I love making savoury cakes! These are always big crowd (hubby + daughter) pleasers as they remind them of little burgers. I love them because they’re tasty, use great healthy ingredients, are packed with protein and carotenoid and are quick and easy to make. Yes, these are quick and easy to make and what’s great is that they are a great meal to make from your leftovers.
I like to plan my meals for two days sometimes and when boiling potatoes one day, I make sure I boil enough for two days. For this recipe I used up leftover sweet potatoes – yup, this is what leftovers look like at my house – sometimes ;)
SWEET POTATO & MUNG BEAN CAKES
GLUTEN FREE & EGG FREE, DAIRY FREE; VEGAN HEALTHY RECIPE
Ingredients :
- 1 1/2 cups of cooked and mashed sweet potatoes (leftovers work great)
- 1 cup mung beans, previously cooked and cooled
- 1/2 red or sweet onion (I used red in this recipe)
- 1 teaspoon of chia or flax seeds (soaked in 2 tbsp of warm water)*
- 1 tsp turmeric
- dash of cayenne pepper
- sea salt + pepper to taste
- 1 tablespoon of chickpea/ garbanzo flour + 1/2 cup more for coating
- grape seed oil for cooking
Directions:
cook the sweet potatoes, mash and let cool. (leftovers are great for this recipe). Soak mung beans overnight or 6-8 hours, cook as per directions (about 45 min.) strain and let cool.
Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl. With your hands, make balls about the size of a golf ball, press gently to flatten slightly, then dip them into the chickpea/ garbanzo flour. Coat on all sides. Fry on medium low for about 3 minutes, flip over once and continue cooking about 2 minutes. Do not move them around on the pan at all as they might fall apart easily if the sides aren’t firmed up yet.
Notes: *the chia or flax seeds and water are 1 egg replacer.
Yum! Making these little cakes ~ or sure call them ‘vegan burgers’ if you like ;) is so much fun. That’s if you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty ;) I also prefer making vegan burgers because I don’t have to handle meat at all! That always grossed me out (sorry, meat eaters). Plant-based cooking is definitely a lot more tactile and easier and a lot less expensive!
Here is some nutritional info for Mung Beans:
100 grams (which is about a cup, 7/8 of a cup to be exact) of Mung Beans, boiled without salt, have 7.02 grams of protein, 105 calories and 7.6 grams of dietary fiber.
They are also high in Potassium, Magnesium, Folate, Vitamin A, K and are a good source of Calcium.
Not to mention that this is a great flavour combo of the Sweet Potato and Mung beans together! And going gluten free, and actually completely grain free in this recipe (as chickpea flour is made from beans) is so much healthier.
These little vegan cakes were served up on a bed of spinach pesto gluten free linguini, with a nest of spinach and cakes on top. Yum.
Blogger, Recipe Developer, Photographer and Author. Loves healthy food, photography, sunshine and dancing in the kitchen with her two daughters. 
That’s the most amazing gluten-free vegan meal I’ve laid eyes on! Seriously…yum!
Thank you! That is the nicest comment I’ve ever laid my eyes on ;D
♥ Ella
These look amazing. I am always looking for new ways with legumes, especially mung beans! I tried to pin the recipe, but for some reason Pinterest won’t bring up the photos. . . sorry. :(
Thank you Ricki for dropping by ;)
Oh that darn Pinterest, always acting up! ;D
No problem, I’ll still take that as a complimet ;)
xoxo
Ella
Looks delicious!
I went to the store yesterday, to get what I needed to make your adzuki bean soup, and couldn’t find those beans. I’ve never had that kind of bean before either, so I didn’t know what to swap for, didn’t want to mess with the flavour of the recipe. Do you know what I could put in instead? Thanks in advance :)
Hello Miss Sunshine ;D
Happy to hear you’re in the mood for some of my cooking ;D
The soup you speak of…. http://www.pureella.com/quinoa-adzuki-tomato-soup/
calls for adzuki ~ as I think it’s such a nice mild tasting bean and has tons of health properties ;)
Hmm… sorry you can’t get your hands on some.
What could we do….
The closest cousin to adzuki beans are the mung beans actually – BUT I don’t see that in this recipe – instead (because it has a bit of an Italian spiced flavour and not asian (and I see the mung bean more asian) I would sub with Red Kidney beans actually.
It’s an easy bean to find (canned would also work and cut the cooking time a million times ;)
Also the tastes of the quinoa/tomato and spices would go well with the red kidney beans.
A soup like that can easily be adjust to fit different ingredients – have fun trying out a different version. And whenever possible (maybe at some asian stores) do look for the adzuki beans – they are the best, most nutritious and most easily digestible bean in my book ;)
(the ‘book’ I have not yet written ;P LOL)
xoxo
Ella
Thanks so much for letting me know! Red kidney beans are super easy to find here, so it won’t be a problem. Can’t wait to try it :)
Hope you have a wonderful week my friend!
