Vegan Chimney Cake
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My first encounter with chimney cakes must have been about six or seven years ago. I was walking through the streets of Budapest and marveled at the great smell spreading through almost every street (at least that's how I remember it). Wide-eyed, I finally stood in front of a booth with chimney cakes and admired these baked goods that were spinning around themselves over an open fire. What a brilliant idea! Nowadays you can also find chimney cakes in Germany at Christmas markets or even in larger shopping malls. But to be honest, I've never eaten them since my vacation in Budapest.
And until now, I never came up with the idea of preparing them myself – what a mistake! Although the traditional dough contains eggs, milk, and butter, it's actually pretty simple to veganize it. The base is a yeast dough, which we prepared with some more sugar, as well as plant-based milk instead of water. We sprinkled our chimney cakes with a classic combination of sugar and cinnamon, but cocoa powder, nuts or coconut flakes work just as well.
Be sure to serve the chimney cakes fresh out of the oven as they will otherwise dry out and get hard. If you are short on time, prepare the dough in the morning (or the night before), roll it out, and cut it into strips. This way you only need to wrap it around a rolling pin and bake it right before serving. If you should have several rolling pins at home, you can even bake several chimney cakes parallelly.
By the way, there's also a great alternative if you don't even have an oven-safe rolling pin or don't want to bake the chimney cakes one after the other. Flip a muffin tray upside down, cover each muffin tin with aluminum foil, and brush it well with oil. Now you can wrap the dough stripes around the muffin tins and this way bake small chimney cake cups. You can eat them as they are or fill them with vegan heavy cream and fruits of your choice.
Vegan Chimney Cakes
Ingredients
For the dough:
- 0.5 (21 g / 0.75 oz) cube fresh yeast
- 50 g (0.25 cup) brown sugar
- 190 ml (0.75 cup) plant-based milk (lukewarm)
- 20 g (1.5 tbsp) coconut oil
- 1 pinch salt
- 8 g (2 tsp) vanilla sugar
- 350 g (2.75 cups) wheat flour (type 550)
- wheat flour (type 550) for rolling out
For sprinkling:
- 50 g (3.5 tbsp) vegan butter
- 6 tbsp white sugar
- 1–2 tbsp cinnamon
Instructions
Crumble fresh yeast into a bowl with your hands. Add brown sugar and lukewarm (not hot!) plant-based milk and mix. Let the mixture stand for approximately 10 minutes so the yeast can bloom.
Heat coconut oil until it's liquid. Then let it cool until it's only lukewarm. Add melted coconut oil, salt, vanilla sugar, and flour to the bowl with the yeast mixture and combine everything into a smooth dough. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and let it rise in a warm place for approximately 1 hour, or until the dough has risen well and many bubbles are visible on the surface.
Roll out the dough on a floured work surface into a large rectangle. If the dough is still too sticky, simply knead a bit more flour into the dough. Cut the dough into 2–3 centimeters (0.75–1.25 inches) thick strips with a knife or pizza cutter.
Preheat the oven to 200 °C/390 °F (fan). For the topping, melt vegan butter in a small pot. Mix cinnamon and sugar in a small bowl.
Wrap a rolling pin with aluminum foil and place it on a baking dish so that only the ends of the rolling pin rest on it. Brush the aluminum foil with melted vegan butter. Now wrap the dough strips tightly around the rolling pin, leaving approximately 5 centimeters (2 inches) of space from the rolling pin ends. When one dough strip ends, immediately attach the next one and press it firmly against the previous strip to connect them. We needed 2–3 strips per rolling pin.
When the entire rolling pin is covered (with some space to the ends to place it on the baking dish), brush the dough again with vegan butter and sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar mix.
Bake the Baumstriezel individually and one after another (still placed on the baking dish) for approximately 12–15 minutes in the oven (depending on the thickness of your strips). Turn the rolling pin 1–2 times during baking. Let the Baumstriezel cool on the rolling pin for approximately 5 minutes after baking, then carefully remove. Repeat baking with the remaining dough.
