Blueberry Lemon Vanilla Cake

This Blueberry Lemon Vanilla Cake is so delicious: sweet, moist with a beautiful vanilla lemony flavour. It’s refined sugar and wheat free. There are so many healthy ingredients in it: coconut oil, brown rice flour, flax seeds, blueberries, almonds… A sweet treat bursting with goodness.

UPDATED

I told you pretty much everything about making vegan sponge cake in my last post (Chocolate Brownie Blueberry Cake – so check it out if you’d like to know more). I wrote about how to replace the eggs in the batter and how to go about the ingredients to get the right texture, and the importance of not over mixing the batter.

Today I’ll explain how I replace wheat flour in recipes.

This blueberry cake is actually one of my oldest recipes for a baked vegan cake, that I used to make with wheat flour (a whole, sifted kind that we call here T 850). So if you’re fine with using wheat, you can simply go with that. Just use wheat flour in the recipe (Whole purpose) in place of flours, and also ground almonds if you want. But like I said, as I try to avoid wheat as much as possible, I changed the recipe to make it more nutritious and wheat free.

I must say both versions are equally delicious: sweet, bit zesty and with a subtle vanilla flavor, and very moist. Still with a nice crunch from the outside, thanks to the granola topping.

Ok, what I usually do with recipes when wanting to cut out wheat is use a combination of rice and spelt flour or rice and buckwheat flour, alternatively with addition of ground nuts (in this case, almonds). For example, for pies and galettes I go with this rice/buckwheat combo and for sponge cakes and muffins, rice and spelt. And so far it’s worked out great. If you have any questions here, let me know in comments.

I would love to hear from you if you try it 🙂

If you recreate it tag on Instagram with #deliciousandhealthybymaya @delicious_and_healthy_by_maya for a chance to be featured;)

In case you’re wondering why I topped the cake with a something like a granola, it’s to make the cake even more delicious but also the granola layer keeps the moisture in 🙂

One more note about vegan cake or muffin batter: it’s best not to leave it standing once the batter is ready. Otherwise you might get the over chewy texture.

Preparation time: 20 minutes + 45 minutes baking time

Yeilds: 12 slices (I wrote down the possible sizes of the pans in method)

Ingredients

1 cup rice flour, 1 cup sifted spelt flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/3 tsp salt
grated rind of 1 large organic lemon
1/2 tsp vanilla powder

Wet
1/3 cup melted coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup agave syrup
juice of that large lemon (2-3 tablespoons)
1 cup almond milk + 2 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 tbsp golden flax seeds + 9 tbsp water

1 cup blueberries – frozen or fresh

Granola topping
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup silvered almonds (or another 1/2 cup oats)
2 tbsp ground almonds (or 1 tbsp flour)
2 tbsp oil
2 tbsp agave or maple syrup
1 tbsp lemon juice
pinch of vanilla
pinch of salt

Method

1. Turn on the oven to 180° (I usually place the jar with coconut oil in the oven while it’s warming up, to melt it:)
2. Mix the milk and cider vinegar and leave to stand
3. Sift the flours and mix them in a bowl with all other dry ingredients
4. Grind the flaxseeds and mix them with water. You will see that what you’ll get will look a lot like a beaten egg
5. Mix oil, agave syrup and lemon juice
6. Mix flax and oil mixture with a spoon and add into dry ingredients, then add milk and mix again. Do it gently, do not over mix it because if you do it too harsh the cake could turn out chewy.
7. Mix in the blueberries coated with a little bit of flour. This will prevent them sinking to the bottom of the cake. The batter should be fairly thick but still pourable
8. Prepare the granola mixture. Just mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Granola ingredient mixture is something you can easily change, but what you need to keep is oats, sweetener and oil.
9. Pour the ready batter into a lined pan and top with granola mixture (You can use a loaf pan 23-13 cm, or a rectangular pan 18-28 cm, or a round cake pan 24 upto 26 cm diameter, or similar sizes)
10. Bake for about 30 minutes. Baking time will depend on the thickness of the batter. In a wider pan the batter will be thiner and will require shorter baking time.
11. Test the cake with the tooth pick. When it’s done the tooth pick should come out clean.

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Love,
Maja xx