Wet-Bottom Shoofly Cake (Vegan)

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. For the topping: Place all-purpose flour, brown sugar, and vegan butter in a medium size mixing bowl. Use a pastry cutter or your fingers (using a crumbling motion) to blend until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs. Set aside.
3. For the cake: Place all-purpose flour, salt, brown sugar, and vegan butter in a large mixing bowl. Again, use a pastry cutter or your fingers to blend until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs.
4. Stir baking soda into the boiling water in a medium-sized bowl. The mixture will fizz, so add the baking soda in a few steps instead of all at once. This will prevent the mixture from bubbling over the sides of your container!
5. Stir the baking molasses into the water/baking soda mixture.
6. Add this liquid mixture to the dry cake ingredients in the large mixing bowl. Mix with a fork until it’s pretty smooth. Set aside.
7. For the bottom layer: Stir baking soda into boiling water in a medium-sized bowl. Again, add the baking soda in parts, not all at once.
8. Stir the table molasses into this water/baking soda mixture.
9. Pour the wet bottom layer into a greased or non-stick 9-inch by 9-inch square baking pan.
10. Slowly drizzle the cake layer over the wet bottom layer in the pan. I pour in circular patterns starting small in the center of the pan and then moving out to the edges of the pan. Try to evenly cover the wet bottom layer.
11. Sprinkle the crumb topping evenly on top of the cake layer in the pan.
12. Bake at 350 F until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean (except for some crumb topping), about 40 minutes. Start checking for doneness at 35 minutes just to be safe.

I started with a Wet Bottom Shoofly Cake recipe from cooks.com, which I veganized and changed to make the texture fluffier and get the cake and crumb topping closer to what you’d find in a traditional Shoofly Pie.