Vegan Cooking with Beverly Lynn Bennett

Beverly Lynn Bennett is a vegan chef who recently completed her first electronic vegan cookbook, Eat Your Veggies. She's been working in the restaurant industry since she was 12. Please visit VeganChef.com to get some great vegan recipes and to learn more about her.

Question:

My fiance and I are planning a wedding in May. As we are both vegan it has made making plans a bit more challenging, not limiting but definiately an adventure. I am planning on creating our wedding cake and have had much luck with several vegan white cake recipes but I am having a hard time with the icing. I was thinking that a fondant would be nice but I know that is not exactly vegan as most recipes I have found contain Knox gelatin. Do you have any suggestions for me and can you reccommend a vegan cake icing recipe that will suit decorating our wedding cake?

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Answer:

Congratulations on your upcoming wedding. I compliment you on wanting to make your own vegan wedding cake. As far as fondant, there are two basic types, poured and rolled. The poured type is much easier to veganize by substituting vegan powdered sugar (homemade or Wholesome Foods or Florida Crystals brands found at most health food stores) for the regular powdered sugar, is all that's really necessary in the recipes that I have seen. If gelatin is the only troublesome ingredient substitution in your recipe, there are a few vegan gelatin type of products out there (Emes, Kojel, Hain, or try dissolved agar-agar flakes), check with your local health food store to see if they carry one of them. I personally always preferred a "buttercream" type of frosting when decorating cakes. You can easily make a vegan version with vegan powdered sugar and vegan margarine or Spectrum Spread non-hydrogenated margarine in place of the butter called for in the standard recipe. Try a few practice cakes to see what works best for you, plus you get to eat your delicious "mistakes," what a bonus! Good luck with your experimenting, your cake, and of course your wedding and future life together!

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