Confetti cake for the climate era
Cake month starts with a Q&A and recipe from Baking Daze
Baking buds, dessert demons: Welcome to cake month! We’re entering a five-week streak of cake content, in part because my life promises to runneth over with cake anyway (birthdays! more birthdays! a wedding cake I’m making for a friend!), and because cake rules supreme in the land of American dessert. So when we ask how dessert might lead us toward a regenerative food system, one of the first questions we must ask is: What part will cake play?
I’ve planned a month of hunches and slices. We’ll talk about—and make—cakes that are stealthily, unnoticeably plant-based; that reduce food waste and make us more confident cooks; that bring the invasivore movement to life with a jammy swirl; and that are three-layered, frosting-swooped billboards for America’s edible biodiversity. Most excitingly, I’ll introduce you to the cake people already doing this work. So buckle up, and bring an appetite. We begin today—as all good stories do—with confetti cake.
Confetti cake for the climate era
Birthday cake has come a long way since it began. It traces back to ancient Rome, where cakes were reserved to celebrate weddings (I support this) and the birthdays of 50-year-old men (I do not support this). At the time, a birthday cake was essentially bread (take that, Roman dads!) made of flour, nuts, yeast, and honey. It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that cakes began to look remotely like something we might serve today. That was when, according to food historian Dr. Maryann Tebben, a pound cake made with eggs and butter known as the quatre-quarts likely first appeared. Then the modern, cake-centric birthday party arrived in the form of Kinderfeste in 18th-century Germany; the next century, birthday cakes got fluffy with the advent of refined flour and baking powder.
Little did it know, birthday cake had been careening across the centuries toward its most exuberant form, achieved in a 1950s Betty Crocker box mix: confetti cake. The cake answer to Lisa Frank and the star of 90s pool parties, confetti cake had a long reign. But does it have a spot in a climate-friendly future? Matt Ricotta, who writes Baking Daze, says yes—just make it plant-based.
Plant-based cake is by no means new. Even the ancient Romans were doing it, albeit in a form that would ruin modern birthday parties (keep in mind for enemies). And one of the classic American quick cakes, the Depression cake, has been plant-based from the beginning. The Food of a Younger Land describes Depression cake an “eggless, butterless concoction born out of necessity by a young woman preparing for a July 4 picnic, rodeo, and general get-together.” (Her plans sound better than mine.)
But while Depression cakes get by with just oil, vinegar, and a little extra leavener, other types of cake often need different ingredients and know-how to enter plant-based incognito mode. That’s Matt’s area of expertise, so I asked him to talk us through common plant-based cake ingredients and to share his confetti cake, which he tested more than a dozen times to recreate the classic, boxed flavor.
Matt studied pastry and boulangerie at Le Cordon Bleu Paris the year before I was there, and he’s made a name for himself on Instagram developing rigorously tested, plant-based versions of French classics and childhood favorites—in part because of their smaller environmental footprint. He’s also working toward an MBA/MS in Environment & Resources at Stanford, proving there are at least a few of us who are obsessed with both dessert and climate change…him, me, and you!
Q&A with Matt on plant-based cake ingredients
The following Q&A has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Caroline: Let’s start broad. What’s the most challenging thing about plant-based baking, in terms of ingredient swaps?
Matt: Eggs are for sure the most difficult thing to replace in vegan baking because they're so versatile, and they do so many things, and they do different things in different recipes. So when people ask what I use for egg replacements, it's like—half a dozen different things. It just depends on what the egg is doing.
For bread dough, if an egg is there for moisture and liquid, I use oil and water, or oil and milk. Most of the time, if an egg is in pie dough, and it's there for a bit of structure and richness, I'm increasing the amount of fat and adding some water. If it's in pastry cream, and it's there as a thickener to make it more rich, then I’ll use cornstarch and maybe some [plant-based] butter.
Cookies and cakes are kind of similar in the use of egg, but egg just does so many things that it requires different replacements each time. That said, the main ones for cakes are flax egg, aquafaba, and [silken] tofu.
Caroline: Let’s talk about your process developing the confetti cake, since I know that’ll make us talk about all three of those options.
Matt: That recipe took forever to develop! So, flaxseed, texture-wise, is a really good egg replacement in a cake. My vegan chocolate cake recipe uses flaxseed meal as the egg replacement. But visually, in a vanilla cake, you can see the flaxseed meal, and even taste it, when there isn’t such a strong flavor like chocolate to cover it up.
And a lot of vegan vanilla cake recipes just use baking soda and vinegar as the leavener, and they use oat milk and [plant-based] butter and the sugar, and there’s effectively no egg replacement, aside from the additional leavener. And I have found most of those recipes to be kind of bland and kind of dry—they dry out really quickly. So I knew I didn’t want to go that route.
I also tried aquafaba, which I’ve used in my banana bread and carrot cake. When there is more structure from banana or carrot, I think the aquafaba can work well. But in the vanilla cake, I just found it was very dense.
But then, at a couple of vegan bakeries, I discovered that they were using [silken] tofu as an egg replacement, so I started experimenting with tofu. It's so neutral that you really don't recognize it as tofu. But it also lends a moisture and a velvety plushness to the crumb. It can make the cake dense, so I modulated between the amount of tofu versus the amount of milk, and eventually got to a point where it was moist from the tofu, but not greasy or dense.
