Vegan Salted Caramel and Chocolate Cake!

This might just be my most triumphant bake to date, owed in part to the fact that it's an entirely vegan creation!

This a Vegan Chocolate and Salted Caramel Cake! The cake is comprised of four layers of chocolate sponge, is filled and decorated with chocolate and salted caramel buttercream, and is topped with homemade double chocolate cookies and homemade vegan fudge! The drip (which did so much emotional damage to me!) is a salted caramel sauce. 

I had to combine elements from a few different recipes to pull this cake together, the majority of which come from Freya Cox's vegan baking book. This book is proving to be something of a vegan baking bible! To start with, I made the sponges following the method for her Black Forest Gateaux recipe, which uses espresso powder to enhance the chocolate flavour! The cookies are a take on Freya's Triple Chocolate Cookies, except I couldn't find any vegan friendly white chocolate in shops near me, and had to leave it out. For the buttercream, I followed a recipe for a vegan chocolate American buttercream from the same book, and added some vegan salted caramel sauce in. The only recipe not from this book was the fudge, which was surprisingly easy to make to be honest!

I was really glad to get to practice a bit of sugar work for this cake. Whilst the salted caramel just didn't want to work for me until the fourth attempt, the vegan fudge was surprisingly easy to make. You simply have to combine light soft brown sugar, vegan milk, vegan butter, glucose syrup and vegan cream (I accidentally used oat creme fraiche instead of cream and it turned out fine!) in a pan and heat to 116 degrees C, known as the soft ball stage because of the structure of sugar crystals (I think!). The fudge is then cooled to 110 degrees, before any flavouring and salt is added. The final part of the method is the most intense. You have to keep beating the mixture with a wooden spoon until the temperature falls to 60 degrees to encourage the formation of sugar crystals, which is exhausting as it takes so much longer than I would have thought! 

Matching cupcakes to complement the 
cake!

The overall taste and texture of the cake was phenomenal! I had to trim some of the sponges down to try and prevent the cake from leaning, which wasn't entirely successful, but the trimmings gave me the chance to try the sponge, and I've never had cake like it! The vegan chocolate buttercream was also some of the nicest buttercream I've ever tasted. The highest compliment I used to give vegan cakes was "wow you can't tell that's vegan!", but honestly with these recipes from Freya's book these bakes are not only up to standard with, they're actually nicer than their non-vegan counterparts!   

The ensemble!

Naturally I experienced a few problems with this cake. I managed to offset most of the leaning with the buttercream filling, however I think the height of the decoration distracts from the remaining lean pretty well. The biggest issue was undoubtedly the salted caramel sauce though. For the first two attempts, the sugar didn't melt completely until the sugar that had already started to melt was burning. On the third attempt, melting the sugar over a lower temperature proved successful, but when it came to adding the cream clumps of sugar formed and ruined the sauce. Interestingly, on the fourth attempt I used a whisk to add the butter and cream to the melted sugar, and it worked perfectly, so lesson learned. 

 

With the sauce made and ready to use as a drip I felt like nothing else could go wrong. How wrong I was... After dripping the cooled salted caramel sauce onto the edge of the cake, all I had to do was wait for it to set and finish my decoration. The completed cake was something I'm very proud of! However, by morning the drip had all but melted off the cake and left a ghost of a trial where it had been. I couldn't store the cake in the fridge overnight as the fudge recipe explicitly stated not to refrigerate the fudge or else the texture would go from soft and creamy to a sticky mess. I therefore had to decide whether to sacrifice the drip or the fudge and seeing as there is a lot of fudge on this cake, I couldn't risk any problems developing here. The pooling effect around the bottom of the cake where the drip had gathered was still kind of cool, so I'm not too bothered by this. Second lesson learned, salted caramel is tricky to use for a drip!

My biggest regret with this cake is including chocolate in the buttercream. Whilst it tasted fantastic I feel this cake would have been more striking if the icing and piping was white. I used a piping technique I first came across on TikTok only last week, and it makes a refreshing change from the swirls I'd usually go for. This cake demonstrates an improvement in my decorating and presentation skills though, or so I would argue, and I can't wait to put these to the test with some more hulking bakes soon!

Gibby x