The gooey chocolate fudge cake you'd never believe is vegan

Hardly a week goes by when we don't make chef Anna Jones' popcorn tacos from her recipe book A Modern Way To Eat,  so we were thrilled to learn she has a new book,  One Pot, Pan, Planet , on the horizon, launching on March 4 2021.

Anna Jones, 41, lives in London and is a cook and writer who champions vegetarian cooking in her books A Modern Way to Eat and  The Modern Cook's Year . Her third book, One Pot, Pan, Planet  comprises 200 recipes all made using just one pot, pan or tray for varied, easy to make weekday meals. The planet part of the title refers to Anna's advice to help us use the foods that most often end up being thrown away, thus being less wasteful.

Here Anna shares her recipe for a vegan chocolate and muscovado fudge cake the requires no sifting or creaming. "My insatiable sweet tooth knows almost no bounds, so cake is something I take very seriously," Anna says. "This dense, gooey (and incidentally vegan) chocolate cake made with coconut oil is as much of a hit with my two-year-old as it is with my vegan brother. It is such an easy cake to make: no creaming, no sifting. Be sure to use a tight-fitting cake tin, as the batter is quite wet and will run out if there are any gaps."

Serves eight

For the cake:

225g plain or light spelt flour
1 1⁄2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
75g cocoa
250g dark muscovado sugar
75g coconut oil
1 1⁄2 teaspoons vinegar (I use cider)

For the icing

75g coconut oil
50g dark muscovado sugar
1 1⁄2 tablespoons cocoa
150g dark chocolate (70 pet cent cacao), finely chopped

1. Heat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan. Grease a 20cm round springform cake tin with oil and line the base with baking paper.
2. Put all the icing ingredients except the chopped chocolate into a heavy-based saucepan with 60ml cold water. Heat until the coconut oil is melted, making sure the mixture doesn’t boil, then turn off the heat, add the chocolate and leave it to sit. After about a minute, whisk until you have a dark glossy icing and set aside. It should be cool and thick by the time the cake has baked and cooled.
3. For the cake, whisk the flour, bicarbonate of soda, a good pinch of sea salt and the cocoa together in a bowl. Make sure there are no lumps of bicarbonate of soda.
4. In a separate bowl, mix the sugar, 375ml of just-boiled water, coconut oil and vinegar. When the coconut oil has melted, stir the mixture into the dry ingredients, then pour into the prepared tin.
5. Bake for 35–40 minutes.
6. When it is ready, the cake should come away from the edges of the tin and a skewer inserted into the centre will come out clean. Cool for 30 minutes in the tin, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
7. Pour over the icing and decorate as you wish.

Recipe taken from One Pot, Pan, Planet, buy from £12.99