Nice Day for a Vegan Wedding

You know that vegan cooking has arrived when a pair of non-vegans do a cake taste-test for their wedding cake and decide that the vegan cake option is, hands-down, the BEST cake out of all the options.  Like, nobody cares that it's vegan, so much as they care that it's just plain delicious.  Which it is, really -- dense and not too sweet, but very vanilla-y, a perfect offset to the sweetness of the best-ever cream cheese vanilla buttercream frosting I smeared all over it.  Oh, and because it's so dense, we had no problems at all with the wedding cake trying to tip over, despite being three layers tall, made taller by the amount of frosting I shoved between the layers.

Yup.

The groom's cake, on the other hand, was completely, unnecessarily vegan, frosted with a vegan tofu chocolate frosting that defies description, it's so tasty.  One batch of the stuff was enough to frost 6 cupcakes and thickly frost the moustache cake and still have probably half the frosting left over.  I'm fairly certain I could frost an entire wedding cake with one batch, but haven't yet tried, and THAT means there's a chocolate wedding cake in my very near future.

Other variations I've not yet tried, but want to try:  vegan butter & vegan cream cheese for the cream cheese frosting, to make the wedding cake vegan through-and-through, and subbing gluten-free flour for the regular flour in both cakes, so as to make them vegan and gluten-free.  Can't do nut-free or soy-free, but give me time, I'm sure I'll come up with something if the need presents itself.

Nice Day for a Vegan Wedding

Vanilla Cake

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

1 cup water
1 Tbsp white vinegar
5 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 Tbsp vanilla extract

Chocolate Cake

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup white sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa

2 tsp cinnamon

1 cup water

4 Tbsp (or 1/4 cup) vegetable oil

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350*F.
2. Grease an 8" cake pan.  I put a circle of paper in the bottom to make it easier to get the cake out after it's baked; recommended that you do, too.
3. Pick the cake you're going to make.  I feel like I shouldn't have to specify that the ingredient lists are for two different cakes, and you should make them separately?  But sometimes things need to be said, so I'm saying this.
4. In a medium mixing bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients.
5. In a liquid measuring cup, combine the wet ingredients.
6. Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk until combined.
7. Dump all of that into the cake pan.  If you use a cake strip around the edge of the pan, you'll get a gorgeously flat cake.
8. Bake 25-30 minutes (mine wanted 27 minutes) or until a toothpick poked in the middle of the cake comes out clean.
9. Allow to cool before removing it from the pan or frosting and eating it.  Or, just eat it warm from the pan.  That's permitted, too.