I am occasionally tasked with providing some vegan baked goods alongside, or in place of, my usual Heinous Carnivore butter- and egg-fests, and I have run into a recurring issue: the vegan stuff just ain't as good. And I hate that! Please send me your truly indulgent, celebratory, gorgeous vegan bakes! Or, BONUS: clue me in to the techniques I'm missing.
I'm a baker of medium competency when it comes to conventional baking. I still need recipes for most stuff, but I can reliably turn out sponges or quickbreads or cookies to whatever texture and flavor are desired, and I can roll out a decent all-butter pie crust as-needed. I got there through a combination of very good recipes, lots of reading, lots of trial and error. I've also improved significantly at gluten-free baking.
But after a couple of years of vegan baking, 90% of the time* I still end up with:
-things look pretty but are dry, flavorless, or taste vaguely of chemicals
-things that taste all right, but are basically...lumps? Or cakes that fall to pieces and can't support layers or icings.
Tasty lumps are fine much of the time, but sometimes you want to present something both lovely and tasty, especially for things like birthday cakes, you know? And it especially sucks when it's a mixed-group thing and the conventional treats are going like gangbusters.
I feel like I am being careful to avoid the chief pitfalls of vegan baking: I don't skimp on the fats, I don't try to make things "healthy" by cutting carbs, and I'm very careful about my egg substitutes. I almost always try to work from recipes that were written vegan, rather than guessing at substitutes and proportions.
What am I missing? Is there a variable I should isolate? A true visionary of a vegan blogger I should follow? A no-fail-no-foolin' cookbook?
*I do know about the Smitten Kitchen olive oil chocolate cake, which is ABSOLUTELY able to hold its own against any buttery creamy confection. But I've already made that one for these folks, and yet they have birthdays every year (what the fuck). |
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