Okara Fudge Cake

My experiments in creating our own tofu and soy milk are largely being guided by The Book of Tofu by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi. I actually have two copies of this, one a small format paperback of the original edition that was bought second hand and an updated large format version which I notice is being sold at a tremendous price on Amazon. It's also available in French at a more reasonable price so I don't know what's going on there at all.

The book is full of stuff, only some of which is relevant to a vegan diet and some which seems bizarrely dated and old fashioned. Still, the basic principles of tofu making haven't changed in many centuries and there is plenty to glean from the history and techniques described.

Now that I've started to produce soy products regularly I find I'm beginning to be overwhelmed by the quantity okara or soy bean pulp that is left after the first stages of making the milk. The book has some useful suggestions for using up this by-product which is rich in fibre and protein. I'm going to try several of them over time but the first one to catch my eye was a method of sweetening and toasting the ground bean pulp to make breakfast cereal or granola.

I had the residue of 250g of soaked, liquidised, boiled and strained soy beans. To this was added 60ml of rape seed oil, 60ml of maple syrup and about 60g of granulated sugar along with a pinch of salt. Mixed together well, the pulp was spread out on a large baking tray and placed in an oven at about 200C for an hour or so. You need to turn it every 15 minutes to stop it scorching. The maple syrup is not essential but I thought it would add flavour to the cereal.

When the cooking was done it looked like this.



Much more like cake crumbs than granola. Which gave me an idea. Rather than have a bag of sort-of breakfast food I would likely never use I could make a sweet with them. Based on our favourite Candice Cake this is a rich fudgy delight. I replaced the biscuits crumbs and nuts in the original recipe with the toasted okara crumbs (but kept the rum soaked raisins!) and didn't bother with the extra topping layer, this baby is plenty rich enough.

Serve in very small squares with strong coffee. Brilliant.