BONUS: A Very Good Vegan Vanilla Cake
Cake is confusing.
As someone who reverse engineers every vegan recipe (see vegan donuts) it was odd I hadn’t attempted to take my regular cake recipe and make it vegan. It came down to one undeniable truth about me and cake: we don’t know each other very well. Can I bake one? Sure. Can I decorate one? Yep. But did I understand the daily life of cake that made her who she really was when no one else was looking? No.
Cake is one of those desserts that can be under and over simplified. They can be $10 from Publix or $1000 and draped in edible flowing fabric made from fondant. And don’t even get me started on the hyper-realistic cakes that are disconcerting in general but particularly so when sliced—have you SEEN the cake that looks like a sweet little puppy but you don’t know it’s cake until after they’ve driven a blade clean through it? Truly haunting.
Speaking of fakes, let’s segue back to me as a cake maker. Up until yesterday my knowledge of the science behind a cake recipe was nil. Luckily, you can still make cute cakes with puddle-depth knowledge, see: the past three years of my life. Whatever level knowledge I had was serving me—no need to rock the boat.
So what happened yesterday to cause me to dive into researching cake chemistry and develop and a new recipe? Lack of direction or meaning in my life? Or perhaps a need to attain perfection? Let’s chalk it up to a little column A, a little column B, and throw in that I actually needed to bake a cake for an order but I didn't feel like baking a cake. Why not turn an undesirable task into one that would take three times as long???
I planned to have myself a cake-bake-off; I took the recipe I’ve been using for years (and generally like) and one I did not like (from Milk Bar’s All About Cake Book) and meant to bake them both to do a side-by-side comp. Ah yes, CREATING CONTENT, the king of all endeavors!
But what if someone asked me WHY the Milk Bar cake was *ahem* not good? Would my lack of knowledge make me unable to respond inspiring a shame-spiral that required me to recede into the earth until such time that all memory of Orlandough and my failure had been forgotten? Probably.
Or perhaps a few hours of aggressive googling would do the trick.
And thus I wouldn’t just be baking cakes and comparing. NO. Armed with my new knowledge, I would create the best vegan vanilla cake recipe, EVER. One Cake to rule them all, One Cake to find them, One Cake to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
But then I over-googled.
Originally, I was blissfully ignorant of why my vegan cake recipe worked. As I started researching I momentarily felt much smarter. Hours of mental math and converting information which included the use of eggs to a recipe which didn’t include eggs resulted in me returning to ignorance Expect now I knew I was just incapable of making much sense of it all .
I’d love to say that the resulting recipe makes the definitively very best EVER vegan vanilla cake but instead I can only assure you it is a very good and enjoyable recipe. There is a fair chance that it could be improved upon immediately and in perpetuity (I’ve included what I’d try next at the very end for your perusal).
I present this recipe to you in the hope that you’re able to be happy with it as-is because you don’t have deep seated insecurities about proving you’re better than others by making the very best cake, all of which stems from the fact that you feel less-than and also probably from that one time Alex Turnbaugh made fun of the weird outfit you wore one time in 5th grade. Maybe you just like making cake! Or maybe you’ve been to therapy to address the things above.
Without further ado or asides: let’s bake some cake!
Probably one of the better vegan vanilla cakes on the Internet
By: Liz Doerr
Yield: Four 5-inch round cakes or two 10-inch rounds (10-15 servings)
Notes on ingredients: I use King Arthur All Purpose Flour and Nutiva Brand Shortening. You can swap these for your preferred brand BUT keep in mind that it may change the flavor and that you should stick to the same type of ingredient. Don’t swap for bread or cake flour. Don’t swap for oil. These things matter to a certain extent (which I’ve described below in the nerd-section).
Notes on method: I assume you plan to make this into a layer cake. If that is the case, I would suggest baking the cake at least one day before you need to decorate it. This will allow the cake time to cool and settle and help make building and decorating your layer cake a bit easier. I include some tips on cake decorating below as well.
INGREDIENTS:
450 g Mylk
20 g Vanilla Extract
30 g Apple Cider Vinegar
160 g Shortening
456 g Granulated Sugar
456 g AP Flour
10 g Salt
5 g Baking Powder
5 g Baking Soda
1 g lactic acid powder (I suppose you don’t NEED this for the cake to work but it helps round out the flavor—but I’m noting it’s relevance in case you don’t have it on hand and really want to make this cake and not wait for it)
METHOD:
Prepare your pans: grease your pans, line them with a circle of parchment paper cut to size, grease the paper, and flour everything. Be sure to knock the pan upside-down into the sink to get excess flour off. You want just enough to negate sticking.
