Now that I’ve got your attention… I wanted to share what else I’ve made from Freya Cox’s book Simply Vegan Baking since I reviewed it. I acquired the 15cm tins needed to make some of the cakes and also a cupcake / muffin tray. As before, I used gluten-free flour for everything and it worked fine.

Victoria Sponge: This is the first time I’ve made a vegan gluten-free version that has actually worked. Using warmed soya milk seems to make all the difference. The only bad thing (relatively speaking) is that the general recipe for American buttercream at the back of the book was supposed to make enough to fill and cover one cake. It wasn’t specified what size cake that would be. I made slightly less than half the quantity as I was only filling the cake, and still had too much! That’s why you can see the cake extruding its cream in a rather undignified manner. I made the cake to celebrate having finished writing They Lie Here and had a lot of compliments when I put a picture of a slice on Twitter.

Coffee Cake: The basic recipe for this one was almost identical to the Victoria Sponge so it wasn’t difficult to do. The only snag was that I had to use dissolved coffee granules in both the cake mixture and the buttercream, as I didn’t have coffee powder and I had no idea if using liquid would make the mixture too runny! I kept the decoration simple, so I didn’t do the Russian buttercream (American was fine) or the walnut praline from the book. I did, however, put some walnuts on top to make it look sophisticated. Again I made less than half the quantity of buttercream and this time it was the right amount for inside and on top of the cake without being too decadent. This turned out to be one of the best coffee cakes I’ve ever had and certainly the only vegan one.

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes: These were easy to make as they followed the same formula as the above cakes and there was no need to extricate them from tins. However, the fudge icing was not so easy as I couldn’t get the icing sugar to dissolve completely, making the result somewhat grainy, although it did taste as indulgent as expected. It was quite sticky too and not very spreadable. There was way too much (this is becoming a theme…) so if I made it again I’d only make half. Or, I suppose, make twice the number of cakes and the same amount of icing! I’d probably substitute a chocolate-flavoured buttercream or simple cocoa icing next time though. By a happy coincidence, there were six glacé cherries left in the pot, the right number for halving to top the cakes.