Is That Cupcake Vegan or Just Butter- and Egg-Free?

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

These are heady times for vegan bakers, who are shedding their reputation as makers of tasteless, hockey-puck pastries.

Vegan baking is hitting the mainstream. BabyCakes NYC owner Erin McKenna shows off some tricks of the trade for keeping the eggless from becoming the tasteless. WJS’s Katy McLaughlin reports from New York.

Vegan bakers—who eschew milk, eggs, butter, and honey—took first-place honors twice on the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars” television series. A vegan bakery recently opened at Walt Disney World. Vegan bakeries have evolved into fast-growing businesses, racking up sales of moist flax-seed cakes, soy-butter cookies and fudgy brownies (one secret: adzuki beans).

All this success ought to be giving vegan baking a good name.

The problem: Some vegan bakeries don’t flaunt their identity for fear of scaring off customers. That stirs up proud vegans who believe every delicious pastry should help promote a world in which no animal is used for the sake of a snickerdoodle.

At Mighty-O Donuts in Seattle, which makes vegan doughnuts, there is no sign highlighting that fact. Founder Ryan Kellner says it could lose him omnivore business. “We use terms like egg-free and dairy-free. Vegans read labels,” and can figure out the code, he says.

When Jennie Scheinbach opened Pattycake Vegan Bakery in Columbus, Ohio, in 2006, her idea was to “be political, and to say, ‘hey, this is vegan and it’s good.’”

The plan collapsed like an egg-free souffle. She says that while Columbus’s tiny population of hard-core vegans loved her pastries, others who wandered into the store refused to even try them. She removed “vegan” from her company name, signs and logos three years ago, and has been gradually eliminating it from her Web presence. Business has steadily grown ever since, she says.

Mighty-O’s doughnut

“Middle America is turned off by vegans,” Ms. Scheinbach says.

BabyCakes NYC bakery specializes in vegan and gluten-free pastries and advertises that on its website. But inside its New York store, “I didn’t put signs up that it was a vegan bakery. I didn’t want to repel anyone,” says owner Erin McKenna.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. McKenna, wearing a 1960s-style miniskirted uniform, demonstrated baking techniques in the kitchen, coagulating soy milk with cider vinegar and stirring it into red velvet cake batter. Customers studied the shop’s pink cupcakes and chocolate whoopee pies. BabyCakes, which has outlets in Los Angeles and at Disney World in Orlando, had $1.8 million in sales last year.

Not all vegan bakers underplay their animal-free origins and some are dismayed by the soft-pedaling of the message. Danielle Konya, who launched Vegan Treats in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1998, plasters her bakery and marketing material—she distributes to 100 restaurants in the Northeast, she says—with the term “vegan.” Every tote bag is embossed with the slogan “compassion never tasted so delicious.”

Covertly vegan bakeries are “counterproductive,” Ms. Konya says. “If you’re not making people aware of food choices, you’re not going to change the world around you.”

Sarah Kramer, co-author of a cookbook called “How it All Vegan,” says bakeries that play down their veganism are a “bummer.” She, like some other passionate vegans, was frustrated last year when former president Bill Clinton gave interviews about eschewing meat, milk and eggs as part of his recovery from heart disease, but calling his “a plant-based diet.”

Mr. Clinton doesn’t use the vegan label because when he is traveling, he can’t be sure exactly how the food is prepared, leaving room for the possibility that a nonvegan cooking fat may be in some dishes, says Matt McKenna, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton. Mr. Clinton also occasionally, though rarely, eats a small amount of fish, says Mr. McKenna, who isn’t related to the BabyCakes owner.

Today’s discretion in vegan baking stands in contrast to the early days of animal-free pastry, when being vegan was often the only thing leaden scones and overly sweet cakes had to recommend them.

That’s largely because early vegan bakers were novices like Isa Chandra Moskowitz, today a vegan cookbook author. She became interested in veganism two decades ago, as a teenager steeped in the punk rock scene. Like many early adopters, she got her first recipes from “punk ‘zines”—Xeroxed magazines—that floated around Brooklyn.

Old-school tactics included blending up tofu to replace eggs, which in some recipes contributed to the “cakiness” that characterized primitive vegan pastry, says Ms. Moskowitz, 38, who now lives in Omaha. Another favorite: Commercial egg replacer, which can lend a “chalky” taste, she says.

Vegan bakers say modern breakthroughs, from the use of coconut oil to water-chestnut flour, have revolutionized the field. Ms. Moskowitz has published recipes in which, in lieu of eggs, flax seeds are ground into meal, then blended with water to form what she calls “flax goop.”

Though her books helped popularize flax goop, she notes she didn’t invent it. “The vegan cupcake world can be kind of cruel. Some people do things and don’t give credit where it came from,” she says.

Other popular ingredients include soy and legumes. Anita Shepherd, a vegan baker in Brooklyn, says she became allergic to soy after overindulging upon becoming vegan two years ago. Today, she uses some legumes in recipes—adzuki beans make her brownies “fudgy” she says—but tempers their inclusion with a pinch of baking soda.

Even the most hardcore “vegangelicals” concede the movement’s baked goods slogged a long, hard road.

“I remember the days when vegan cheese tasted like dog food and vegan cupcakes just didn’t hold together,” says Ingrid Newkirk, president of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Today, vegan pastries are “beyond fabulous,” she says.

Some conventional bakers and chefs agree. Candace Nelson, owner of 10 Sprinkles Cupcakes bakeries, says she and fellow judges on the “Cupcake Wars” series were surprised to find themselves naming vegan bakers episode winners in two consecutive seasons. “We were all like, wow, they’re really good,” she says.

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