Vegan Jaffa Cake Traybake

Very quick and easy to make. There is some waiting for things to cool, but you don't have to be doing anything during those times. This cake never lasts longer than a day, but if you don't have enough dessert lovers in your house, you can keep it in airtight container for around 3 days
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 20 minutes
Cool down and Decorating 1 hour 30 minutes
Total Time 2 hours 5 minutes
Servings: 18 pieces
Course: Dessert

Ingredients
  

Bowl
  • 300 grams self-raising flour
  • 150 grams caster sugar
  • 3/4 tsp baking powder
  • 3/4 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
Jug
  • 300 ml soy milk
  • 120 ml sunflower oil
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
Topping
  • 225 mls marmalade or orange food spread – I use St Dalfour as it's not overly bitter. The quantity is just the size of the jar in this case
  • 15 grams icing sugar – you might need extra if the marmalade you're using is on the bitter side
  • 300 grams dark chocolate – I look for chocolate with cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar as the only ingredients
  • 1 tbsp coconut oil – I usually use the odorless variety, you can use extra virgin but it will give a coconutty taste

Equipment

  • 1 Tray – I use a 34×25cm tray but it's not an exact science- a bigger tray will give you a thinner cake layer
  • 1 Hand blender

Method
 

Prep
  1. Put the oven on 180℃ (fan oven)
  2. Grease and line the tray with baking paper
Making the traybake
  1. Mix all the Bowl ingredients and give them a good stir with a metal spoon
  2. Mix all the Jug ingredients and give them a stir
  3. Pour the Jug mixture into the bowl and use a metal spoon to mix the ingredients. The mixing is more akin to traditional folding, do not mix vigorously or use an electric mixer
  4. Pour the mixture into the tray and smooth it and pop it into the oven for around 20-25 minutes until it’s turned golden
  5. When you’re checking whether the cake is ready – the toothpick test may help. I often give the cake a little press to see if it bounces back and also look around the rim of the cake – if the sides are coming away that’s a good sign it’s done. If the sides are still firmly in contact with the tray and it feels soft on pressing – it’s probably not quite ready
  6. When you take it out of the oven leave the cake layer in the tray
  7. Put orange layer on the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven to let some of it soak in
  8. Afterwards cool for around an 30 mins to an hour otherwise the icing will melt when you put it on
Making the orange layer
  1. Empty the marmalade into a bowl
  2. Sift in the icing sugar – if you don’t sift it it will clump!
  3. Blitz the mixture with a hand-held blender
Making the chocolate layer
  1. You can opt for the full bain marie (bowl over steam from boiling water) – of course that does melt the chocolate beautifully
  2. You can also use the microwave – I find that 1 minute to start off with and then mixing at 30 sec intervals works pretty well. If you don’t mix often enough it will burn
  3. You’re not aiming for very hot and liquid chocolate – if most of the chocolate is melted but there are still some lumps left, I tend to just mix until they have melted instead of heatig it up more
  4. As the cholocate is melting add the coconut oil and mix well
Putting it all together
  1. I’ve tried pouring melting chocolate over the back of a spoon, but that just didn’t work for me. So I just take spoonfulls of the melted chocolate mixture and drizzle them in a cross hatch pattern over the cake
  2. I continued drizzling, filling in the gaps and eventually it all evens out – this allows me to put the chocolate on without disturbing the orange layer
  3. Let the chocolate set for an hour or so

Leave a Reply