A delightfully easy to make marmalade cake recipe with beautiful zesty flavours and a sticky, sweet topping!

This marmalade cake is like a drop of sunshine for these cold, dark and misty January days.  It’s sticky, sweet, squidgy and just about as easy as cake making can get.  There’s literally zero faff involved but you get a cake that is SO light and moreish I’d eaten 2 giant squares before I even noticed!

Sometimes you just want a really simple cake.  Minimal effort, nothing fancy, no frosting, filling or buttercream.  But absolutely no compromise on quality or flavour.

Do you love marmalade?  I think I love it more than jam.  For this recipe use whatever marmalade you prefer – whether it’s homemade, fine shred, thick shred, lemon, clementine.  It’s entirely up to you.  I used thick cut orange marmalade because that’s my absolute favourite.  Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade to be exact.  It’s tawny, thick, sweet and very orangey.

How to make this zesty vegan cake:

It’s such a simple cake mix and as simple as mixing the wet with the dry ingredients.

Weigh out your ‘wet’ ingredients into a jug (easier to pour from a jug but use a bowl if that’s all you have).  Oh and grate the zest from the orange BEFORE you juice it.  I don’t know how many times I forget to do this and yet still flipping do it.

Your wet ingredients are the orange juice and zest, yoghurt, marmalade, oil and milk.  I also add the cardamom here.  The cardamom is optional but recommended – it gives a really subtle flavour boost.  Whisk everything together.

In a large bowl whisk together the ‘dry’ ingredients – flour, sugar, baking powder and bicarb.

Then simply add the wet to the dry.  Whisk or stir together making sure it’s well incorporated.  Stir up from the bottom of the bowl to make sure there are no sneaky pockets of flour hiding!  This is quite a liquid cake mix – it’s what makes the cake quite light and squidgy once baked!

Pour into your prepared tin.  My square tin isn’t non stick so I brush some margarine all over, dust with flour (tip out the excess) and put a square of parchment in the bottom.

Bake for around 45 minutes.  Use a cocktail stick inserted in the centre to make sure it’s cooked through.  If the stick comes out clean with no bits of raw cake clinging to it your cake is cooked!  If not return to the oven for a few more minutes, repeating the test.

Leave to cool in the tin for around half an hour before turning out onto a cooling rack.

To make the sticky topping just gently warm the extra marmalade with the agave then brush all over the top of the cake.

Store the cooled cake in an airtight container at room temperature.

I’m a little bit in love with this cake.  It’s so light and zingy, sticky and sweet.  I was also a bit greedy and only cut it into 9 squares – you could probably get away with 12 squares unless you’re feeling greedy too.

Looking for even more easy vegan cake recipes?  Try these:

Lemon and poppy seed cake

Jamaican Ginger Sticky Pudding Cake

Vegan Basbousa

Spiced Apple Cake

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