you manage to veganise a dish or bake by studying the original preparation and then substituting the animal products and sticking to the original preparation method, but far more often you don’t. And especially in baking, the latter is usually the case. So too with pound cake it seemed to be the case. In such a case, you have to go back to the ‘drawing board’ and do things completely differently. We discovered that for a good vegan cake it will not work to first whip the butter until fluffy, as is done in classic cold cake preparation. Whipping a substitute for eggs (e.g. aquafaba) with sugar, as is done in classic hot cake preparation does not work either.During baking, the whipped aquafaba loses its substance. During baking, the whipped aquafaba collapses into a desintegrates into a splash of water in your batter, causing your cake to collapse hopelessly.
Big Five of Baking
What really helped us was studying the five most important ingredients in baking and their key roles. We call these ingredients the Big Five of Baking. Each of these five ingredients has a specific function and the interplay between them determines the final structure of your baking and whether it is successful or not
Deconstructing lemon pound cake: structure builder or breaker?
One of the most important properties of the Big Five of Baking is whether the ingredient contributes to the firmness of the pastry or, on the contrary, to its tenderness or smoothness. In our Vegan Pastry course, we use the terms structure builder or structure breaker for this distinction.
Good pastry always consists of a combination of structure-building and structure-breaking ingredients. In the Big Five of Baking lesson from the Vegan Pastry course, we explain for each ingredient which category they belong to.
Want to learn the intricacies of vegan baking? Then consider taking the online Vegan Pastry course. Have you already purchased this course? Then log in now or read on immediately for this delicious recipe for Lemon cake.
Garnished lemon poundcake
Equipment
- 1 cake tin for poundcake
- 1 measuring jar or immersion blender cup
- 1 batter bowl
- 1 whisk
- 1 immersion blender
- 1 sheet of baking/parchment paper
Ingredients
for the cake batter
- 220 g all-purpose flour
- 30 g lupin flour can be replaced by chickpea flour or lentil flour
- 20 g potato starch
- 12 g baking powder or 1/3rd of the weight in baking soda
- 2 g salt
- 180 g castor sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar
- 250 ml soy milk or any other plant milk
- 95 g butter
- 30 g lemon juice
- 1 lemon, its zest preferably organic
candied lemon peel
- 1 lemon
- 50 g castor sugar
- water
lemon icing
- 50 g powdered sugar
- 7 g lemon juice
Instructions
preparing cake
- Preheat oven to 160° C for convection oven or 175° C for a conventional oven
- Prepare a cake tin by greasing it well or lining it with a piece of baking paper
- Sift flour, chickpea flour, potato starch, baking powder and salt together in a bowl, and mix well with a whisk to evenly distribute all dry ingredients.220 g all-purpose flour, 30 g lupin flour, 20 g potato starch, 12 g baking powder, 2 g salt
- Melt the butter together with the lemon zest95 g butter, 1 lemon, its zest
- Mix milk, sugar, vanilla sugar and lemon juice with a hand blender in a measuring cup until the sugar dissolves.180 g castor sugar, 1 tsp vanilla sugar, 250 ml soy milk, 30 g lemon juice
- Now add the butter mixture to the milk mixture and mix with a whisk, hand blender or food processor.
- Pour the liquid part onto the dry ingredients and stir well with a whisk to form a smooth batter
- Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin, place the cake in the centre of the oven and bake for 50 minutes until cooked and golden brown. The cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and dry or when the core temperature is at least 80 °C.
- Meanwhile, prepare the candied lemon peel and spoon some of the juice of the lemon peel over the surface of your still warm cake, about 15 minutes after it came out of the oven.
- Allow the cake to cool for about 20 minutes before carefully releasing the cake and letting it cool further on a wire rack.
preparation candied lemon peels
- Wash the lemon. Peel off the skin using a peeler or sharp knife to get only the yellow part of the skin, not the white. Peel from top to bottom, in long and wide strips.1 lemon
- Cut the lemon peel strips into julienne (thin strips)
- Weigh the lemon juice in a saucepan and add water to the juice to a weight of 85 g liquid in total. Add the lemon peel julienne and sugar and boil over low heat gently 6 minutes without a lid on the pan. Stay with it, the liquid should become a light syrup, it should not caramelise.50 g castor sugar, water
- Spoon approx. 4 tablespoons of the zest syrup over the still warm cake, about 15 minutes after it came out of the oven.
- Keep the lemon zest in the remaining syrup until you are about to glaze and garnish the cake (when the cake has cooled down)
preparing icing
- Mix icing sugar and lemon juice with a spoon into a thick, pipeable or spreadable icing, put it in a small piping bag if you have one, if no piping bag at hand you might also apply it later with a pallete knife or even the back of a spoon50 g powdered sugar, 7 g lemon juice
finishing
- Using a piping bag, apply the icing in decorative diagonal stripes (or smooth it with a palette knife) This way, you can also apply a written (birthday) decoration.
- Decorate the cake by applying the candied lemon peel to the still wet icing and let the icing to dry