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Vegan birthday cake?
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As a chef for a catering company in Sacramento California, I have received requests for unusual foods, ethnic foods, fish and game. Recently my office manager booked a small birthday party featuring a vegan birthday cake.
The price was agreed on, the contract was signed Melange Catering was committed.
tried to pass this assignment off to our baker but she declined citing a rare and exotic illness. I suspected she just wasn’t up to the challenge of the vegans.
With no one else to hand it off to I decided I would give it go. Let me say first off I am a chef not a baker. I bake on occasion but the results are less than the perfection people expect when they are paying you.
I do bake bread and cinnamon rolls but when it comes to fancy confections I feel it is best to leave it to the professionals.
I met with the vegans, an intense group of lesbians, to get an idea of what they expected. Lesbians are usually easy to please when it comes to food but not the vegans.
Vegan adhere to a higher standard than the rest of us. A vegan will not eat any animal products or any product that may have been used by animals to make the product or any product that an animal may have once looked at.
I found a recipe and armed with a list of ingredients, off to the market I went.
The recipe called for margarine and something called soy milk. I stood in front of the dairy case and stared at the assorted tubs, everything had milk in it and other stuff that I couldn’t identify but was sure would not be good for you.
As I stood there reading ingredients I began to realize why the vegans were so intense. It wasn’t easy to be a vegan and I was sure nothing they ate could have any flavor.
I wasn’t able to find a substitute for the butter so I called my client and asked her what she used. She told me she used Crisco Butter Flavored Shortening for baking and a vegan vegetable spread for regular stuff like toast.
Curious I checked out the stuff and sure enough it is the same type of stuff some cities have banned KFC from frying their chicken in because it is bad for you.
What’s a little trans fat between friends I always say, so bought the stuff along with the soy milk (is it soy or is it milk, it can’t be both) and headed home to bake the cake.
Birthday cakes have layers, with icing. That’s how a birthday cake should look. This vegan cake was so heavy and moist it would not support itself, when I tried to stack the layers, the top layer smashed the bottom one and created a huge mess on my counter.
Back to the oven for another try at the cake. This time I made it in a half sheet pan deciding to forgo the layer idea. It baked up nicely and I slid it out of the pan onto a cooling rack hoping for the best.
The heavy cake pressed into the rack and it developed ridges but it did not sink all the way through as I was expecting.
After the cake was completely cool I whipped up a fluffy butter cream like frosting. I covered the ridges and the cake with this chocolate flavored, trans fat filled goo, decorated the top and sides and called it good.
The vegans were delighted with the cake, it was beautiful and according to them, the best cake they had ever eaten.
I tasted the cake, it was good, was it great? No. The frosting tasted heavy and left an oily feeling in my mouth, but it did taste somewhat chocolate-like.
For first time I really looked at the vegans and they looked malnourished. They were all painfully thin, except for one woman who looked like she had eaten a couple of the other vegans. I think she was the only one not eating the soy ice cream.
I am understanding of the whole lesbian thing, we mustn’t eat animals, they are our friends, but why must vegans take it too far?
We only get one life, I say, live as though you may die tomorrow. Do things, travel, laugh and eat the real chocolate.
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