Welcome bakers
What a crazy day and age we live in! With the virus outbreak and the unbelievable pandemic going on, most of us are stuck at home, practicing self isolation. It is very unfortunate for those who were planning on many trips this time of the year-or all around the year if you are like me-and now we are all “bored to death” when there are people physically suffering from the disease. So let’s stay positive and try something new at home, perhaps vegan baking for you and I. Although I’ve never baked anything from scratch by myself, I enjoyed accompanying friends who baked (and when I say friends I mean baking experts, they are so talented!) and I was always overwhelmed by all the different measurements and ingredients. I told myself I could never bake alone, I do not have the tools and the ingredients, I cannot possibly follow so many instructions… But here I am today writing a blog on how to bake a vegan lemon pound cake. It’s only been a couple of days since I’ve started baking things from scratch and boy am I surprised by the miracles that white flour make inside the oven!
Inspiration
The main reason I started baking is not only because of self quarantine but also because of my dad’s health. We recently came across his health issues and he decided to go vegetarian for a month or two which I’ve never imagined him to ever try. So I wanted to prepare healthier snacks for him to munch away all those meat cravings but do be careful, I ended up eating WAY more than he did. It is quite addictive. There are only six key ingredients to this recipe and it only took me 10 minutes to prepare everything and the rest was taken care of thanks to my beloved oven. I was thinking of the delicious lemon cookies we baked in Chester last year and got inspired to try a pound cake version with a twist of banana flavor to it. BBC’s Good Food Recipes helped me out a lot and I recommend you to go over to their website to check out tasty vegan recipes.
Recipe
Prep time: 10 mins
Baking time: 40 mins
Ingredients
-1 lemon zested & juiced
-100ml coconut oil (or any type of vegan oil)
-1 banana, mashed
-180g self-raising flour
-1 tsp baking powder
-150g white sugar
-150ml cold water
Alternative Ingredients
-I did 45ml of coconut oil and 55ml of canola oil and it was perfectly fine. If you are using more coconut oil, you can reduce the amount of sugar as the coconut flavor will add sweetness to the batter.
-It could be any type of flour from any brand. Mine was an old-schooled Korean flour brand and it worked. If you don’t have bananas, you can replace it with 100g of flour and add 10ml of water to the batter.
-No need to worry about fancy sugar, just use whatever you have in your pantry. They all taste pretty similar.
Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Oil an 18cm (7 inch) baking tin/cake pan/loaf tin and line it with baking parchment/paper foil.
2. Mash the banana in a bowl with a fork/spoon/any utensils you prefer until it is smooth with tiny bits of chunks for texture.
3. Prepare lemon zest and juice. If you don’t have a grinder, you can use a potato peeler to peel off the skin and dice the pieces finely. For the juice, scrape out all the transparent bits from the insides of the skin for extra zinginess.
4. In a large bowl, mix the mashed banana, flour, baking powder and lemon zest. Add the oil, lemon juice and 150ml of cold water, then mix until smooth.
5. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 30-35 mins. Poke the cake with a toothpick/fork/chopstick to check if it’s completely baked. If it doesn’t come out clean, bake for another 5-10 minutes. Once it is thoroughly baked, cool it in the tin for 10 mins, then transfer it to a wire rack to cool fully or just cut it if you are like me and want the good stuff right away 😉
Step by step photo recipe
Step 1 & 2
While your oven is being heated, mash your banana to the consistency of the above photo. The riper the banana, the sweeter the cake.
Step 3
As you can see, my lemon zest is not the finest but it did the job. Because it was slightly larger than grinded zest, it added to the texture of the cake. Also, scraping out all the small bits of the insides of the skin really made a difference. Since I did not want to use artificial lemon extract, I wanted to add as much flavor as possible, hence adding those bits really helped.
Step 4
When mixing everything together, I ended up adding 15g of flour as the batter seemed too runny. Depending on how thick you want your cake to be, you can add more flour. I enjoyed my cake with the above batter consistency as it was super moist.
Step 5
I used a round 18cm (7 inch) cake tin but you can use whatever you have to bake. Mine was ordered online and delivered yesterday to my door for only 3 dollars and the poor guy has already been in and out of my oven many times. My lining paper is called ‘paper foil’ and you can easily get it from any local marts or online malls. They are recyclable and reusable (I reuse them for cookies, 3 times max). After 30 minutes of baking, my cake looked like the photo on the right, but it wasn’t properly baked in the inside. I threw it back in the oven for another 10 minutes and voila!
The top was golden brown and the inside was soft and moist! Crunchy, crumbly, hot and lemony-the best combination ever. I waited another 5 minutes for the cake to cool but could not resist to cut the cake and eat. Because mine was in a round tin, I could not cut it in the traditional pound cake shapes but it disappeared in a few minutes so the shape didn’t matter much. Enjoy your yummy vegan cake and stay healthy everyone!
Travel with Mon 