Description

This decadent cardamom pistachio cake with honey cream cheese frosting is the perfect spring cake for any occasion. It’s sweet, slightly salty, nutty, and so freakin MOIST! Plus, the texture of this cake is so soft and delicate and pretty much melts in your mouth.

Ingredients

Scale

Cardamom Pistachio Cake

1 3/4 cup (405 g) cashew milk
1 1/2 tbsp (16 g) lemon juice
2 1/4 cup (290 g) spelt flour
2 1/4 cup (253 g) coconut sugar
1 cup + 2 tbsp (160 g) roasted unsalted pistachios
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1 cup (250 g) coconut yogurt
3/4 cup (155 g) extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp vanilla paste or vanilla extract
3/4 tsp almond extract

Honey Cream Cheese Frosting

3/4 cup (5.5 oz or 156 g) unsalted butter or unsalted vegan butter, softened
2 cups (16 oz or 460 g) cream cheese or vegan cream cheese
1/3 cup (135 g) honey*
2 tsp vanilla paste or vanilla extract
1/8 tsp kosher salt

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Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350°F and grease and line a 9×9 square pan** with parchment paper. I like greasing the pan with olive oil. Set aside.
Prep the buttermilk. In a pitcher, pour in the cashew milk and lemon juice. Stir and set aside to curdle.
Make the batter. Grind the pistachios in a blender or spice grinder (I prefer the spice grinder as it’ll get the pistachios super fine). Dump the ground pistachios into a large mixing bowl, along with the spelt flour, coconut sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cardamom, and kosher salt. Whisk well to combine, and make sure there are zero lumps! In a medium mixing bowl, pour in the buttermilk mixture, coconut yogurt, olive oil, vanilla paste, and almond extract. Whisk well until it’s a homogenous mixture. Dump the flour into the wet ingredients and whisk to combine until there are no streaks of flour.
Bake the cake. Pour the batter into the prepared pan**, and gently tap on the counter to pop any air bubbles. Bake the cake in the oven for 42-45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out mostly clean (there should be a few crumbs clinging to the toothpick).
Cool the cake. Let the cake cool in the pan for 1 hour, before turning it out onto a cooling rack and letting it cool to room temp, about 1 hour. Personally, I like making the cake the day before, so it has time to chill and sit in the fridge. This helps a ton with flavor development and ensures the cake isn’t too crumbly when you go to frost it.
Make the frosting. Using an electric mixer (I used an immersion blender with the whisk attachment), cream together the softened butter and cream cheese. Once creamed, about 3 minutes, add in the honey, vanilla bean paste and kosher salt. Cream together again until the frosting is fluffy and light. This should take an additional 5 minutes. Taste and adjust for sweetness as needed.
Assemble. Once the cake is done cooling, plop on all of the frosting (yep, all of it). Spread the frosting out creating loose swirls and loops. Sheet cakes are supposed to be rough and imperfect, plus they always look good no matter how much you play with the frosting, so don’t fuss with it too much. Sprinkle over some chopped pistachios for garnish and enjoy.
Store the leftovers in an airtight glass container in the fridge. Full transparency, this cake only lasted 2 days in our house haha, but it should keep well in the fridge for up to 4-5 days.

Notes

*Maple syrup would be the best substitute for honey if you want to make this vegan. However, since maple syrup has a higher water content than honey, I would use 4 tbsp of maple syrup and add more as needed depending on how sweet you want the frosting.

**I’ve baked this cake successfully in an 8×8 square pan, but I’ve updated the recipe since to use a 9×9 square pan as two folks said the batter spilled out. As a general rule of thumb, the batter should fill the pan about halfway so the cake has room to rise while it bakes.