Preheat your oven to 350F.
In a medium bowl, whisk flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and lactic acid together until combined. Set aside.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, add the shortening and sugar. Beat with the paddle attachment on medium speed for about 2 minutes. You want to cream these ingredients together and the mixture should get a bit lighter from being whipped.
In a third bowl (hope your dishwasher is empty…) combine the Mylk, vanilla extract, and vinegar. Stir to combine. You will notice the mixture curdle a bit. This is good!
To do it like the professionals: add the dry and liquid ingredients to the butter-sugar mix in alternating additions starting and ending with the dry mix which you add in three additions. I dump it all in together at once because I am impatient. It worked fine. Mix until you no longer see any dry sections. The batter will be thick.
Measure 400 g of batter into each 5 inch pan or 800 g into each 10 inch pan. These will make thick cakes, ideal to be turned into a layer cake. The layer will be thick enough to torte but they do take a bit of time to bake through.
Bake for 45 minutes and check them by inserting a skewer into the center. If the skewer comes out clean, they’re done. If not, set a timer for 10 minutes and check again. If you notice the cakes browning too much on top before they’re done baking through you can put a piece of foil on top to prevent further browning.
Allow the cake to cool in the pan for about an hour. Once they’re cool, run a knife between the pan and cake to make sure there are no stuck parts. Turn it out onto some plastic wrap. Fully wrap the cakes in plastic wrap and weigh them down overnight with a sheet pan or two (I use a pizza stone which sounds too heavy but I find it’s perfect for three cakes). This is a little cake-making trick which helps press out excess air. When you layer cakes you’re adding more and more weight on top which will cause the cake to compress and will push the air trapped in the cake out. By preemptively compressing the cake (don’t worry, they won’t be completely mushed down) you are avoiding the air being pushed out AFTER you’ve put your buttercream on which will result in bubbles.
PREFERRED INGREDIENTS AND TOOLS
Ripple Unsweetened Original Milk (Costo Unsweetened Almond Milk also works well)
Fancy Sprinkles “Animal Crackers” Mix (vegan)
Cake stand and tool kit I got when I started making cake and still use today (This kit comes with an offset spatula which is a basic requirement for cake decorating—you can use a knife but an offset spatula is THE tool for the job. And a turntable makes a HUGE difference in the quality of decoration. Though cakes can slide on their cake board on the surface of the turntable so you can do what I did and cut a silicon mat down to size to help grip the cake board in place)
Wilton Cake Leveler (cheap but does the trick with a little elbow grease)
And I hit up D&G Occasions in Orlando for my cake board and box needs generally.
Cake Decorating Tips:
I won’t get too crazy with these tips but here they are if you want them:
I love to utilize Fat Daddios Fondant for vegan, gluten-free, and vegan-gluten-free cakes as it’s a great option from creating decorative elements that suit dietary restrictions. You can see it in use above with the Robot Cake and the Unicorn Cake. It’s been a bit hard to find during the pandemic though.
Vegan buttercream can be weird—sometimes doesn’t want to stick to the cake, particularly when you there isn’t a good balance of liquid-to-fat. I don’t generally use crisco in my baking, I find that it really helps make a buttercream which can spread a bit easier and smooths a bit better. You can add a bit with another shortening of your preference.
Make sure to level your cakes before stacking—trim off any rounded tops (though these tend to disappear after you weigh the cakes down).
Always crumb coat your cake before your formal decorations—a crumb coat is a thin layer of buttercream around the entire cake which locks in the crumbs. It’s like priming a wall for painting: the final decorations will look cleaner and better if you put a crumb coat on and allow the cake to rest for about 30 minutes in the fridge before continuing.
If you’re having trouble keeping the cakes stacked evenly as you build it: build all the layers up and then use your hands to push the cake into alignment. Then add a few skewers cut to size to hold the cake in line and continue adding the buttercream to the sides of the cake. Don't be afraid to push the cake around a bit to get it aligned—you can always touch up the buttercream and if it’s the crumb coat it won’t matter how it looks.
Plan ahead: I tend to over-decorate if I don’t have a clear idea of what I’m aiming for before I start decorating.
If you hate it: you can literally take all the buttercream off, knock it back to the crumb coat (you might need to touch up the crumb coat and let it rest again if you do this) and start over. You can even go further and carefully dissemble the entire cake and rebuild it from the board up. All I’m saying is there’s an ctrl+z when it comes to cake decorating and no one seems to mention it.
Here’s a view of the three cakes I baked with the center one being the one I have included in this post for you all. You’ll notice I added sprinkles to them all because I needed this to be funfetti. I also used an imitation vanilla extract like in the classic Milk Bar Birthday Cake.
