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I have been inspired by Google. On Cookingtiki I found a walnut cake with chickpeas, which I thought looked interesting. (Tiki had been inspired by a Russian cake page!) Chickpeas need strictly speaking neither eggs or flour to function as a cake ingredient. Here I have used as a starting point the recipe for Student Muffins, and substituted apple sauce with carrot, and also tried oatmeal instead of rice flour. Tiki had also made something I have thought about but not yet tried, namely to use chickpeas also as topping. You need therefore a total of 350 g cooked chickpeas in this recipe. Here is my adaptation of Tiki’s recipe. The cake was brougt to the job, and my colleagues found it to be very good. No one was able to guess what the cake was made of ??without help. In total there are 450 g of vegetables in this pie, so this is pure health food … The recipe is enough for a cake of 18 cm in diameter (ie for 6-8 people):
Cake Base:
100 g rolled oats (gluten-free)
20 g maize starch
50 g walnuts
1 tsp baking powder
200 g cooked chickpeas
100 g shredded carrot
100 g brown sugar
50 g of honey or syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
75 g of cannola oil or similar
Chickpeas should preferably be placed in water 8 hours or more before they are boiled in plenty of water for about 1 hour. If you are in a hurry, you can use dry peas and add a half teaspoon baking soda to the boiling water. Chickpeas you are not using right away, can be frozen for later use. If using chickpeas from the box, rinse them, give them a quick boil in plenty of water, and rinse them again in cold water before using them for baking, to avoid any extra flavor from the peas.
Process oatmeal in a blender or electric coffee grinder until it is as a fine powder. Add the maize starch and baking powder and mix well. Pour flour mixture into a mixing bowl. Mix in chopped walnuts.
Preheat the oven to 180 gC. Use oil to grease a cake tin, 18-20 cm in diameter. Process peas, carrot, sugar, honey, salt, cinnamon, vanilla sugar and oil in a blender until it becomes a smooth, and creamy. Pour the mixture over the flour mixture and mix gently together. You want to avoid loosing air. Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake at 180 gC for 40 minutes or until a stick comes out dry out of the cake. Let the cake cool, remove the cake from the tin and place it on a cake stand.
Walnut topping:
30 g lemon juice
150 g cooked chickpeas
100 g coconut oil (or a mixture of 70 g saturated coconut fat and 30 g of canola oil)
100 g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
30 g walnuts
Put peas and lemon juice in the blender and run the blender for until the peas are crushed. Melt the coconut oil over low heat and add to the blender. Run the mixture until the peas have become a fine pure.. Add the icing sugar along with the vanilla sugar and the walnuts. Run the blender until everything has become a smooth cream. Scrape the cream out of the blender and into a bowl. If you think the cream has a too pale color, you can stir in a little caramelised sugar. Set the cream in the cold for 30 minutes so it thickens slightly. Beat it up again just before you spread it on the cake.
For assembly:
100 g apple jelly (or stiff plum marmalade)
The whole walnuts for garnish
Apply a layer of jelly over the cake base and cover the cake with walnut cream. Garnish with walnuts and small chunks of jelly or marmalade.
Stiff plum marmalade can be made by bringing 200 g plums without stones to a boil, adding 80g of sugar and simmer under stirring till the mixture has thickened. If you do not have plums, use 100 g seedless prunes and 100 g water.
This cake is gluten-free (if you use gluten-free oats), milk-free and eggfree and thus vegan. If you do not have coconut fat and tolerate milk, you can use soft, room temperature butter (do not melt the butter before using it for the topping).
Blog entry by Anne Spurkland, published on 25 October 2014