Vegan graham cracker cake?! Yes graham crackers can be something besides crust or s’mores. Also, I lied. In Germany we don’t have graham crackers. I used “Haferkeks” (oat cookies), but the original non-vegan recipe I based this on used graham crackers so I think any cookie like graham crackers, oat cookies, Hob Nobs (which are oat cookies), Lotus Biscoff cookies, etc. would be fine for this.
I’m about to leave Germany for 4.5 months and had these cookies to use up. They were kinda boring by themselves, I originally bought them to turn into a crust for pumpkin pie, but I had extra. Since I didn’t have anything else left to use as pie I needed another option. These cookies needed to be upcycled into something more exciting!
In Germany not all the oat cookies are vegan, so check that. The ones I bought were a cheap brand from Lidl that was accidentally vegan. They had two types and one was NOT vegan.
This was kind of a mix between a cake and a brownie. Chewy but still fluffed up a bit. It reminds me of the texture of some egg-heavy cake I had growing up.
Thanks to Sweet ReciPEAS for the original inspiration. The recipe there is not-vegan and I changed a lot of ingredients because I didn’t have them, but hers is one of the only recipes that cake up for something to make out of graham crackers that isn’t crust or s’mores.
Vegan Chocolate Graham Cracker Cake
Equipment
- food processor or blender
- 13-inch pan (to be honest I used a long bread loaf pan)
- stand mixer or whisk
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup vegan butter or oil I used oil
- 1 cup sugar I used brown sugar
- 3 vegan eggs I used 1.5 Tbsp chia seeds powdered then mixed with 6 Tbsp water as I find chia eggs more gummy than flax eggs
- 2 cups graham cracker crumbs I used oat cookies, i.e. Haferkeks
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 3 Tbsp cocoa powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 cup non-dairy milk I used water because I was out
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 375F (190 C)
- Beat vegan butter/oil in a stand miser or with a whisk and add sugar and vegan eggs, mixing until well combined.
- Add graham cracker crumbs, baking powder, cocoa, salt, non-dairy milk, vanilla extract and mix well.
- Pour batter into greased 13-inch pan. I used a long bread loaf pan honestly. Whatever you pour it into it should be about 1-1.5 inches high.
- Bake 25-35 minutes until a knife doesn't come out gooey. It will still be more wet than cake, even once it cools.
- Cool for 10-15 minutes than turn upside down and cool on a wire rack
Notes
Pin Vegan Chocolate Graham Cracker Cake for later:
What a clever way of upcycling your cookies! But we vegans are often creative that way. My go-to recipe for vegan pecan pie uses saltine crackers in the pie filling and it’s really amazing. I can’t take the credit for that; someone else came up with that idea.
I’ve always been a fan of dense cakes and will always harbor a tiny bit of bitterness, I’m afraid, because of a cake I entered in the county fair when I was 17 which used ground up walnuts instead of flour and was thus meant to be really dense, but the judges used the arbitrary criteria of “light and fluffy” as the reason for awarding any cake a prize, so every category, and the grand prize, was chosen based on their made-up-on-the-spot rule that the winning cake must be the lightest and fluffiest. Hrumph.
Saltine crackers, interesting! Yes this is sort of halfway between a cake and a bar. I think dense cakes can be great as long as they’re not too dry or gummy!