This vegan maple pecan cake has a soft texture and a sweet, crunchy, chewy top. It’s one of those super-easy vegan recipes that involves mixing all the wet ingredients together and stirring them into the dry ingredients. Somehow, this minimal process always seems to produce a good cake.
Pecans are ranked as the healthiest nut on the nutritionfacts.org website, which examines the scientific evidence for plant-based diets, beating even walnuts in terms of their anti-oxidant content. Maple syrup and dates provide plenty of sweetness without any refined sugar, and the recipe uses olive oil and wholemeal flour instead of more processed alternatives.
The ingredients include an unripe banana. The riper the banana, the more banana flavour will carry through into the cake, which is lovely but a bit of a diversion from a maple pecan cake.
An extended baking time produces a really rich brown top with toasted pecans. To make it easy to cut slices, arrange the pecan halves in a star shape like the pictured cake.
Vegan maple pecan cake…
Ingredients
- 100 g pecan halves
- 100 g chopped dates
- 250 g plain wholemeal flour
- 2.5 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 75 g unripe banana (ie, still with some hints of green)
- 140 ml oat or other non-dairy milk
- 120 ml maple syrup, plus 2-3 tablespoons for drizzling
- 100 ml light olive oil
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
Method
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F. Lightly oil and line the base of an 8″/20cm cake tin.
- Reserve 24 pecan halves for the top (around a third). Chop the rest fairly small and place in a large bowl.
- Add the chopped dates, flour, baking powder and salt to the chopped nuts and stir well to ensure everything is evenly distributed.
- Place the banana, maple syrup, oat milk, olive oil and vanilla extract in a blender and blend until smooth.
- Pour the liquid mixture into the dry ingredients, stirring as you go, to create a soft cake batter.
- Spoon the mixture into the cake tin, level the top, then arrange the retained pecan halves on top. There is no need to press them into the mixture. If you arrange them in a star shape like the pictured cake, it will be easy to cut slices.
- Drizzle two to three tablespoons of maple syrup over the top, paying particular attention to the pecan halves.
- Bake for around fifty minutes, until the cake is risen with a deep brown, glossy crust and an inserted skewer comes out clean.
- Allow the cake to cool before removing from the tin and cutting.
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