We all would love to have our cake and eat it too, but with obesity on the rise (41.9% of the United States today versus 30.5% twenty years ago), plus climate change concerns (animal agriculture accounts for approximately 15% of annual greenhouse emissions), healthier plant-based options are making their case in every sector of life and the event arena is no exception.
It used to be if you asked for a vegan wedding cake, a baker thought you meant mixing applesauce with mung bean flour. Vegan cake requires no milk, eggs, butter, or cream—basically almost all the ingredients that make a cake a cake. But now there are more options than ever to make a plant-based cake that pleases both the vegan and non-vegan guests and actually makes the non-vegan guests question their life choices. You can also find healthier sweetening options like honey, maple syrup, date paste, and coconut sugar and more whole food and gluten-free flours.
The key to a great vegan cake is one that mimics the fluffiness of traditional cakes and isn’t so dense from egg-replacement options that you feel like if you dropped it, you might break your big toe. Thankfully, many bakeries have risen to the task, able to mimic the tried and true wedding favorites—vanilla, chocolate, lemon, coconut, carrot, red velvet, and salted caramel—without a hitch. What’s great about plant-based options is that dairy fat can mute flavors, so the panoply of alternative “milks” such as oat, rice, almond, and other nut-based flavors actually accent the ingredients better.
Although you don’t necessarily need to go to a vegan bakery since some mainstream bakeries offer vegan options, there are many brick and mortar bakeries where the focus is entirely plant-based. For a tour of these options, you can check out The Tree Kisser blog, Eluxe Magazine’s article on vegan cakes, or check out some of the following websites:
- The Good Good LA vegan bakeshop
- Half Baked Co in Burbank, CA
- Piece of Cake Bakery in Portland, OR
- Vegan Treats Bakery in Bethlehem, PA
- Erin McKenna’s Bakery in Orlando, Los Angeles, and NYC
- PattyCake Bakery in Columbus, OH
- Alba Cake Design in Austin, TX
- Celebrated in Boston, MA
Or, if you’re in the bespoke wedding market and really want to both save money and tear all your hair out and make your wedding cake yourself (or for a friend or relative), books recipe books abound with decadent options: The Vegan Cake Bible, Vegan Cakes: Dreamy Cakes & Decadent Desserts, Va va Voom Vegan Cakes, and Pure Artistry: Extraordinary Vegan and Gluten-Free Cakes. Fran Costigan also teaches a popular online vegan pastry course on Rouxbe.
If you’re holding a large scale wedding, PopUP CleanUP offers pre, live, and post event cleaning. After all, you’ll need someone to sweep up the crumbs.
