Baking Experiment: Veganity

Working in a building featuring several awesome vegans, it always pains me when I've baked stuff that I can't offer them one. I finally got round to looking up a vegan cake recipe, and was surprised to discover that the basic vegan cake recipe is pretty simple: water, oil, sugar and flour. This shouldn't really surprise me, since I'm sure there's an equivalent basic recipe for non-vegan cakes, but the idea that you can start from this intrigued me, and my initial thoughts were along the lines of messing with this basic premise.

This of course led to a baking experiment, and the questions which the experiment aimed to answer were:

• Does using vegetable oil based non-dairy spread work as a substitute for oil?
• What things can you add to it to make the cakes nicer?
• Can I swap the water out for other liquids?

These questions were all answered by the massive variety of vegan cakes I baked over the course of an enjoyable afternoon with a few friends round. We made some cakes using Vitalite instead of oil, we added frozen fruit, cocoa powder, walnuts, vanilla, dried cranberries, food colouring, and in a bout of awesomeness, swapped water out for fruit juice or Vimto.

The results of these many varied combinations of things are pictured below (click to enlarge). The Vitalite cakes are the ones in yellow cases (bottom right photo).

We also made a loaf tin cake in which we put mashed banana and walnuts, and I think the texture of that came out the nicest, although it was structurally not very good at staying in one piece (the top came off when I tried to get it out of the tin) and so we cut it up and put portions in individual muffin cases.

The Vimto buns with raspberries, and the grape juice with dried cranberry buns both didn't rise as well as the others, so there's a lesson for you - although I have yet to taste one, and it may be that they taste nice. Or not.

In general, it seems vegan cakes don't necessarily rise as well as regular cakes, in the absence of dairy and eggs (apparently the banana does quite well as an egg substitute, explaining the awesomeness of the banana loaf) and a lot of the crazy vegan cake recipes you see which have vinegar and all sorts in are basically designed to get them to rise better. The buns mostly rose a satisfactory amount, so I'm happy to stick to this simple recipe. Plus, I get lots of vegan points.