I bet you can’t believe it, two blog posts in two days !!! I made a lot of promises to myself for 2020 and one of them was to blog more, I have been discovering some great recipes, cooking and baking them and then losing them or forgetting where I got them from! The whole point of starting this blog all those years ago was so that this didn’t happen and as always I have a queue of friends and relatives lining up ready to be taste testers.

I am basically a Flexitarian, but I would really love to be completely vegan, but I am also weak, weak when it comes to cheese, cakes and desserts. There are great vegan ice creams, custard, yoghurt, milk, but they still haven’t nailed cheese, when they do I will proudly say I am 100% a vegan, but until that day I am searching for recipes to fill the gap and one of the biggest gaps is cake. Olly and Luca eat vegan food, but I still can not convince Stephen, my plan is to find food that is so gorgeous that he will be so impressed and doesn’t notice that there is no meat.

This cake is soooooooo good !!! Very simple to make, I can even go as far as to say even healthy !!! Luca and I loved the mousse, I even had enough left over to fill a couple of ramekins to have it for dessert, but I don’t think you would get it past an anti-vegan. So to play safe and make it more user friendly I suggest getting a good vegan butter and making a simple chocolate butter cream

Just a brief note, the recipes says to slice the two halves, I don’t recommend it, the cake is fairly crumbly and will just break, so don’t risk it. If you do make the mousse I can tell you that the cake just gets better and more rich day after day, it is extremely delicious and will now be my go to chocolate cake recipe.

Buon appetito

FOR THE CAKE

150 ml vegetable oil, plus extra for greasing the tins

450 ml  Alpro/Koko fresh coconut milk alternative

1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar

250g golden caster sugar

250g plain flour

75g cocoa powder

1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tbsp. vanilla extract

FOR THE MOUSSE FILLING

3 medium, ripe avocados, peeled and de-stoned

2 small ripe bananas

100 g (3 ½oz) cocoa powder

7 tbsp. maple syrup

2 tbsp. vanilla bean paste

75 ml (3 fl oz) Alpro/Koko fresh coconut milk alternative

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan) mark 4. Grease 2 x 20cm.5 (8in) loose-bottomed cake tins with oil and line the bases with baking parchment. Mix the coconut milk and vinegar in jug, leave to stand for 10min and to allow it to slightly curdle. 

Meanwhile, mix the sugar, flour, cocoa, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and a pinch of salt in a large bowl. 

Add the oil and vanilla to the jug with the milk mixture. Then pour into the bowl with the dry ingredients, whisking with a balloon whisk until combined and smooth. Divide the batter between the tins and bake for 30-35min, until risen and springy to the touch. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tins for 15min, before transferring them on their baking parchment to a wire rack and allow to cool completely.  

When ready to assemble, whizz together the mousse ingredients in a food processor until smooth. Using a large, sharp serrated knife carefully cut each cake into two layers by slicing them through the middle. Place the bottom layer onto a cake stand and spread over 1/4 of the chocolate mousse using a palette knife. Top with the second layer and repeat until you’ve layered all four with all the mousse.