Steph
xox
Ella these look incredible – I love littel cakes too, they are so easy to make with leftovers and fun to serve!
I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with mung beans before but these look great!
Hello Ella,
LOVE the new site my friend. Just beautiful.
And thank you for sharing this beautiful recipe. I have made mung beans a few times. I do love their flavor, and can imagine these are quite delicious with the sweet potato. I’m featuring these this week on AFW! Thanks for such a great recipe – love the entire presentation. :-)
Hugs to you lovely lady,
–Amber
Excuse me, the note says that chia seeds and water are egg replacer. How is it an egg replacer? Does that combination produce an immitation of an egg?
Hello Alexander,
My apologies for getting back to you just now.
(comments on my older posts get mixed up with spam and I don’t notice them easily – need to work on that! ;))
Back to your question though, Yes!
Chia seeds mixed with a little hot water and left aside for a few minutes create a gel consistency. This when added to a recipe helps to bind everything together – very much like an egg.
What’s great too is that it’s virtually tasteless in a recipe which is great that it doesn’t overpower it. (You can use ground flax seeds also to achieve the same thing – but I find that you can taste the flax seeds more.
It also adds amazing chia seed nutrition such as protein, omega fatty acids, calcium, fiber and so much more… ;)
Hope this helps ;) Cheers. Ella
I found your blog during a search for other things to do with mung beans. This looks great. I am trying it this weekend.
Thanks! Let’s call that fate that you ended up here ;) Enjoy those mung bean cakes! They are delicious ;) xo Ella
These are SO great! My husband and I recently started the Vegan Diet (4 weeks ago), our meals where becoming Blan. Way to “spice” things up! Thanks!
Well Thank YOU for writing this sweet comment ;)
Happy to hear you both enjoyed these so much!
And your comment is such a nice reminder for me to keep doing what I’m doing ;)
*hugs* xoxo
Hello! I’m making these now – so I’ve left it a bit late – but I was wondering if the 1 cup of mung beans was the dry or cooked volume you used? These look marvellous; I don’t want to mess it up!
Hi Demabu,
Thanks for your question! The 1 cup is for cooked or canned mung beans. Otherwise they would overpower the recipe too much.
If you are cooking them from dry, about 1/2 cup makes 1 cup as they double in size (more or less).
But may I suggest that if you are cooking from dried beans, do cook more so you have some for another recipe for the next day or you can freeze them once cooked for a quick thaw.
Dried beans need to be soaked for about 4 hours or overnight and then cooked for about 45 minutes. It’s a longer process but worth it which is why I like to cook a bigger batch of beans and using only 1 cup for this recipe.
I hope this helps.
Enjoy the Mung Bean Cakes! xo
These look beautiful. I can’t use garbanzo beans or grains. Would coconut flour work? A starch? Almond meal? Thank you.
Hi Amy,
Thanks for your question…
Is it the mung beans that you can’t use ~ all beans? I haven’t played around with alternatives to the mung beans but you need quite a lot to make the texture stand out otherwise the sweet potatoes are just too soft to form cakes.
What I would recommend is to use a mix of nuts actually – ground up in a food processor. Use about the same amount as the mung beans. You could use a mix of walnuts/ pecans/ brazil nuts. These would have a great texture and flavour… now I haven’t tried this recipe yet but I’m just being inventive and I’m pretty sure this would be great ;)
As for the coating, I would in this case, use a bit of starch just a dusting of potato starch should do it to seal them up – alternatively you could place them on parchment paper and bake for about 25 minutes flipping over once half way, in which case you could omit the flour coating.
I hope this helps! ;)
Let me know how it goes for you and how they turn out.
xo Ella
Don’t know what I did wrong. Mine turned into an inedible, mushy messy.
Pile of garbage. Yours looked so good. Oh well, I will try another recipe.
Oh that’s too bad! Definitely too much liquid there somewhere….
Here’s a thought – do not throw it out though!
I would press it into a baking dish, maybe add a 1/2 cup of croutons to absorb some of that liquid and bake for 20-30 min at 350. If you have all these ingredients together it will still be delicious as a type of casserole that you can have with a salad. It would be a shame to throw away good ingredients :)
Maybe the potatoes or beans had too much liquid. Others didn’t seem to have this problem so that’s what I think happened. Hope it still gets saved.
Hugs. ella
For those people who have too much moisture even after adding the 1 Tbsp chickpea flour, I find that coconut flour works the best! BUT only sprinkle a little at a time otherwise it will dry out. Let it rest for a few minutes and test it with your fingers. If it’s still a bit wet, sprinkle a dash more of coconut flour until you can mold it. Remember that you have to coat it in chickpea flour as well.
I’m always looking for more ways to make vegan protein patties.
I substituted the cayenne for smoked chipotle powder and chia seed I find is a better binder than flax. I fried mine in coconut oil.
This is a fantastic recipe! Mine worked out really well!!
Vegan cooking is a challenge, you have to keep practising and don’t be afraid to improvise.