Dairy Free Vanilla Cake

Our answer

Nigella's Spruced Up Vanilla Cake (from Christmas and on the Nigella website) is a cake that is baked in a bunt pan. Nigella uses the Holiday Fir Tin, but you can use any 2.5 litre (10-cup) bundt pan. The cake is made with butter and also with fat-free plain (natural) yogurt.

You should be able to replace the butter with a pure vegetable oil spread or margarine. As the fat is creamed with the sugar and then the eggs are beaten in, you do need a margarine, rather than using vegetable oil. If you wanted to use coconut oil then this has a higher percentage of fat than butter or margarine and you would need to reduce the amount of coconut oil by about 20% (to 180g) and replace it with the same weight of extra yogurt (to give a total of 295g yogurt). For the yogurt you should be able to use a low fat non-dairy yogurt, such as a soy or coconut milk yogurt. However we would emphasise that we have not tried these substitutions ourselves so we cannot guarantee the results.