An Eggless Life

Being vegetarian and being small is hard sometimes. All you ever want to do when your small is blend in. You don't want to be different from anyone else or have to explain why you are who you are.

So when the birthday party invitations started coming in for free range chick no 1. and the realization came that she would miss out on the birthday cake as it was bound to have eggs in it, I decided to start asking the mothers if they minded me making some cupcakes. The triple chocolate cupcakes were always received well by eager little hands and mouths but often there were a couple left over.

I started paying attention to the food that was being served at the parties and I noticed most of the time there was a double up on cupcakes.(the ones Id made and then another batch from the host mother.)

I needed an eggless alternative to a cake that wasn't a cake or a cupcake. So the ‘lamington chunks for a birthday party’ tradition was born.

Lamingtons are another of our families firm favourites, and my personal, absolute, no questions asked, always on the table for my birthday, favourite! I found that small people love them as they are not something that is normally at a birthday party and the parents devour them as they are curious as to what a eggless sponge tastes like.

This is my mother in law’s – lets call her Nana - recipe for eggless lamingtons. She is by far the best vegan/eggless baker I know. The variety of cakes and biscuits she makes is amazing and her cakes are always beautifully soft, moist and risen (which is actually an art all to its own, to get an eggless cake to rise.)

I have slowly attempted her highly admired recipes in my own kitchen and had many failures but recently more and more successes. Following her recipes to the exact detail and failing only led me to realize the one ingredient that she adds that she forgot to tell me I was forgetting.

LOVE.

To succeed in veg*n baking and veg*n cooking you have to love what you are creating. Your food is made from scratch, no one has added preservatives flavours or additives to your food, you create the flavours and textures yourself. A love of natural food and love for those you are feeding is the most important ingredients in your baking. The rest is practice, advice from a wonderful woman that will share her tried and true recipes (thanks as always Nana) and of cause the people you love, to praise your efforts, even your massive failures, and wash the dishes when your done.

Eggless Sponge

· 200mls of canola oil (or sunflower / vegetable oil)

· 1 tsp vanilla essence

· 1.5 cups white sugar (I used Xylotol which is a found naturally in corn)

· 1.5 cups natural set Greek style yogurt

· 5 cups of White Self Raising Flour (SR spelt will work here too)

· 1.5 cups milk (or soy milk or rice milk)

Sift flour 3 times into a separate bowl (this makes the cake really fluffy)

Beat oil, vanilla, sugar & yogurt until really creamy

Add flour & milk and continue beating for around 3 mins

Put into a lamington tray

Bake at 150 in a fan forced oven for around 25 mins (my oven is a commercial sized fan forced oven so I cooked this cake for about 35 mins on 160, just keep checking with a skewer)

Lamingtons

· Icing Sugar

· Cocoa

· Butter

· Hot water

· Desiccated or shredded Coconut (the girls prefer desiccated)

Mix the icing ingredients to a chocolaty strength your family likes, my girls prefer a lighter colour to the traditional dark chocolate lamingtons in the bakery)

Cut the sponge into chunks of cake and ice

Put coconut on a flattish plate.

Roll chunks in the coconut.

The icing and the rolling is really messy business, my girl’s luuuuurrrvvvee this part and I happily hand this job over to them. Don’t put all your coconut on the plate at once as it does get goopy.