Baker Behind Award-Winning Vegan Carrot Cake Shares Her Recipe After 16 Years With VegNews Readers (2024)

FAQs

What is the history of vegan cake? ›

The original “vegan” cake recipe was concocted during The Great Depression! In an era when butter, milk, and eggs are rare luxuries, someone craves cake. So they figure out a way to put super cheap, easily accessible ingredients together and create one. Genius!

The vegan carrot cake recipe calls for shredded carrot, applesauce or pineapple, optional oil, white vinegar or apple cider vinegar, flour, pure vanilla extract, cinnamon, baking soda, sugar, and a pinch of salt. Spelt, oat, white all purpose, and some brands of gluten free flour will work.

Vegan baking and cakes are free from any animal products. For cakes, this normally means there are no eggs and no butter in the recipe, but all animal products have to be excluded for it to be vegan.

Carrots add sweetness and moisture to a batter. Carrot cakes have been around for centuries, but the modern carrot cake can be traced back to World War II when carrots were suggested as a way to add sweetness to cakes when sugar was being rationed, according to the World Carrot Museum of Skipton, England.

It's all in the chemistry: the acidity in the vinegar reacts with the baking soda creating bubbles and making your batter rise. You can use apple cider vinegar or regular white vinegar. Both will work and neither will leave a taste behind.

In vegan cakes, the absence of the egg makes it so that it's all about taking advantage of gluten formation to build structure. This means that when you take the egg out of a cake recipe, you're going to be taking out the primary structure builder, which means that the cake is going to fall flat.

Some health benefits of choosing vegan cakes over regular cakes include: Plant-based products are healthier. Animal fats are definitely unhealthy and responsible for diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, etc. Plant-based fats have no cholesterol which is much healthier for you.

Carrots contain pigments that are sensitive to changes in pH balance. When the shreds of carrot come into contact with the alkaline baking soda, a chemical reaction takes place that causes the pigments to change color.

Carrot cake is oil-based, rather than butter-based. This keeps it moist and helps it last for days. Unfortunately, it also means you lose the leavening power that creaming butter and sugar would bring. (Creaming, or beating together the two ingredients on high speed, aerates the butter.)

Rejected words included 'dairyban', 'vitan', and 'benevore'. They settled on 'vegan', a word that Donald Watson later described as containing the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian'. In the words of Donald Watson, it marked “the beginning and end of vegetarian”.

Which flour is vegan? ›

The vast majority of flours are vegan, from white to oat and everything in between. Still, it pays to read your labels carefully and look out for bone marrow, bone char, cricket flour, and any other animal products.

A vegan diet is based on plants (such as vegetables, grains, nuts and fruits) and foods made from plants. Vegans do not eat foods that come from animals, including dairy products and eggs.

There's a big chance your butter and sugar will over-cream, meaning the butter will trap more air than it should. As the batter bakes, that extra air will deflate and leave you with an overly dense cake. It's all science!

This is because too much batter in one cake tin may result in the weight of the batter being too much for the cake to support, causing the cake to collapse and sink in the middle as it bakes. This is especially true for cake recipes which have a more softer, delicate structure to them, which many of my cake recipes do.

The ratio of wet to dry ingredients determines a cake's moisture level. If there's simply too much flour and not enough butter, a cake will taste dry. On the other hand, if there's too much milk and not enough flour, a cake will taste too wet.

The word vegan was invented by Watson and Dorothy Morgan, a schoolteacher he later married. The word is based on "the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian'" because it marked, in Watson's words, "the beginning and end of vegetarian".

To put it simply, a vegan cake is a cake that doesn't contain any animal-derived ingredients, most notably eggs, milk, and other dairy products. In 'regular' cakes, eggs and dairy products are among the key ingredients used to create the sponge and icing, and often decorations, too.

The Greeks and Romans made sweet baked goods, and the Egyptians baked sweetened breads. However, it wasn't until the Middle Ages that cakes as we know them today began to emerge. During this time, sweetened breads were transformed into a more cake-like dessert, often made with honey, fruit, and spices.

That honor goes to a 4,176-year-old cake that was found in an Egyptian tomb, according to the Guinness organization. It is on display in a food museum in Switzerland.