Vegan pound cake with an almond glaze. Moist, rich and dense (but not heavy) this pound cake is super simple and absolutely delicious.
This vegan pound cake with an almond glaze turned out super well. I’m ridiculously pleased about it.
Mostly because it took me AGES to figure it out!
Traditionally a pound cake is made with a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs and a pound of butter (the recipe usually makes more than one loaf if you were wondering why so much of each!).
Now here’s the thing, when you want to veganize a recipe, and you need to replace 1 egg, it’s really quite simple, you can just use 1 flax egg or you can use some applesauce or something, it’s not a big deal.
But when you’re replacing a whole lot of eggs (like 4 of them for one loaf of pound cake), it gets more challenging.
The thing is you can’t ever use 4 flax eggs or a whole heap of applesauce because when eggs are cooked they firm up, they become solid, they provide structure. Flax eggs and applesauce don’t do that.
No egg replacer? What?
So with this vegan pound cake, I had to do a lot of improvising and I tried all sorts of combinations, and in the end did not replace the eggs at all, not at all.
I used vegan butter, sugar, flour and vegan buttermilk as the main ingredients. The result might be a tiny bit lighter and fluffier than a traditional pound cake, with a slightly looser crumb, but it’s still much denser than a sponge cake and works very well for this.
Another little snafu I was running into was a case of sinking in the middle! And then thankfully I found a great troubleshooting article which goes through all the reasons this can happen, most of which I was aware of but one important one that I didn’t know.
So since my baking powder was fresh, I was not opening the oven when my cake was rising, and I was not overbeating my batter, my oven temperature was correct, and I was not leaving my batter to sit for too long before baking, I realized that what I WAS doing wrong was using too much baking powder.
The ratio is 1 to 1 and 1/2 tsp baking powder per cup of flour, not more than that when you’re making cakes.
Since my recipe uses 2 cups of flour, the maximum amount of baking powder I can then use is 3 tsp. And when it was sinking in the middle I was using 4!
It was sinking in the middle because the cake was rising too fast without enough structure to support it, hence the collapse in the middle. So as soon as I dropped the baking powder down to 3 tsp that problem was solved.
How to prevent your vegan pound cake from over-browning
The other little issue I had was too much browning on top. This cake bakes for an hour. So does my vegan banana bread, but with banana bread, if it gets browned and crispy and caramelized on top it’s just perfect, whereas with this, you don’t want it too brown on top.
The solution? Tent it with foil for the last 20 minutes of baking. And if you’re wondering what ‘tenting’ is, it’s exactly like it sounds.
Take foil and place it in a tent like shape over the top of your loaf pan. It allows it to continue to bake without over-browning on top, while also protecting your cake so that the foil doesn’t push down on it from the top (the reason for the ‘tent’, rather than just putting foil over the top).
Since it’s only for the last 20 minutes, the cake has done all its rising by then so opening the oven at this point to put a foil tent over the top doesn’t interfere with your cake rising and doesn’t cause any sinking side effect.
The almond glaze
The almond glaze on top was because as delicious as this vegan pound cake is, well sometimes pound cake can be considered a little…. boring.
It’s really quite plain, like you’d probably want to serve it with something else, like a fruit compote and vegan whipped cream or ice cream or something to jazz it up a bit.
But with the almond glaze and lots of almond flakes on top, this jazzes it up very nicely and it looks and tastes absolutely delicious.
So I really hope you will love this vegan pound cake with almond glaze. It is:
- Moist
- Rich
- Dense (but not heavy)
- Super simple
- Topped with an almond glaze
Keep it covered at room temperature where it will stay good for a few days or covered in the fridge where it will stay good for up to a week.
More delicious vegan cakes!
- Vegan Lemon Cake
- Vegan Chocolate Cake
- Vegan Vanilla Cake
- Vegan Banana Cake
- Vegan Coconut Cake
- Vegan Carrot Cake
Let us know in the comments what you think of this vegan pound cake and please do rate the recipe too, thank you!
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Vegan Pound Cake
- Prep Time: 15 mins
- Cook Time: 60 mins
- Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
- Yield: 10
Description
Vegan pound cake with an almond glaze. Moist, rich and dense (but not heavy) this pound cake is super simple and absolutely delicious.
Ingredients
For the Vegan Pound Cake:
- 1/2 cup (112g) Vegan Butter
- 1 cup (200g) White Sugar
- 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 2 cups (250g) All Purpose Flour
- 3 tsp Baking Powder
- 1/2 tsp Salt
- 1 cup (240ml) Vegan Buttermilk (1 Tbsp lemon juice + soy milk up to the 1 cup line, see instructions)
For the Almond Glaze Topping:
- 1 cup (120g) Powdered Sugar
- 1 and 1/2 Tbsp Soy Milk (or other non-dairy milk)
- A few drops Almond Extract*
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350Ā°F (180Ā°C)
- Add the vegan butter and sugar to the bowl of an electric mixer and cream them together. Add the vanilla extract and mix in.
- Sift the flour into a mixing bowl and add the baking powder and salt and mix together and then add into the bowl with the vegan butter and sugar.
