Drawing on past success with substitutions, I got this sweet darling.
 |
| All bundled up. |
This recipe is for a large (12 cup) bundt, but I opted to used a small bundt pan and bake off the extra in a loaf pan, because I wanted a shorter bake time. With all the substitutions, I knew it was going to be a very wet batter.
Cake ingredients
2 3/4 cups All Purpose Flour
2 teaspoons Baking Soda
1 teaspoon Salt
1 Tablespoon Ground Cinnamon
1 teaspoon Ground Ginger
1/3 cup Coconut Oil
1 1/2 cups Granulated Sugar
1/3 cup Mayonnaise
1/3 cup Apple Sauce
2 Tablespoons Plain Yogurt (optional)
2 small Eggs
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
15 ounces of cooked sweet potato
Filling
2 Tablespoons coconut oil (or butter)
1/2 Cup firmly packed Brown Sugar
1/8 teaspoon Ground Cardamom
Drizzle (make when cake has cooled)
1 1/2 cups Powdered Sugar, sifted
2 Tablespoons milk
If you haven't cooked your sweet potatoes yet, start with that. It sounds obvious, but if you are using fresh sweet potato instead of canned, you need to cook them first. I got tiny ones, none thicker than 2 inches across, so I boiled them whole with skins on for 30 minutes. They are easy to peel once cooked and cooled down enough to handle.
If you are using bigger ones, peel and cut into 2 inch cubes.
Drain all water from the cooked sweet potato and allow it to cool. Mash them smooth. You don't want your eggs to cook when you mix the wet ingredients together.
Preheat your oven to 350° F.
Grease and flour your pan(s).
Mix the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and ginger together in a bowl and set aside.
In a large bowl, cream together coconut oil and sugar. Gently stir in the mayonnaise, applesauce, yogurt until incorporated. Beat your eggs and fold them in. You can do all this by hand, but if using a beater, mix on low speed. Add in the mashed sweet potato.
Gradually fold in the dry ingredients until fully incorporated.
Fill the bundt pan 1/3 full with the batter. Sprinkle in 1/2 of the brown sugar filling, careful not to let it touch the sides of the pan (or it will carmelize and stick). Add more batter until the pan is 2/3 full.
Pour 1/2 the excess batter into your 2nd pan, layer with the remaining filling and remaining batter.
Bake for 45 minutes. Check with a bamboo skewer. If it's still goopy, and not because of the filling, turn the oven down to 300 and let it bake 10 more minutes before checking again.
Leave it in the pan, on a wire rack or cool surface, for 30 minutes. Then invert to de-pan and let it cool completely before drizzling with the glaze.
To get a nice, porcelain white glaze, make sure to use as little liquid as possible, use milk, and pour it over cool cake. If you want to skip the glaze, you can dust the top with cinnamon or leave it plain.
Sweet and delicious! The sweet potato made orange flecks, like carrot cake, and had the charm of pumpkin bread while still having its own identity.
As I mentioned, the recipe I started from used four large eggs, sour cream, and a cup of butter, just in the cake. Rich, but I was going to eat those eggs for breakfast. Additionally, I had small, local eggs, so I would have had to use five or six.
Mayo, especially when the best-before date is looming, makes a good understudy for eggs-and-oil in baking. This was, in fact, national brand olive oil mayonnaise, believe it or not. Applesauce can be a tricky substitute for butter, but it does work. In this case, the sweetness of the applesauce and the sweet potato (instead of canned pumpkin) meant I could hold back on some of the granulated sugar, too.