Appendix: nerdy BS you might like if you’re like me and probably have some form of undiagnosed adult ADHD which requires you look way too deeply into something that probably doesn't matter much.
Let’s chat cake chemistry.
In my ideal universe I keep this section quite digestible but also ridiculously detailed about every element. For the sake of your attention-span I’m choosing the edit aggressively.
First up: all cakes include elements that give structure and elements that disrupt structure. Flour and eggs (or emulsifiers, more generally) give structure, fat and sugar disrupt it. You need liquid to activate the protein in flour to create gluten (structure) and you also need liquid to dissolve the sugar. So overall you are balancing three elements: structure builders, disrupters, and liquids.
In the vegan world, eggs and butter are off the table. Which means a few things: flour does a bit more work creating structure. Flavor tend to be less complex. And, a bit more in the weeds, the fats we have available aren’t 1:1 with butter. Compositionally, butter is about 80-85% fat, 15% liquid, 2% milk solids (what browns when you make brown butter). Shortening and Oil on the other hand are 100% fat. This matters when we consider the ratios of liquid in the recipe.
We should also address oil versus solid fats (shortening). Oil can create a more moist cake than a solid fat because it doesn’t solidify when it cools. This can even add to the tenderness of cake but is a bigger hit to rise than a solid fat might be (you’ll see this illustrated in the Milk Bar cake versus mine).
This also matters when we consider most of the information out in the world about creating cake recipes is, in my opinion, very biased towards the assumption you’ll be using eggs. Eggs are magic. Food scientists have spent a VERY long time trying to replicate them but still it seems easier to get a vegan burger that tastes like the real thing than it does to get an egg replacement that emulates all the wonders an egg can.
As much as I now know about cake recipe development, I believe taking that knowledge and applying it to vegan cake recipe development doesn’t quite work out. Eggs are too weird. So let’s proceed knowing that I’m working on less information than I need, information I could only truly acquire through more testing.
Starting Point and Where I Was Trying to Go:
With 88% sugar:flour, my original recipe is was a lean-cake formula (less sugar than flour). Whereas the disliked Milk Bar recipe with 118% sugar:flour is a high-ratio cake (more sugar than flour). These two recipes were my jumping off point. Other differences included shortening in mine versus oil in the Milk Bar Cake. And baking soda in mine versus baking powder in the Milk Bar recipe.
I wanted to make a cake with equal parts sugar and flour plus give it a more robust flavor. This meant a few things: I might need to help the structure of the cake a bit when I increased the (destabilizing) sugar. I definitely would need to add something into the cake to punch up the flavor. And potentially I would need to adjust the liquid levels to accommodate more sugar.
I’ve already tried to pump up the flavor with the swap of Nutiva shortening for oil, plus apple cider vinegar. But this time around I’d also add Lactic Acid which can enhance milky flavors. I think this is an area in which vegan desserts fall flat so I was hoping it would help.
Lastly, I find a lot of desserts in the world of alternative baking can be oddly-textured. I wanted a light cake. And even though I was using AP flour instead of Cake flour which arguably could produce a lighter crumb, I went about trying to make that happen but using a fat that was solid at room temperature. This meant I could use the creaming method to hopefully trap some air in the mix which then imparted airiness into the structure of the cake.
What I’d try next if I wanted to keep messing with this recipe:
As of right now my ratio for this recipe is 1:3.1:3:3 fat:liquid:sugar:flour
I’d start by pumping up the liquid and seeing what happened. Since we don’t have any liquid being contributed from eggs, I think it’s safe to pump it up a bit and the result COULD be a more delicate cake. Total liquid in the cake is 500 g between the mylk, vanilla extract, and vinegar. I’d see how 550 g total worked with the addition of 50 g of mylk.
I would want to see about less batter in each pan—I’m thinking 250 g per pan—I think a thinner cake could be lighter throughout. I noticed a bit of compacting happening at the bottom on my cake with 400 g in the pan.
Next: I’d leave out the soy lecithin (which I omitted in the recipe above) and see if it made any difference. I would double the lactic acid and see how that effects flavor because I didn’t notice a huge difference with the addition of 1/4 tsp but I think it’s because I was just too timid about it. I’d try 1/2 tsp next.
Lastly: I’d try cake flour. I don’t love cake flour simply because I never seem to have it on hand when I need it for a random recipe. But for the sake of developing the very best vegan vanilla cake recipe I suppose it would be worth a try.
Top: Milk Bar Cake which is made with oil and more sugar than flour
Bottom: My Cake which is made with shortening and equal sugar to flour