Thursday, April 22, 2010
Bites Eat Vegan Cake and Have it, Too, With The Wild Cow
Posted by Nicki Wood on Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 9:19 AM
The most challenging baking I've ever attempted is vegan baking. You can work around butter and sour cream with oil and soy products. It's always the eggs that trip me up. Nothing else performs exactly like an egg.
- Vegan chocolate cake from The Wild Cow
That made this delicious vegan chocolate cake, made by the Wild Cow restaurant and on sale at the Earth Day festival, an especially happy find. In taste and texture, it's as near a traditional cake made with dairy as any vegan I've sampled. The main differences were that it's slightly more gooey than a traditional cake, which isn't such a bad thing, and, as my daughter said "You can taste the soy." True, but if you eat a lot of tofu and tempeh already, you'll hardly notice it. And the leaner nutritional profile (and all the other benefits of vegan) means you can indulge a sweet tooth.
Several different schools of thought on tampering with the nutritional profile of sweets. Some people would rather have one teensy sliver of a real cookie than a whole box of low-sugar or reduced fat, cookies. Others would rather not have a sweet than eat one without the richness and sugar of a full-fat, full-sugar sweet. Other people choose (or are compelled for medical reasons) to stick to strong dietary or philosophical guidelines and are glad to have a treat that works, even if it's less rich or less sweet.
I'm in that third category, and I wish I'd tried the lemon cake, too.