- Make your vegan buttermilk by adding 1 Tbsp fresh squeezed lemon juice to a measuring jug and then pouring in soy milk up to the 1 cup (240ml) line and then stirring in so it curdles. You can also use almond milk if you prefer. Add to the other ingredients.
- Mix into a batter with a spoon. The batter will be thick. Mix in properly but be careful not to overmix.
- Spray a 9×5 loaf pan with non-stick spray and then line it with parchment paper. The best way to do this is to let the parchment paper hang over the sides so that when your cake is done you can just lift it out.
- Transfer your cake batter to the loaf pan and smooth it down.
- Place into the oven to bake for 60 minutes.
- At the 40 minute mark, bring out the cake and add foil to the top in a tent shape. So let the top be quite high (in a tent shape) so that it doesn’t press down on the cake from the top. Put the cake back in for the last 20 minutes.
- It’s ready when a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
- Lift the cake out with the parchment paper and place onto a wire cooling rack to cool completely before frosting.
- Prepare the almond glaze by adding the powdered sugar, soy milk and almond extract to a bowl and mixing in until smooth. I didn’t use the electric mixer for this, I found it was easy to mix up in a bowl.
- Spoon this out over the top of the cooled pound cake and smooth it down. It will likely run down the sides, this is fine.
- Top the cake with some almond flakes or slivers and place into the fridge for a little while so that the frosting can set.
- Cut into slices and enjoy!
Notes
*Almond extract is quite strong tasting so I usually just put a tiny bit on the edge of a spoon and then let a few drops fall into the bowl.
- Category: Dessert
- Method: Bake
- Cuisine: Vegan
Nutrition
- Serving Size: 1 Slice (of 10)
- Calories: 276
- Sugar: 31.9g
- Sodium: 364mg
- Fat: 6g
- Saturated Fat: 1.1g
- Carbohydrates: 52.6g
- Fiber: 0.7g
- Protein: 3.4g
Keywords: vegan pound cake
I make a ton of recipes by lovingitvegan and Iāve loved all of them. As for this pound cake I donāt feel it was buttery or dense enough like a pound cake should be. Still taste good but not what I expected. Thank you for always posting awesome recipes!
I left the glaze off. Using it in trifle. I doubled the recipe. It is amazing!
★★★★★
Awesome! Thanks Nicole!
Delicious! I used lemon extract instead of almond in the glaze and it was great.
★★★★★
Awesome! Thanks for sharing Lisa!
Wonderful recipe! Is it able to be doubled?
Thanks Paris! I haven’t tried doubling it but I think it would be fine.
Hi, this looks great! Is the vegan butter the foil wrapped block kind or can you use vegan soft margarine? Thanks!
You can use either/or in this recipe. š
Hi! Wondering if you have tried this recipe with gf flour? I have some bobs red mill 1 to 1 gf baking flour
Hi Sofia, I haven’t tried it, but I do think that should work.
Will almond milk work instead of soy milk
Yes you can make the buttermilk with almond milk instead of soy.
Needed a few more minutes in the oven and didn’t turn out as dark as yours but still SO good! (I have a thermometer in the oven to double check temp, if that’s helpful)
★★★★★
Turned out absolutely 100% perfect, as always with this site! So lovely. I didn’t make the icing as I usually find the cakes here sufficiently sweet and yummy without icing, and I really liked the subtle classic vanilla flavor and feel of this cake.
★★★★★
So happy to hear that Yesim! Thanks so much for sharing!
I have tried so many vegan poundcake recipes and always end up trashing them… they are always either too sweet, too bland, too heavy or too “floury”.
This is the first recipe I have tried that comes out absolutely PERFECT!!!
I like to use this recipe with the glaze from her lemon poundcake recipe. Try it now, you will be delighted! Easy and delicious!!!
★★★★★
Thanks so much Lorene!
This was really good. A few changes though. I used one tablespoon of white vinegar for the buttermilk because I didnāt have any lemons. Also I added 2tbsp of orange juice and zest to the batter to make it an almond orange pound cake. It was really good!
★★★★★
Awesome! Thanks for sharing Elisabeth!
I don’t like soy or almond milk, can I use oat milk?
It might not curdle into buttermilk but you can still use it if you prefer.
Texture-wise, this reminded us of banana bread (but with no banana flavor) and it tasted great even plain – so we actually ate nearly half the loaf while it was still too hot to glaze!
I am very excited to try it in a bundt cake pan with pecans and butter, nut, and vanilla extract – vegan butternut cake!
Substitution notes – I used earth balance for butter and oat milk. I didn’t see curdling in the “buttermilk”, but the cake came out great. I definitely wouldn’t omit the lemon juice, when I mixed the wet and dry you could see some foaming like you do with baking powder + vinegar “eggs”.
★★★★
So glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for sharing Angela. š
Do you have a gluten free version of this?
Hi Anneka, I don’t. You could try a gluten free all purpose flour blend instead of the regular flour and see how that goes. š
Do you think this would work in a 9×13 pan with altered baking time?
Hi Melinda, it should work okay! I’m not entirely sure what the baking time might be, I’d probably check it at 30 minutes and see how it’s going then. All the best!