The Vegan Lamb Part One

Today I tried the vegan lamb cake recipe taken from the blog ,Vegan Cooking In Colorado (which was taken from  Issa Chandra Moskowicz's great book,Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World). It was kind of scary because I kept thinking the cake wouldn't bake or rise. Yet, this animal friendly pound cake did.

Baking a scratch cake is always a leap of faith.It could go wrong even though leavening has been added. Of course it starts with a greased and floured pan.

It's the same as with the regular (non-vegan?) cake, generously grease with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and then a generous coating of flour.

These are the liquid ingredients. The  1/2 cup vanilla soy yogurt and 2/3rd cups canola oil make up for the lack of eggs.The recipe calls for soy milk but I've had good luck with the almond kind so I went with Almond Breeze's.It just takes 1 and 1/3 cup.

I also had to add vanilla and almond extracts too. It's 2 tsps vanilla and 4 tsps almond . It'll give the cake a lovely almond aroma and flavor.

These are the wet ingredients mixed with 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar

This is the almond meal. It looks like polenta and taste like what else - ground almonds. Use 2/3 cup of it. The dry ingredients are the meal, two cups plus 4 tablespoons of flour, 3 tsps baking powder, 1 tsp salt (I used the coarser, grittier Celine's gray  sea salt) and 2 tblspns cornstarch which lends more cohesion to the batter.

 This is the batter thoroughly mixed. You can see why I was nervous. It  looks really thin, doesn't it?

It was easily poured into the mold and all the batter went into it so no extra cupcakes like the other recipe. The mold was tied together with twine. I was so ansty about the recipe that I forgot to put the five toothpicks in the neck area. (the recipe didn't stress adding the toothpicks so maybe it'll be all right and the lamb's head won't fall off 😲😲)

Bake in a 350 degree F oven for 50 to 60 minutes. I took it out at 55 minutes and let cool. You can see it's a pound cake because of the splits in the surface.

It's paler than the first box mix one , probably because there's no artificial colors used. I plan on checking out the cupcake recipes and other ones in Ms. Moskowicz's recipe book. This is definitely the recipe for vegan birthdays and for inclusive holiday sweets. 

Tomorrow is the icing - with some interesting twists. Stay tuned.