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| GoT Blue Fire & Ice mirror-glazed ube cake |
But before we get into how I jumped into the vegan cake challenge deep end, let's just say that I have been more than excited about the final season of GoT. I binge re-watched all 7 seasons starting in February, and managed to get through all 5 available books since then as well! I was disappointed that there hasn't been more books released since 2011, and that the story remains unfinished. At least GoT fans of the TV series will finally get to see how the game ends!
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| too cute Daenerys and Drogon! |
Now, back to vegan cake. I knew right away that I wanted to do a mirror glaze cake, in different shades of blue, with streaks of white. The only problem is that the mirror glaze recipe I have contains condensed milk, white chocolate and gelatin, all of which are not vegan-friendly. Not to mention the mousse and sponge cake recipe underneath the glaze contain eggs, butter, whipped cream & gelatin!
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| peek a boo, Mother of Dragons! |
I decided to go ahead and try vegan substitutes for all these ingredients for the recipes that I already had, instead of using a vegan cake recipe, cuz I couldn't find one online of what I wanted! Here's a list of what I substituted vegan ingredients for non-vegan ingredients with:
- Butter: plant-based buttery spread
- Egg white: 2 tbsp aquafaba*
- Egg yolk: 1 tbsp aquafaba*
- Gelatin: agar agar powder
- Evaporated milk: unsweetened oat milk (original flavour)
- Condensed milk: organic sweetened condensed coconut milk
- Whipping cream: organic heavy coconut cream (without guar gum)
- White Chocolate: Vegan white chocolate
- Graham crackers: digestive biscuits (without honey)
*Aquafaba is just the drained liquid from a can of chickpeas. It's magic. One would think how could this liquid ever whip up to the same product as egg whites in a meringue, but it totally does!! I did have success in making vegan macarons using aquafaba before, so I knew it would be a great substitute for egg whites. I just wasn't sure how well it would work in a mousse recipe!!
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| Aquafaba stiff peaks! |
I shopped around grocery stores, markets and other places that carry vegan products but found most of these ingredients at Whole Foods and Well.ca. I was eager to try out the recipes using all these vegan substitutes!
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| lotsa new ingredients to work with! |
First up, the mousse cake. The mousse cake is made of 3 components: a crunchy base, a sponge cake and a light mousse. The "veganized" crunchy base and the sponge cake recipes turned out well. But the light mousse was another story!
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| an entire can of thick heavy coconut cream! |
No matter how long I whipped the heavy coconut cream for, there was no way I was getting stiff peaks the way you would after a few minutes of whipping dairy cream! Research online says that coconut cream is a great substitute for dairy whipping cream, and the online photos certainly looked like the coconut cream could hold a peak, but I couldn't seem to get it to that point. I barely had soft peaks.
And then, I added the agar agar-water mixture to it, and that's when everything separated and became really liquidy!! In the original recipe, the whipped cream-gelatin mixture should at this point be stiff enough so that a spatula could stand straight up in the mixture!
I was highly doubtful that this liquid mousse would ever set, but I poured the mousse into the mould anyway and hoped for the best! Let's see how it looks in about 4 hours.
Meanwhile, because the outcome of the mousse was up in the air, I decided to make another ube cake, this time using my go-to ube chiffon cake recipe, but with vegan substitutions. The original recipe calls for 8 egg yolks and 8 egg whites, which meant a lot of aquafaba to substitute! But, the aquafaba did whip up into nice stiff peaks and the batter looked great going into the oven, just slightly less airy than with the usual non-vegan ingredients.
The finished cake is 3 layers of vegan ube chiffon cake, filled with layers of ube buttercream, ube halaya (sweetened mashed purple yam) and macapuno strings (coconut sport). I stuck the entire buttercream crumb-coated cake in the freezer just in case the mousse cake didn't turn out.
One of the things that I would do differently for this cake next time though, is to make the ube halaya from scratch, instead of using the ready-made jarred ube halaya, cuz the jarred stuff, combined with jarred macapuno, and the mirror glaze, made the overall cake quite sweet (even though the chiffon cake itself isn't all that sweet)
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| mirror glazing the ube mousse cake |
Now, back to that mousse cake that's been setting in the freezer. Lo and behold, the thing did set after all, though I had no idea what it would taste like. I decided to go ahead and finish the mousse cake off with the vegan mirror glaze anyway.
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| iChoc's white vanilla vegan chocolate |
The vegan white chocolate is naturally light brown with specks of darker brown in colour. I had to add quite a bit of white food gel colouring to lighten it up, and even then I never did get it to a true white, but it was white enough for our purpose. I dyed the mirror glaze three different shades of royal blue (using Wilton royal blue gel colouring), and randomly poured that all over the frozen mousse cake, and finished with a sweep of white mirror gel to give it that crackley-icy "spiderweb" effect.
