Vegan cake

I am not a vegan but I know a few. I feel as if it is becoming more common. I did dabble with being a vegetarian when I was younger but found it quite difficult to find something decent to eat. I imagine that things are much easier now. Most restaurants have vegetarian meals which aren’t yesterdays vegetables in a cheese sauce.

Being a vegan is a whole new ball game. I have no knowledge or experience to draw upon.

You may be wondering where I am going with this but it is a wedding related story. My eldest daughter got married recently and had a lovely cake made using eggs. This made it a no go for the vegans who made up almost ten percent of the guests.

I like making cakes, it is some sort of alchemy, you put in all the ingredients and as if by magic a delicious cake appears. I volunteered to make a vegan cake, not to appear on the cake table but to be served for those who wanted it.

Cakes take practice. Ovens are different and timings can vary. You need to play around with the ingredients, some of which I didn’t have in my store cupboard (it’s actually a drawer but that doesn’t sound so grand) and so I tried out a few.

Finding a recipe was not that easy and the first cake I tried was like a brick and the frosting was a disaster. It ended up in the bin. My second, a lemon cake, was a lot better yet the almond milk left too strong a taste. My first attempt at a lemon curd filling was too solid and also a bit nutty.

I replaced the almond milk with soya, added more lemon zest and a bit more liquid and went for it. I iced it as well.

It was not until the evening of the wedding that I found out how it was though I got some nice comments and it all went.  

The morals of this tale are: if you want to try something, try something; things may not work out as well as you’d hoped to start with; if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying.