Vegan Candy Cake
Wait, has someone turned the clock? Sometimes, we ourselves can hardly believe that Zucker&Jadgwurst has been around for seven years now. On April 29, 2016 we put our then-still rather unprofessional and absolutely unknown blog online. Seven years later, we are sitting in a small office in Neukölln with a wonderful team around us – our first cookbook and already the second advent calendar in hand. Woohoo! To remind us of this little wild journey, we bake ourselves an extravagant cake every year. Today it will be colorful, sweet and exciting because we're having a Candy Cake!
A Candy Cake is characterized by quite a lot of ... sweets! That's right! We'll show you how to make your own vegan Candy Cake and what to look out for while baking it. So let's start directly with the three components that usually make up a Candy Cake.
The bases: The cake bases usually consist of a simple sponge or biscuit cake. Since the candies and creams often bring enough flavor and color to the cake, we keep a low profile with the cake bases and prefer a basic cake batter. However, we flavored our simple sponge cake batter with some fresh lemon zest, adding some freshness and tartness to the recipe, which greatly counter the sweets.
We used a reasonably tall springform pan with an 18 cm / 7 inch diameter to bake the dough. If you use a larger baking dish, your dough will be much flatter, so you won't be able to cut it into three horizontal layers at the end. Therefore, we can only recommend such a small cake pan. Cakes that are taller rather than wider always look a bit prettier in general, so it's well worth the investment!
The frostings: We prepared three different frostings for the cake. Two of them are fruit and curd-based, to again bring acidity and some lightness to the cake, and the third is butter and cream-cheese-based. We use the latter to cover the cake at the end. The advantage here is that the sweets stick to it perfectly and you don't need a particularly large amount of cream so that the cake won't be too heavy. The curd creams that we put between our cake layers are pureed with fresh strawberries and strawberry jam as well as with peaches from the can and peach jam. To make the creams nice and firm, we boiled them with pure agar agar, which you can now get in any organic market. Make sure that you really use pure agar agar, because many products on the market contain, for example, only 30 % agar agar. The two different colors of the curd creams also add some color and fruitiness to the inside of the cake. We applied them in alternating rings.
The decoration: We used the delicious assortment of Not Guilty! All of Not Guilty's candies are vegan, organic, and contain only the ingredients you really need – so no artificial colors or flavors. And on top of that, they taste delicious! We used almost all of their candies for our cake, but the focus was on the Milly The Star fruit gummies. We used them to decorate the cake's top and included two of their three flavors (strawberry and peach) in the creams. Finally, we topped it all off with a birthday cake topper, and the birthday party is ready to go!
Happy seven to Zucker&Jagdwurst and the whole gang behind it!
Vegan Candy Cake
Ingredients
For the cake bases:
- 450 g (3.5 cups) wheat flour (type 405)
- 250 g (1.25 cups) sugar
- 8 g (0.25 oz) vanilla sugar
- 16 g (0.5 oz) baking powder
- 1 pinch of salt
- 1 lemon (grated)
- 500 ml (4 cups) sparkling water
- 100 ml (0.5 cups) vegetable oil
For the peach layer:
- 200 g (7 oz) peaches (canned or frozen)
- 100 g (3.5 oz) peach jam
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 3 g (0.1 oz) pure agar agar
- 200 g (7 oz) vegan curd
For the strawberry layer:
- 200 g (7 oz) fresh strawberries
- 100 g (3.5 oz) strawberry jam
- 3 g (0.1 oz) pure agar agar
- 200 g (7 oz) vegan curd
For the white cream:
- 150 g (5.33 oz) vegan cream cheese (room temperature)
- 125 g (4.33 oz) vegan butter (room temperature)
- 25 g (0.77) powdered sugar
To serve:
- vegan sweets (e.g. from Not Guilty)
- decoration (e.g. candles, cake garlands, cake toppers ...)
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 180 °C / 350 °F (convection heat). For the sponge dough, mix the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Add the zest of one lemon, sparkling water and vegetable oil and stir in just briefly. Pour the batter into a greased springform pan (∅ 18 cm / 7 inch) and bake for about 60 minutes. After about half the time, cover the cake with aluminum foil to prevent it from getting too dark.
Let the cake cool completely after baking and straighten it with a cake knife or a cake cutter and cut it horizontally into three bases of the same height.
In the meantime, prepare the strawberry frosting. To do this, wash and hull the strawberries and puree them with the strawberry jam until smooth. In a saucepan, mix the pureed strawberries with agar agar and bring to a boil, stirring constantly for at least 2 minutes. Now stir in the vegan curd by the tablespoon and then remove the cream from the heat and allow to cool.
Tip: As soon as the agar agar clumps, simply use a blender to blend the mixture smooth again.
Proceed in the same way with the peach frosting. For this, puree canned peaches with peach jam and sugar until smooth and mix with agar agar in a saucepan. Simmer for at least 2 minutes while stirring constantly. Now stir in the vegan curd by the tablespoon and then remove the cream from the heat and let it cool.
For the white frosting, whip the vegan cream cheese, vegan butter and powdered sugar with a mixer and set aside at room temperature.
Now we start with the stacking! To do this, blend both creams again until smooth and put the mixtures in piping bags. Place the first cake layer on a cake plate and now alternate circles with the peach and strawberry cream on the layer until it is completely covered with cream. Place the second cake layer and do the same again. Once the third cake layer has been placed, spread the entire cake with the white cream and decorate with the vegan candies, garlands or candles.
