Vegan Lemon Olive Oil Cake Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the best oil for vegan cake? ›

Even unrefined canola oil has a high enough smoke point to work like a champ in vegan baking applications. If you wanted to specialize in frying, you could turn to a refined canola oil for the extra heat tolerance.

Olive oil leaves your cake sponge incredibly delicate, moist, and spongy and removes the chance of the sponge being heavy or dense. The swap from vegetable to olive oil is a very simple one and is one you should make, for both flavor and health reasons.

Extra virgin olive oil is a great substitute for butter or other fats when baking cakes. It gives cakes a wonderfully moist texture and a light, subtle flavor that pairs perfectly with other ingredients like fresh fruit and nuts. Plus, it's healthy and packed with antioxidants and healthy fats.

Melted Butter

Melted, unsalted butter is the perfect substitute for oil, and can even add a richer flavor to baked recipes. Swap in butter for oil in a 1:1 ratio, melting butter in the microwave or on the stovetop. Vegan butter or ghee can also work in this instance.

Replacing butter with vegetable oil in your cake recipes typically yields moist results. Unlike butter, vegetable oil remains liquid at room temperature, ensuring your cake maintains a soft texture, whether served fresh or straight from the refrigerator.

Instead of oil, I use fruit purees, veggies, dairy-free yogurt, nut butters, almond flour or other nuts, sometimes coconut butter. This gives lot of moisture and the fats still give that texture and richness that oil or butter normally give. Sometimes applesauce or pumpkin can be used interchangeably.

Canola oil is the most popular baking oil as it's stable at high temperatures, is cost-effective and has a very natural flavour. It also has only 7% saturated fat and contains omega-3s. Choose organic where possible even if it's a little more pricey.

To substitute coconut oil for vegetable oil, use the same amount of coconut oil as vegetable oil. Since coconut oil is solid at room temperature, you'll need to melt the oil if your recipe requires liquid oil. Just make sure the other ingredients aren't too cold or they will re-solidify the coconut oil.

Best Olive Oils for Baking

Any olive oil is fine, but we find the best olive oil for baking is made with Aberquina olives ($19, Target). This type of olive oil will come labeled as "mild" olive oil, which allows for a light, mild flavor rather than the more aromatic extra virgin olive oil on the shelves.

Engineering the perfect olive oil cake requires more olive oil than you might expect—a full 9-inch round cake needs anywhere from ¾ to 1 cup of the good stuff—as well as a sturdy emulsion. Simply mixing olive oil into your wet ingredients will result in a greasy mouthfeel and a dense crumb.

Why does my olive oil cake sink in the middle? ›

If you have too much liquid or too much fat in your cake batter, this can result in a cake with a weak structure which can cause it to sink in the middle.

Most olive oil cakes don't taste like olive oil unless you choose an intense or especially fruity extra virgin olive oil. In this case, you might notice some pleasant herbal or floral notes that compliment your primary flavoring and give your cake a more complex flavor profile.

To convert butter to oil, you'll want to use a 3:4 ratio instead — this means one equal part of oil equates to ¾ butter. Example: If a recipe calls for 2/3 cup of butter, use 1/2 cup of oil instead.

Applesauce is a 1:1 replacement for oil, so if your recipe calls for half a cup of oil, use half a cup of applesauce instead. If you find yourself in the middle of a recipe and out of oil, use applesauce instead! This trick works in cakes, muffins, cookies, brownies, and any kind of sweet baked good.

Try cutting the oil in your recipe back by substituting ½ of the amount of oil with ¾ the amount of yogurt. For example, if your recipe lists 1 Cup of Oil, try replacing ½ cup of Oil with ¾ cup of yogurt.

Sunflower, safflower, sesame, avocado, coconut, almond, and olive oil also pass this “Is This Oil Vegan” background check and are all great oil options that may not come with the worries of palm oil or canola oil. So that's the vegan oil lineup and the verdict.

Canola oil is, without doubt, one of the best types of oil for baking. It's preferred in many recipes since it has the most neutral flavor compared to other types of oil. It also tends to be lighter in flavour, so it will not negatively affect the baked product's flavor and texture.

Because coconut oil remains solid at up to 76 degrees, it can mimic the texture of butter when cutting it into flour for a pie crust (or laminating it into croissants). You just use 20 percent less chilled, solid oil than a classic butter-based recipe, and you'll achieve very similar results.

Unrefined coconut oil (which is solid at room temperature) can add the thickness that butter would, and canola oil works in recipes with liquid sugars (think agave) or solid fats, such as groundnuts or chocolates in cakes. Vegan shortening works well with cookies and pie crusts.