Everyday Life Vegan Lifestyle

Vegan Victoria Sponge {Jamie Oliver}

I have no interest in cooking and I’m well known for starting kitchen fires (luckily nothing that’s ever required a fire engine). I eat healthily and My Fitness Pal has recently become my best friend, but when Ian is working away I stock up on the healthiest ready meals I can find so I don’t have to cook. And yes, I realise that last sentence sounds like a contradiction in terms. I hold my hands up to the fact that in our house, Ian does all of the cooking. He looks after me well and I’d say that at least 90% of our meals are made from scratch; I’m a very lucky girl.

Although I have no interest in cooking, occasionally I like to bake. My dad’s mum was always making homemade jams, cakes, jam tarts and many other baked goods – so I can only imagine this is where my desire to bake comes from. At home when I was growing up, the most adventurous things that were made in our kitchen were fairy cakes or rice krispie cakes. (Sorry mum).

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With a birthday looming at the end of the month and my usual cake maker not being available, I decided this year I would make my own. So on Sunday, with some help from my partner in crime I decided we should do a trial run, because let’s face it, everyone should eat cake at the weekend. No?

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My baking skills aren’t good enough to make anything from scratch, so we followed this recipe from Jamie Oliver for a vegan sponge cake. Although we’ve been vegetarian for 6 years, our diet is actually closer to vegan these days and my aim is to be fully vegan by the end of the year.

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As we need a new oven, the cake took nearly triple the recommended cooking time and just when we thought it was done, we had to turn it upside down and put it back into the oven for it to finish cooking properly! But even with all this palava, the sponge cooked all the way through and turned a nice golden colour as Jamie said it should; bonus! For the frosting, we used a mix of non-dairy margarine, icing sugar and fresh fruit, although, in hindsight, I think we should have just used icing. Our frosting concoction took a while to set and some of the fruit on top started to slide off! Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the quantities used for the frosting; Ian just kept on adding in the various ingredients until we had a consistency that looked like it might work!

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Although it tasted reeeeeeally nice, it didn’t look very pretty when we cut into it; hence, why there are no photos! It tasted a little greasy once it had been in the fridge and I noticed that other people had also commented on the greasiness at the bottom of Jamie’s blog – but overall, for a first attempt I was pretty pleased with the result. After working out the nutritional value though, I’m going to have another scout around on the old interweb to see if I can find a lower fat version.

What have you been baking recently? If you have any (low fat) vegan recipes to share, I’d love it if you could point me in the right direction!

Happy Wednesday!

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2 Comments

  • Reply Sarah Shotts June 1, 2016 at 7:07 pm

    Simply beautiful! I’ve always wanted to try baking a Victoria Sponge. Maybe this summer I will!

    Thanks for linking up. You’ll be featured this Friday. 🙂

    • Reply Lorna June 2, 2016 at 5:27 pm

      Thanks Sarah! You should do – I’d love to see the outcome 🙂

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