Vegan Chocolate Cola Cake recipe

Over the past few years I've made several vegan cakes for my sister-in-law with varying degrees of success. The first cake I attempted was a vegan vanilla sponge. It came out of the oven golden and gloriously risen and it stayed that way for almost 10 seconds before deflating in the blink of an eye. I tried to compensate by being generous with the icing and my in-laws said it was "Nice, if a little sweet". I thought it was revolting.

Then someone brought a vegan chocolate cola cake into the office and it was really good. I pestered the baker for the recipe and when I finally made it I used Vitalite. I've always disliked the taste of margarine and, to me, Vitalite has a strong, plasticy taste. It was all I could smell while the cake was baking. The finished cake tasted overwhelmingly of margarine and I hated it.

Then I came across a vegan chocolate passionfruit cake recipe by Meera Sodha. I felt sure that this would be The One as I love Meera but, as others have commented, I couldn't taste the passionfruit and found the cake to be dense and floury.

This time I've gone back to the chocolate cola cake (a James Martin recipe) and used Pure dairy free sunflower margarine, which has a neutral taste. To veganise James's recipe:

• Replace the butter with the same amount of vegan margarine.
• Replace the milk with a vegan milk, e.g. oat or soy.
• Increase the cola to 10oz (285ml) instead of using eggs. The soda makes the cake fluffy and moist. Try not to over-mix so the batter keeps the bubbles.

When I added the wet cake ingredients to the dry I did it too quickly and my batter was lumpy so I passed it through a sieve before pouring it into the cake tin. By doing this I lost some of the cola bubbles but this seemed better than serving a cake full of flour lumps. I’ll try to combine the ingredients more slowly next time to avoid needing to use a sieve.

You can see in the picture that the cake is a little fragile and the icing cracks as soon as the cake is released from its tin. Regardless, as long as it’s handled gently, it holds together and is an incredibly moist and rich cake. It almost has the texture of a sponge pudding. I must confess, I prefer cakes made with eggs, but out of all the vegan cakes I’ve made I’m happy with this. I top it with strawberries as that’s what the baker of the original cake did and it works really well.