Hazelnut praline (vanilla) cake

Hazelnut praline (vanilla) cake

So, currently for the last four weeks I’ve been living out of a B&B in Navan for this rotation (except weekends, which is how I finally made this!). Recently enough, we were sitting around in the B&B and this Rachel Allen baking show came on, starting off with a demonstration of how to make hazelnut praline cake.

Watching this all I could think was how dreadfully complicated it looked and how many ingredients it needed… Who would want to make that cake after seeing such hassle?

Anyways, I decided that I could make a much simpler (which is particularly important for students!) and vegan version. Cake should always be simple – the more this is true, the more cake there is going around!

This cake is very rich and indulgent though – when we made it us and friends could only manage one slice each (after a vegan lasagne dinner though).

 

Ingredients: Cake: 3 cups flour (self raising) 2 cups sugar for cake 1.5 cup soya milk (or other, or water) 1 cup oil 1 tsp vanilla essence (or butterscotch essence) Icing sugar for icing Custard (or just make icing instead!: water + icing sugar): 3tbsp Sugar, vanilla essence 1.5tbsp Cornflour 3/4 cup soya milk

Praline: 1 pack hazelnuts (whole, but chopped would be easier I’d guess) 1 cup sugar (I went with normal brown sugar as I feel brown=caramelize, but it doesn’t matter which type much) 1 tbsp dairy free butter (or use oil)

Preheat oven to 180°

1. -For cake: As always, for the cake: mix the wet ingredients, mix the dry ingredients. Mix the two sets together.

-Split mix into two greased sponge trays and bake in oven for 15-20mins (until browned)

-Once cooked: cut the top off one of them (to be flat, so the other can go atop it!)

2. -Make custard: Put custard ingredients in a pot, boil off on medium heat until thickens to custard consistency.

3. -For praline: Put 1tbsp dairy free butter (or oil) in pot and add sugar. Cook at low heat until it starts caramelising, then add the hazelnuts (reserve some whole ones for decorating if wanted). Continue cooking until caramelises (see pics) and let cool to harden.

-Once hardened, put in a blender/hand blend (can also crush with rolling pin I think) until fine crumbly consistency. 

4. Mix some of the praline crumble with the custard mix (about half), and reserve the rest for decorating (if desired). Spread onto the sponge cake that is to be the bottom one, and put the other one on top. Decorate as wanted (I just iced it (icing sugar + water) and sprinkled the rest of the praline on top).

You can make this a chocolate hazelnut praline cake easily – just add 2-3tbsp cocoa powder.

We ran out of icing sugar so couldn’t do the ‘stiff peak pointy effect’ that the Rachel Allen cake has… But this is easily achievable I’m sure with icing made to be more mouldable (less water basically).

May be making this again in two weeks so we’ll see!

Conor didn’t like the ‘running over the edge’ thing I did with the icing, whereas I thought it made it look more indulgent (like it’s ready to burst with nom nom nom )

P.S. We had extra praline left over, so we added it to this: (just use soya milk/dairy free butter/oil to make vegan): artofdessert.blogspot.ie/2010/11/quick-fix-microwave-brownie.html