Vegan Light Christmas Fruit Cake
This Light Christmas Fruit Cake is similar to the traditional Christmas cake but doesn’t have quite so many grown up flavours. This makes it popular with kids as well as grown ups who are looking for something not quite as heavy. Get the recipe below.
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Alternative Christmas cakes
It’s traditional to eat a range of sweet treats at Christmas. Whether it’s cookies or mince pies there’s something for everyone. Except when it comes to Christmas cake.
Traditionally this is a really heavy fruit cake that is quite dense and full of alcohol soaked fruits and tonnes of winter spices. It’s got quite a grown up flavour profile and because of this it isn’t always that popular, particularly with children.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. For the last few years I’ve been looking for alternatives to the traditional Christmas cakes. Some of which I’ve linked to below. There are lots of different ways you can bring festive flavours into cake without having to resort to a heavy fruit cake.
Light Christmas fruit cake
This light fruit cake is really just a sponge cake that has fruits dotted throughout. It’s not too disimillar to a Genoa Cake.
A Genoa cake is a light fruit cake that is made from flour, eggs, butter and sugar, much like any sponge cake. Sultanas, currants, raisins, glace cherries, candied citrus peel and slithered almonds are then mixed into the batter.
Of course eggs and butter aren’t vegan so we need to make a few tweaks to the recipe.
Vegan fruit cake
Making this cake vegan isn’t too difficult.
There are lots of vegan butter alternatives on the market these days. The most important thing is to use a vegan block “butter” rather than a spread. This is because spreadable butters have a much higher water content that will affect the final bake.
The eggs need replacing for two reasons, they give the cake batter lift and loosen the batter. In this recipe we help the cake to rise by using self raising flour. This is plain flour that has raising agents mixed in. If you can’t get hold of self raising flour you can make it by mixing 1 tsp of baking powder into every 100 grams of plain flour.
To loosen the batter we use a little soy milk. This has quite a high protein content so goes a little way to mimicking the properties of the egg.
The recipe
Vegan Light Christmas Fruit Cake
Ingredients
For the cake
- 225 g vegan butter
- 200 g caster sugar
- 450 ml soy milk
- 300 g self raising flour
- 75 g sultanas, raisins and currents
- 75 g mixed peel
- 100 g glace cherries
- 75 g cranberries
- 50 g flaked almonds
For the decoration
- 500 g icing sugar
- 250 g vegan butter
- 0.5 tsp vanilla paste
- food colouring red, green and yellow
- sprinkles
Instructions
To bake the cake
- Pre heat your oven to 150C / 300F / gas mark 2.
- Line two 6 inch cake tins with baking paper.
- Cream together the butter and sugar followed by the soy milk a little at a time.
- Fold in the flour followed by the fruits.
- Pour into the prepared tins.
- Bake for 45 minutes or until it's bouncy to the touch and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.
- Remove from the oven and place on to a cooling rack to cool completely.
To decorate
- Cream together the icing sugar, butter and vanilla paste.
- Spread a little of the buttercream on top of the first layer and sandwich the second later on top.
- Using a spatula cover the cake with a very thin layer of buttercream, catching any crumbs.
- Place in the fridge so that this layer sets.
- Using a spatula cover the cake with a second layer of buttercream until no cake is visible.
- Take your remaining buttercream and colour roughly half of it green and red and the remaining icing yellow.
- Mark a triangle on the centre of the cake and then ice the Christmas tree using the green icing and a piping bag.
- Top the tree with a star using the yellow icing in a second piping bag.
- Next, write Merry Christmas beneath the tree .
- Finish by using sprinkles to decorate the tree.
Nutrition
How to scale up (or down) this recipe
This recipe is for a tall 6 inch cake. If you want to make it larger to serve more people or perhaps turn it into a square cake then you need to follow a basic formula.
You can find out more about how to do this here.
More Christmas cakes
More Christmas recipes
For the full range of Christmas recipes on the blog check out the Christmas recipe archive.