Baking news! What is cooking on the front of the pie?

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Currently I am busy with my favorite hobby: watching someone else bake a cake that I can eat. Harrods head pastry chef Philip Khoury is making his two-tone chocolate cake, a recipe with simple ingredients but radical in that it contains no eggs, no dairy, and no unnecessary substitutes. It’s one of many plant-based recipes reimagined in his first cookbook. A new way of baking (Hardie Grant).

Khoury grew up in Sydney and trained at the award-winning Quay under chef Peter Gilmore before becoming the right-hand man for Australian pastry chef Adriano Zumbo. Joining Harrods in October 2018, she noticed how few plant-based options were available and began developing her own. “Sometimes you have to bring an idea to life so people can try it out first,” she says. “I would only disclose that the bake was plant-based after tasting and approving the product.” Since then, she has launched more than 20 plant-based cakes and pastries in the store.

Very few plant-based recipes use pantry staples – people end up using inferior substitutes.

Although his years as a development chef influenced his book, A new way of baking is aimed squarely at home cooks. Khoury could not rely on the specialized pectins, agar-agar variants or potato proteins that he uses professionally. He also wanted the recipes to live up to his high standards as a chef, which meant avoiding products like margarine. “Margarine is not a high-quality product,” he says of its inconsistency and lack of provenance. “Why should I only use it to make something vegan?” Instead, Khoury focuses on ingredients that are “natural” or “in their purest form,” like unrefined oils, nuts, and non-dairy milks, reformulating classic recipes with their broad properties in mind.

Khoury’s solutions include using “tangzhong” cooked flour (an Asian technique for making soft breads) and sweet potato to make brioche. Both ingredients add moisture to make the dough pliable, while the sweet potato recreates the buttery fragrance and golden hue we’ve come to expect. She employs a “syrup method” to make cookies; coconut oil and soy milk to make whipping cream; and reinvents everything from the banoffee cake to the Victoria sponge cake.

Often, eliminating eggs and dairy results in a simpler recipe. The mousse top layer of her two-tone chocolate cake contains three ingredients: non-dairy milk, sugar, and dark chocolate. They are mixed, refrigerated and then beaten. The high fat content of cocoa butter provides the airy foam expected from eggs. The base of the cake contains flour, sugar, extra virgin olive oil, dark chocolate, plant-based milk, and baking powder, whose leavening qualities give the fluffy texture that you would otherwise get when creaming butter and eggs. The cake is rich and elegant and ranks among the best chocolate cakes I’ve ever had (vegan or not).

“There’s a huge demand for plant-based products, but very few plant-based recipes use pantry staples,” says Khoury. “People end up using inferior substitutes, like egg replacers. It’s all about going back to basics in recipes that get results. It’s also so everyone else has more options. There are many plant-based ingredients that make for great baking.”

Another book promises baking solutions of a completely different kind. A mug cake, in case you didn’t know, is mixed together and baked in the microwave and then eaten straight out of the mug. Books on the subject are big business in the United States and Canada: students and parents of young children tend to be the biggest fans. As someone who loves cake and microwave tricks, should be a devotee. But can a cake baked in 90 seconds measure up?

In Happiness in a Mug Cake (Hardie Scholarship), Kate Calder he dispenses with orthodoxy in search of flavor as only an ancient skeptic could. He uses oil instead of butter because “it has less flavor but keeps the cake moist.” Increase the sugar and cocoa powder to amplify the richness. And introduce fruit, nuts, and alcohol into recipes like apple crumble, gingerbread, and espresso martini cake to enhance flavor and texture in what would otherwise be whole cups of pound cake.

Their double chocolate chip cake (the first of many I’ve tried) has me peering through the microwave door like a child as the cake puffs up like a soufflé. The cake itself is more substantial than that, but it ticks all my instant gratification boxes. “Anyone with a sweet tooth who needs a fix,” Calder says of the target audience. You got me.

@ajesh34