How to make a vegan chocolate fudge cake

A dairy-free spin on the most chocolatey and indulgent bake of all: vegan fudge cake

Whether you’re baking for a birthday, a party, or just to enjoy with friends and family, a chocolate fudge cake is guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser. Its moist texture, heavenly flavour, and sheer decadence make it a favourite of ours. And even better, it’s also very easy to make the recipe vegan — no matter the dietary requirements, it’s a cake that everyone can enjoy. Read on for our favourite vegan chocolate fudge cake recipe and facts about the gooey treat.

How to make a vegan chocolate fudge cake

On our quest to find the ultimate vegan chocolate fudge cake, we’ve taken two approaches:

1. following a vegan recipe
2. creating our own from a non-vegan recipe

Which method works best for you?

Vegan chocolate fudge cake recipe

This recipe from Stork: The Art of Home Baking uses vegan margarine, plant-based milk, and dark chocolate to get you that same rich taste and texture we love, with none of the usual dairy ingredients.

The most difficult part of this recipe is melting the chocolate. There’s nothing more disappointing than burning chocolate when trying to melt it, so check out our guide to the best ways to melt chocolate if you want to keep your chocolate beautifully smooth — and more importantly, edible! The recipe suggests using a pan, but we’d recommend the double boiler method for its superior control.

Many chocolate cake recipes opt for cocoa powder instead of real chocolate. While this does work in a pinch, we think you can’t get much better than the real stuff when it comes to that rich flavour we look for in a chocolate fudge cake. Our 70% Dark Chocolate Slab Selector is the perfect secret ingredient to a moist, chocolatey fudge cake. A high cacao content gives it a deep, indulgent flavour.

Make your favourite chocolate fudge cake recipe vegan

Perhaps you swear by Nigella’s desserts. Or maybe you’ve got a much-loved cookbook stashed away on the bookshelf. You might even be a seasoned home baker who’s looking to make their tried-and-true recipes vegan friendly. The good news is, you can still use these recipes with some simple ingredient swaps.

As the (not-so) famous proverb goes: “Give a baker a vegan recipe, and they can make a vegan cake. Teach a baker how to make a recipe vegan, and they can make any cake vegan.”

Take this Mary Berry recipe, for example. Eggs, milk, and cream are the problem areas here. Luckily, you can swap out:

• Dairy milk for your choice of plant milk such as soya, almond, or oat
• Dairy cream for vegan cream, either commercial and homemade
• Eggs for banana, tofu, yoghurt, or aquafaba (depending on the recipe)

You may want to stick with a tried and true vegan recipe. But if you’re willing to get inventive, the world of baking is truly your oyster.

Interested in more vegan dessert recipes? Learn how to make delicious vegan chocolate truffles, vegan hot chocolate, and even more vegan chocolate desserts here on our blog.

What is a chocolate fudge cake?

Denser and richer than a sponge cake, the ingredients in a chocolate fudge cake are sometimes melted together instead of beaten. Beating the butter and sugar together gives a sponge cake the air bubbles that make it so light and fluffy. But we don’t want that here. What we want is true chocolate decadence.

But beware: due to the richness of chocolate fudge cake, some may enjoy it best in smaller slices!

Is there fudge in chocolate fudge cake?

Despite the name, chocolate fudge cake doesn’t actually contain fudge. It’s the density and the moistness of the cake that make it reminiscent of delectable chocolate fudge.

If you do want to sink your teeth into some soft, gooey fudge chocolate, you can’t get much better than the Chocolate Fudge Sundae Selector. That one unfortunately isn’t vegan, but we find that the rich vegan ganache of our Raspberry Nutmilk Ganache Selector* hits the spot when we have a craving for that dense, chocolatey goodness you get from a quality chocolate fudge cake.

*Please note that, although our vegan and Nutmilk chocolates don’t contain any dairy ingredients, they are made in the same environment as our milk chocolate so we can’t guarantee they’re free from dairy traces.

Chocolate fudge cake ideas

Part of the appeal of the chocolate fudge is its simplicity: it’s really just chocolate cake at its absolute best. But if you’d like to shake your recipe up a bit, here are a few ideas for variations on the classic fudge cake.

Fudge cake with nice cream

Fudge cake served warm is a truly sumptuous experience, so it’s not hard to see why chocolate cake and ice cream is such a popular combination. The contrast of the rich, warm chocolate with the refreshing, chilly ice cream together is a perfect fit.

Serve your vegan chocolate fudge cake with a generous scoop of vegan ice cream. Or why not try making some nice cream? Made from blended frozen bananas, this dessert uses the banana’s natural sugars and texture to mimic ice cream. Check out our recipe here.

Double chocolate fudge cake

In our eyes, anything with “double chocolate” in the name is bound to be a winner. This recipe combines a chocolate fudge cake base with a white chocolate buttercream, making for a beautiful light and dark contrast when you cut the cake open. And with some high-cacao white chocolate, you’ll have an irresistibly smooth icing topping it all off.

Marbled chocolate fudge cake

Marbling is a technique that uses light and dark batter or chocolate swirled together to create beautiful patterns in the dessert. We just love the look of this chocolate marble fudge cake recipe that puts its own spin on the classic chocolate fudge cake look.

Bite-size desserts from Hotel Chocolat

After writing all of this, we’re definitely craving some vegan chocolate fudge cake! If you decide to make some of your own, why not tweet us the results @HotelChocolat on Twitter?

And if you fancy just a petite portion, why not take a look at our delicious Selector range? Our Gianduja Bombes and Panned Pecan Nutmilk Pralines may not be a big slab of fudge cake but they’re sure to satisfy your cacao craving.