Champagne Celebration Cake with Peach Bellini Buttercream

♥ Vanilla Champagne cake with Peach Bellini Buttercream ♥

♥ Mmmm, cake at many angles! ♥

♥ Mini Non-Alcoholic version I made for my son - adult only this cake people! ♥

Yay! I'm back to cake with no ready made ingredients!! I decided to bake up a rather special cake to celebrate us living in our new house 1 year, not that I usually need an excuse ;-) This turned out so well but was a rather glorious mistake.... I came up with this idea whilst on my personal baking holy grail - the perfect vegan white cake. It has eluded me so far despite numerous attempts and nothing online works. I should add here I'm being very picky, I want my vegan white cake to be white, fluffy with a delicate crumb and perfect vanilla flavour. Surely that's not too much to ask is it?

Now, the chocolate cake I always use is perfect. It's the basic wacky cake recipe that's out there and I love it. Chocolaty but also really light and fluffy with a fine crumb. Not a dense, gummy or heavy crumb in sight, which got me thinking it you omit the cocoa powder it should be the same, right? No. I believe this is the version on veg web that others seem to like but it's not for me. Without the cocoa powder we were back to dense, heavy and gummy. I used the veg web version there for my son's cake and he wasn't very happy with it :-(

The wacky cake works by the acid of the vinegar reacting with the alkaline baking soda which was still in the white cake version so I couldn't' figure out why it didn't' work. Turns out that cocoa powder is itself acidic and can't really be omitted. I then looked into replacing the water with sparkling water to help give it a lift. Sparkling water has a slightly more acidity level than regular water but not as much as cocoa powder. I then wondered about Champagne. Turns out it has the same acidity level as cocoa powder. Perfect!! I was convinced this would work, it certainly did on paper.

Well, sadly no. I didn't' get my white, fluffy cake here, but I did get a really moist, flipping delicious cake! I was so obsessed with getting the texture right in this cake that I forgot just how much Champagne was going into it, and believe me, you can taste it! This is a good thing :-) This cake has a really nice and boozy taste to it which went beautifully with the Peach Bellini Buttercream. If I could describe the texture here, it's somewhat like what a cake drizzled with a syrup might be like, a boozy syrup at that, it really is that moist and tastes incredible.

SO, the quest for the perfect vegan white cake continues, but, I have at least found another albeit completely different style cake I love in the process, and that's never a bad thing!

Oh and that buttercream is amazing, I am so glad it turned out as you can't buy peach extract here I debated on how to make it. I would have liked to have used fresh peaches but felt as they are not in season they would just be too watery. The canned worked great as the flavour was more concentrated and made it a bit easier too :-)

Champagne Celebration Cake with Peach Bellini Buttercream: 

400g plain flour

300g caster sugar

1 tsp salt

2 tsp baking soda

1 Tbsp vanilla extract

160ml vegetable oil

2 Tbsp white wine vinegar

480ml chilled Champagne, or sparkling wine

♥

1 can peaches in light syrup (standard 400g tin)

100g vegan butter

6 cups or about 840g icing sugar

1 Tbsp Champagne

For the cake, I used a loose bottomed, high sided 6" cake pan. This is probably a unique sized pan and you can just use 2 standard sized cake pans here. Your cake will probably be wider and not as high as mine however. Line the bottoms of the pans with baking paper and grease the sides. Preheat the oven to 180C.

In a large bowl whisk together all the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl whisk together the wet. Pour the wet into the dry and whisk until combined and no lumps remain. Pour into the prepared pan/s and bake, mine took 1 hour as it was all cooked together, if you are cooking 2 pans, check with a toothpick after 1/2 hour, if it comes out doughy keep cooking until it is firm to the touch, golden and the toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pans for about 15 minutes then remove from the pans onto a wire rack to fully cool.

Peach Bellini Buttercream:

First you want to make a concentrated peach puree. Drain the peaches - you don't have to save the liquid. I used peaches in light syrup here, I'm sure peaches in juice would work as well. Tip them all into a blender and blend until very smooth. Push this mixture through a fine sieve to get it as fine as possible. Now pour this into a saucepan and bring to the heat. You want to simmer this mixture down until it is much thicker and more concentrated. That way it won't make your icing runny, resulting in having to add even more sugar and it will give you a strong peachy taste. Simmer, stirring constantly until it is thick enough that when you move the wooden spoon along the middle of the mixture it stays separated for a brief time before coming together again. In the end you should have 1/2 cup of puree. Pop this into the fridge to fully cool and thicken some more.

In a mixer add the vegan butter and mix until soften, or by hand. Add some of the peach puree and some of the icing sugar and mix until well blended. When it's a bit dry add the Champagne then continue to add the puree and icing sugar until all is added. If it's too wet, add some more icing sugar, too dry, add a bit more Champagne. You want it too be a thick yet spreadable frosting.

Assembly:

If you have cooked just one large cake like I did, carefully slice it in half and separate the halves. Place one half on a cake stand and frost generously with the peach buttercream. Place the other half on top and frost the whole cake, top and sides. The buttercream recipe makes way more than you need for this cake as it's nice to have extra if you would like to pipe designs along the cake. I kept mine simple as I found these super cute Wafer Daisy's by Dr. Oetker - so cute and vegan! Actually they're not just vegan but really not bad for you at all, just rice and potato flour and the colours come from beetroot and turmeric- all natural! Nice.

♥

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