I love bread and sweets, I eat them in moderation because my body demands them and I don’t want to give them up. So, lately I’ve been looking for flour-free breads and cakes. Flour is a processed product, even the one made only of natural ingredients, without the additions of gluten-free mixes. I haven’t given up flour, but I do if I can avoid it in some dishes and still get tasty results. So, I created or adapted recipes such as: the buckwheat flatbread, the buckwheat, quinoa and chickpea bread, or the plant-based ricotta cake. Now I’m adding this chickpea cake recipe, a sweet and flavorful goodie that doesn’t contain any flour.
Ingredients
- 150 grams of chickpeas
- 300 grams of plant-based milk
- 4 large or 5 medium eggs
- 120 grams of white sugar
- 30 grams of coconut oil
- 1 sachet of baking powder
- 1 sachet of vanilla sugar (or a teaspoon of vanilla essence)
- 1 teaspoon of lemon essence
Recipe Method
Soak the chickpeas for 24 to 48 hours. Soaking removes phytic acid and makes chickpeas more digestible, as I wrote about in this article. Then boil the chickpeas until soft, 50-60 minutes. If you are too lazy to soak and boil chickpeas, you can use canned chickpeas, but I advise you to use “real” chickpeas. This is how you are sure that the chickpeas are prepared correctly, and the second reason is that ”real” chickpeas is much cheaper than canned chickpeas, it does not spoil, it can be stored in a jar with a lid on and used in other dishes, such as hummus, cheese or bread.
If you used chickpeas, you soaked and boiled it, drain the remaining water and let them cool for a few minutes. If you used canned, drain the water and wash the beans well.
Vegetable milk. You can make plant milk very simply, using a ratio of 1:5, meaning you will use one part seeds or nuts (almonds, cashews, sesame, walnuts, etc.) to 5 parts water. Pre-soaking is also recommended. Another variant I used was a coconut cream that I thinned with water. Or you can use the lazy version, commercial plant-based milk. If you choose this last option, you need to adjust the amount of sugar, if the purchased milk is sweetened.
And now let’s move on to assembling the cake. Put all the ingredients in a blender and mix until a thin paste is obtained. Complicated, isn’t it? 😊
We pour the obtained batter in the tray, on baking paper. I used a square pan with a side of 22 cm. If you have a larger pan, you will need to multiply the ingredients according to its surface area.
Place the tray in the oven heated to 180 degrees Celsius and leave until the surface is lightly golden and hard to the touch, 30-40 minutes. It will rise but deflate after it is removed from the oven, like a souffle.
Let it cool, then you can cut it. It can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a week.
