30 Oct 2024
How To Make A Vegan Wedding Cake & Cupcake Tower
When my sister asked me to make her wedding cake, I was honoured she trusted my baking skills enough with such a big task. One of my oldest friends baked our wedding cake for us and every time I look through photos, it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy that she put that amount of effort in for us. It’s such a personal, special touch to the day and I loved the idea of doing the same for my sister. So, of course, I said yes immediately.
It was only later that it dawned on me what I had committed to. I thought about all the weddings I have been to and realised at some point on the wedding day, every guest was going to gather around my creation and take a lot of photos. No pressure.
The brief was: a bit rustic, flavours preferably carrot and/or lemon, and all vegan. Which did mean I spent quite a lot of the first half of this year obsessing over how to make the perfect vegan icing. Still, nice to have hobbies. After a lot of back and forth, I eventually settled on the idea of a smaller wedding cake alongside a cupcake tower.
It was the first time I have ever focussed on just one bake over several months, baking, tweaking, baking again, tweaking again until I had a result I was happy with. I was pretty sick of eating carrot cake by the end of it but the baker in me really loved the process. It’s not something I would normally allow myself the time or energy for – it would feel a bit excessive to do it for no reason – but having a reason to do it made me understand how fun it could be to do for a living.
The Wedding Cake
The original recipe for the sponge of this carrot cake was from the cookbook A New Way To Bake by Phillip Khoury, which I tweaked to make it a little more citrussy. The icing was based on a lot of internet research and a lot of trial and error.
This cake is a normal size so could be also used as a nice birthday cake or – hey why not – a just-because-it’s-Tuesday cake. It is 100% vegan.
For the cake:
200g grated carrot
50g raisins
100g walnuts, roughly chopped
120g muscovado sugar
150g caster sugar
350g oat milk
80g olive oil
300g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
Zest of 1 orange
Pinch of salt
For the icing:
600g vegan butter (I used flora) – at room temperature and then blasted in the microwave for 10 seconds
280g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 tbsp aquafaba (the water from a can of chickpeas)
3 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
To decorate:
Edible flower petals
Pre-heat the oven to 180c and grease & line the base of three 20cm shallow cake tins. Combine the grated carrots, raisins, walnuts, both sugars, milk and olive oil in a bowl and stir well with a silicone spatula. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, spices and salt. Add to the carrot mixture and mix well to combine. Stir through the orange zest.
Divide between the three tins – I would recommend weighing to ensure all the sponges are as equal as possible: it’s approximately 430g of batter in each tin. Bake for 25 minutes. Swap/rotate tins and bake for another 10 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool the cakes completely in the tins before icing.
I did a lot of trial and error with this icing, and after several attempts, my conclusion is that is it much better to use an electric hand whisk as opposed to the stand mixer. So: whisk butter in a large bowl with hand whisk until just creamy. Add the icing sugar, stir it in a little to avoid a mushroom cloud of sweet snow, and then whisk until just combined.
Add the vanilla extract and aquafaba and whisk for 3-4 minutes. Aquafaba is the magic ingredient here; it transforms a sweet, yellowy butter into a white, silky-smooth buttercream and I find it a little bit magical to watch it come together. You need to keep an eye on this – 3-4 minutes is an approximation. I would say don’t do less than 3 minutes, but you don’t want to over whisk. It’s a bit of judge-by-eye situation and you need to bear in mind that once you’ve done this, you’re going to add the lemon juice and whisk for another minute. The important thing is that it is silky smooth and can hold its shape.
You will have a generous amount of icing here; that’s okay. Nothing worse than running out and I found it reassuring to have some spare to take with me just in case of any hiccups when transporting the cake.
Level off the sponges if needed (I made them on the same day but I am almost certain you could make these the day before and wrap in clingfilm as soon as they are cool, and they would be fine). Put your cake board (think carefully about the colour as it will peek out) on an icing turntable, dollop a splodge of icing on the cake board to hold the cake in place and lay down your first sponge. Spread a generous – you have loads, don’t be stingy – amount of icing on evenly and then put the next sponge on top. Repeat.
Once all the sponges are stacked, start applying the icing to the sides and top using a dough scraper and palette knife. Make this a thin-ish layer and don’t worry too much about presentation at this point. Then put in the fridge for about half an hour. Do not skip this step; it stops any crumbs getting caught in the icing and makes the rest of the icing so much easier.
Once out the fridge, apply the rest of the icing on the cake, using the dough scraper, palette knife and turntable to smooth. Steady as you go, there’s no rush. I just kept going and smoothing until I was happy. Rustic was the vibe so it didn’t need to be perfect and I was going to decorate with the edible flower petals anyway. For the flower petals – I think you absolutely need a pair of bent-tip tweezers to get them on without smudging icing everywhere but you might have more delicate hands than me. I had no set ideas for the flower petals, I just created patterns depending on what arrived.
On the day, I stood the cake on a pretty stand and added the topper. It stood in front of the cupcake tower; speaking of which…
The Cupcake Tower
The below recipe is for a batch of 24 vegan lemon cupcakes. I made four batches.
For the cupcakes:
100ml rapeseed oil
2 tsp cider vinegar
400ml oat milk
450g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
300g golden caster sugar
3 tsp vanilla paste
Zest of 2 lemons
For the icing:
560g vegan butter at room temperature. Blast in microwave for 10 seconds before starting.
230g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp aquafaba
Zest of 2 lemons
Pre-heat the oven to 160c fan and pop your paper cases into the cupcake tin.
Combine the rapeseed oil, cider vinegar and oat milk in a jug, and then combine the flour, baking powder and sugar in a bowl. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet mixture, whisking as you go.
Add the vanilla paste and lemon zest and stir to combine.
Divide between the muffin case – it’s approximately 3-4 tablespoons of batter per cup.
Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden and a skewer comes out clean.
To make the icing, use the adjusted measurements but follow the same instructions as above, only add lemon zest at the end, instead of lemon juice.
To ice, I would recommend buying very big piping bags and a large nozzle. If you’ve not got much experiencing icing cupcakes (like me), here’s what I learnt from practice, and then icing 96 of them in a row:
- Your instinct is to start in the middle of the cupcake but don’t. Start from the edge and twirl your way in. That’s how you get the pretty bit in the middle.
- Have a lot of icing in the bag and a good amount of pressure so you don’t run out halfway through icing a cupcake.
- Be bold and be fast, if you dither or try to be gentle, they don’t look as good or the icing goes everywhere. We had a system going where Gary would have a continuous stream of cupcakes in front of me, so I never really stopped icing, and my mum whisked them away into the carry case and the never-ending motion was what gave me the best results. It was surprising how quickly I managed to ice them all as well.
- The first few won’t be great but don’t worry. You’ll get into your stride, and they can go at the back.
- Your arms and back will ache. Not much you can do about that I’m afraid.
All the cupcakes were baked in paper cases and then we added them into the pretty cases afterwards. The tiered stand was just clear acrylic but that was all we needed; 96 cupcakes piled high was enough of a statement.
On the day, we had the cupcake tower stood tall and then the cake in front of it and we decorated the surrounding table with colourful dried flowers. And, if I do say so myself, I was pretty chuffed with the end results.
All photos by Hannah Mia.
2 Oct 2024
September Journal | Cosy season, my go-to candle brands & things I’ve loved lately
Hey there!