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| see how brown the mirror glaze is before whitening? |
I was pretty happy with the vegan mirror glaze effect, though it wasn't as super shiny as the original non-vegan version. The surface of the glazed mousse cake was indeed shiny!!
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| freshly glazed ube mousse cake with a shiny mirror finish! |
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| really cool cracked ice effect! |
Good thing I had baked up the chiffon cake as a back-up! So I glazed that in the vegan mirror glaze as well. No two mirror-glazed cakes ever come out the same, due to the random nature of the way the glaze is poured over, but I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out! The sides could've been smoother, but I suspect it's because the plant-based butter doesn't set as hard as regular butter and the frosting may have started getting too soft once the warm mirror glaze was poured over the cake.
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| shiny shiny mirror-glazed ube chiffon cake |
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| close up of the spiderweb effect |
To "ice-ify" the cake even more, I made shards of blue glass (by heating sugar up to 300C, colouring it with food gel, pouring onto a silicone mat and then shattering it after it set) and vegan white chocolate shards (whitened with powdered food colouring).
As a nod to the Night King, I added touches of vegan meringue kisses in shades of royal blue on the cake. The base of the cake was bordered with crushed vegan meringue kisses for "snow".
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| blue sugar sculptures & white chocoalte shards |
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| Meringue kisses in "Night King" colours |
Aquafaba truly is amazing. I had no issues whipping it to stiff peaks and piping out the vegan meringue kisses, flavoured with a bit of clear vanilla extract. I painted stripes of royal blue food gel in the piping bag to get a random striped effect on the meringue kisses.
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| stiff aquafaba peaks for meringue kisses |
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| freshly piped and ready to bake meringue kisses |
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| crunchy after baking and drying in the oven! |
I happened to pass by a game store that was selling Funko figures, with a small Game of Thrones section. The baby Funko 5 star GoT Daenerys Targaryen vinyl figure was just too cute to pass up and I had to get her. She comes with a bonus baby Drogon.
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| baby Daenerys and Drogon |
I would've bought all four designs, but the Night King, Tyrion Lannister and John Snow figurines won't be released until May 3rd. I wish the Night King and his blue dragon was available cuz he would've been perfect with the blue cake!
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| Night King GoT Funko 5 star figure |
So I showed up to my friend's GoT premier party with not one, but two cakes in hand! Haha. Since it was a blue fire and ice-themed party, she also had a spread of blue/purple food and drinks. Perfect snacks to enjoy with the show!
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| blue fire & ice GoT-inspired cake! |
Unfortunately we missed the first 20 mins of the season 8 premier episode cuz there was a mix-up with the screening being live instead of being on demand. Darn you, Crave! No biggie though, cuz the episode aired again a few hours later, and we were able to record that, plus the episode is available online by now!
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| blue and purple snacks & drinks! |
After the screening, we were eager to try the cakes!!! The vegan ube chiffon cake layers turned out to be more dense than the original non-vegan version, but it was surprisingly still "cakey". I've tried vegan cakes in the past, and all have been really heavy, dense and somewhat goopy, but not this cake! The crumb was a little delicate and kinda messy to cut, yet not truly chiffon cake-fluffy, but not super dense either. I just thought it tasted too sweet because of the jarred ube halaya filling.
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| cutting into the vegan ube chiffon cake |
Surprisingly, the vegan ube mousse cake fared better than expected! The cake cut cleanly, had a pleasant and contrasting mousse vs. crunch texture, and best of all, it held up and did not melt into a puddle after thawing out! The mousse, however, did not have that classic creamy texture that one would associate with mousse. I haven't tried other vegan mousses so I really have nothing but the non-vegan mousse to compare it to.
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| a slice of vegan mousse cake |
Strangely, the shiny mirror glaze on the cake became a matte finish somehow after setting in the fridge, making it look kinda like cool dragon skin! I'm not sure if that's as a result of the agar reacting with the coconut and aquafaba, but matte or shiny, the cake finish was still interesting to look at. I did notice a pool of liquid that drained from the mousse cake after it had sat in the fridge overnight while the agar was setting. Good thing I had the cake elevated with a plate to catch that underneath so it didn't pool on the clear cake plate!
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| 12 hours later after refrigeration, it developed a matte finish!? |
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| still, the matte finish looks cool, like dragon skin! |
After stressing out for weeks in anticipation of getting the cake done, all in all, I was happy that my foray into vegan baking was successful overall! Definitely lots to improve on and for sure worth the time to continue to experiment and refine. I applaud all those vegan bakers out there who continue to innovate and develop vegan-friendly, tasty cake recipes! Hope this (super long!) blog post is of some help to you if you're trying to "veganize" a non-vegan cake recipe like me! Happy Baking, folks!!
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| Happy belated birthday, Scanders!! |
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