Back to Basics #1 – Biscuit cake

Hey there!

Let me introduce you to Back to Basics, a series all about basic recipes turned dairy, egg and meat free. I decided to introduce this series as I noticed that most vegan/vegetarian food blogs mainly post recipes with their own little twist which is super interesting yet sometimes you just want a good old classic. No fancy spices, no exotic fruit, no odd flour substitute.

I decided to get this started with a classic fluffy biscuit cake, which is perfect as the basis of any fruit cake or just plain sprinkled with some slivered almonds. I noticed that I have never actually posted a simple cake recipe and that I have also never actually come across one I liked so I decided to create my own.

The ingredients are of course pretty basic, hence Back to Basics and the preparation is super simple as well. I mean what else could you want right? This is just the perfect recipe when you need to quickly whip up a cake. Be it for a pot luck dinner, an unexpected birthday party or as a punishment for being late at school. Yes we Swiss are odd. To hear the sentence: “ You have got to bring a cake to the next lesson” from your teacher while he or she is being deadly serious is actually not a rarity in this neck of the woods. Luckily I don’t have to deal with such ‘punishment’ anymore yet my lovely little sister needed to bring a cake to her English class for some reason. Me being the wonderful, amazing, greatest big sister of all time, of course, baked the cake for her. Well, to be honest, I just needed an excuse to do some baking, but let’s go with the first reason on why I baked this yumminess, alright?

So guys, enough talk about the unconventional, yet surprisingly effective Swiss punishment system at certain high schools and let’s get baking.

I have probably overused the words simple and

• 150g plain soy yoghurt
• 1 tablespoon canola oil
• 1 teaspoon locust bean gum (Johannisbrotkernmehl) mixed with 4 teaspoon soy milk
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 100ml soy milk
• 1 vanilla bean, seeds
• 100g cane sugar
• 125g spelt flour
• 50g ground almonds
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 sachet baking soda (5g)
• ¼ cup slivered almonds

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C.
2. Add the soy yoghurt, canola oil, locust gum, soy milk, vinegar, the seeds of the vanilla bean and the cane sugar into a mixing bowl and cream together until well combined.
3. Sieve in the flour, ground almonds, baking powder and baking soda. Mix until just combined.
4. Pour your batter into a lined baking sheet and sprinkle with the slivered almonds.
5. Bake for 20 minutes.

Voila, that’s it, easy right? Simple and basic, that’s all I can say, although I have probably sort of overused those words in this post, but oh well, this truly is, simple and basic!

Bisous