Vegan MoFo Day 7 - Sweet Saturdays - Raspberry yoghurt cake

There was a time in my life when the majority of the cookbooks I owned were a selection of Woman's Weekly cookbooks, which had been impulse purchases during shopping trips to the supermarket. In the midst of a clean out a few years back I gave all but one of these cookbooks away to charity as the pile was so large and I hadn't been using them for ages anyway. I held onto one for nostalgic reasons as it contained a recipe for a lentil cottage pie which was the first vegetarian meal I ever cooked for my family.

When Jes from Eating Appalachia posted about a lemon blueberry yoghurt cake this week, I had an instant flashback to a raspberry yoghurt cake my husband used to bake years ago. I knew that this recipe came from one of those Woman's Weekly cookbooks and immediately went searching for the one I had retained to see if the cake we used to love was in this book. After I scanned the index and found the raspberry yoghurt cake my other baking plans for Sweet Saturdays were put on hold as I was compelled to veganise this cake that used to be such a household favourite.

It was never a complicated cake to put together and this vegan version also proved to be pretty straight forward. The cake can be made with whatever berries you have kicking around in freezer, at times we used to make it with a mixture of berries or blueberries. It's a lovely moist cake and not overly sweet which is a good thing in my book. When it comes to sweet treats I've been making slices mores than anything recently but now that this recipe has been rediscovered I'm sure it will be appearing often at home.

Raspberry yoghurt cake with cream cheese frosting (Adapted from Woman's Weekly Low-fat food for life) 

½ cup (125g) dairy-free margarine

¾ cup (165g) firmly packed brown sugar

2 tablespoons ground flaxseed

6 tablespoons water

1¼ cups (200g) self-raising flour

½ cup (140g) soy (or other non-dairy) yoghurt

100g frozen raspberries

Cream-cheese frosting

60g tofutti cream cheese

20 g soy yoghurt

½ cup (55g) icing sugar

1 teaspoon lemon or lime juice

Preheat over to 180C. Grease a 14 x 21cm loaf pan and line it with baking paper.

Beat the margarine and sugar together with a hand held mixer in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Stir the ground flaxseeds with the water in a small bowl and pour this into the bowl containing the butter and sugar mixture. Beat until just combined.

Using a wooden spoon, stir through the flour, yoghurt and raspberries until all the ingredients are thoroughly combined. Spread the mixture into the loaf pan.

Bake in the oven for 1 hour. Test for readiness with a skewer after this time, if it comes out clean the cake is ready. If not, bake for an extra 5-10 minutes.

Allow the cake to stand in the tin for 10 minutes then turn it out onto a wire rack and allow it to cool down before icing.

Whisk together the tofutti cream cheese, soy yoghurt, icing sugar and lemon/lime juice and spread over the cake.

As the icing contains tofutti cream cheese I prefer to store the cake in the refrigerator.