I wanted it to taste like boxed cake. And the other reason I wanted to spend so much time on it was because I knew a vanilla cake recipe is such a foundational thing that could spin into so many other recipes: lemon cake, coconut cake, and even the red velvet cake recipe.
Caroline: Are there other tricky elements to vegan-izing cake that could be helpful for people to be aware of? What about the frosting?
Matt: The confetti cake frosting I also fiddled with for a while. One of my inspos was the Milk Bar frosting, because it’s perfection. So that's why there's a little bit of cream cheese. I wanted there to be some tanginess, without you recognizing it as a cream-cheese frosting. I think the Trader Joe's vegan cream cheese, specifically, is so good in frosting. The taste is not quite as tangy as a real cream cheese, but it’s very convincing, in my opinion.
Caroline: What about the vegan butter you use in the frosting?
Matt: I experimented with a bunch of different vegan butters. Replacing butter with vegan butter is not as hard as replacing an egg, but it’s just so brand-specific.
I really like Miyoko’s in most applications, because it has such a clean, natural taste. It’s not flavored to taste like butter, which most of the margarine-like products are. But because it's made from coconut oil, it just melts so quickly in frosting. I actually prefer the taste of Miyoko’s in frosting, but it's so annoying to pipe it, because it literally melts in the bag as you're piping it.
So then I switched, and now Violife is currently my favorite. It's kind of like the other type—I call them margarine-style vegan butters, and I think they taste pretty neutral.
Caroline: OK, final question. I noticed when I was making your confetti cake it that the recipe calls for a LOT of vanilla. Is that a plant-based cake thing, or a confetti flavor thing?
Matt: It's kind of a little bit of both. Somebody on TikTok called vanilla “dessert MSG”. And I thought that was so funny and perfect, because it literally is like, you really can't add too much of it. It's kind of impossible.
Recipe: Plant-based confetti cake
Excerpt of Matt’s recipe notes: The recipe can be scaled up to make a multi-tiered birthday cake as well: simply double or triple the batter and frosting depending on how many layers you want.
Ingredients
Vanilla Confetti Cake Batter
195 g (1 1/2 cups + 2 tbsp) cake flour
7.5 g (1 1/2 tsp) baking powder
150 g (1/2 cup + 2 tbsp) oat milk (or other neutral plant milk)
150 g (3/4 cup) granulated sugar
37 g (3 tbsp) light brown sugar
2.25 g (3/4 tsp) kosher salt
57 g (1/4 cup) unsalted, margarine-style vegan butter (e.g. Violife), room temperature, diced
50 g (1/4 cup) vegetable oil
75 g (1/4 cup + 1 tbsp) silken tofu, pureéd
15 g (1 tbsp) vanilla extract
1.25 g (1/4 tsp) almond extract
40 g (3 tbsp) rainbow sprinkles
Vanilla Birthday Frosting
113 g (1/2 cup) unsalted, margarine-style vegan butter (e.g. Violife), room temperature
28 g (2 tbsp) vegan cream cheese (Trader Joe's brand recommended), room temperature
275 g (2 1/2 cups) powdered sugar
7.5 g (1/2 tbsp) oat milk (or other neutral plant milk), room temperature
5 g (1 tsp) vanilla paste (see ingredient notes below)
5 g (1 tsp) vanilla extract
2.5 g (1/2 tsp) lemon juice
2.25 g (3/4 tsp) kosher salt
Assorted rainbow sprinkles
Make the vanilla confetti cake batter and bake the cake
Preheat the oven to 350 F and position a rack in the center of the oven
Lightly grease an 8-inch round cake pan with cooking spray, then line the bottom with parchment paper and lightly grease the paper
Whisk together the flour and baking powder in a medium bowl
Combine the granulated sugar, brown sugar, and kosher salt in a large bowl
In a small saucepan, heat the oat milk over medium heat; as soon as bubbles appear around the edges, remove from the heat (this is called scalding)
Add the hot oat milk to the sugar mixture and whisk until the mixture is fully dissolved; it will take 1-2 mins
Add the vegan butter and whisk until the butter has dissolved; add the oil and whisk until the mixture is emulsified
Add the tofu and extracts
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and gently whisk until the batter is mostly smooth and no large lumps of flour remain; however, do not mix until the batter is completely smooth or it will be tough
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake the cake for 35-40 mins, until a tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean
Allow the cake to cool for about 30 mins in the pan, then invert it onto a wire rack and allow it to cool completely, at least 2 hours
Note: Cake can be made ahead up to 2 days in advance and kept in the fridge, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap, until ready to use
Make the vanilla birthday frosting
Place the vegan butter in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat it on medium-high speed until it is creamy and smooth; scrape down the sides of the bowl
Add the vegan cream cheese and continue beating until no lumps remain
Add the powdered sugar and continue beating until the mixture is bright white and fluffy
Add the oat milk, vanillas, lemon juice, and salt, and beat until they are fully mixed in; the frosting should be smooth and fluffy
Note: Frosting keeps in the fridge for up to 1 week in an airtight container; allow the frosting to come to room temperature (for 4-6 hours) before serving
Frost and finish the cake
Once the cake is cool, top with as much frosting as you would like, and spread the frosting evenly over the cake
To make the decorative swirl in the images above, I used a rotating turntable: first spread the frosting in an even layer over the cake, then, starting at the outer edges, firmly press an offset spatula into the frosting to "dig" a spiral, working inward until you finish in the center
Sprinkle the sprinkles on the cake; I like to focus on one side of the cake for an asymmetrical look
Serve the cake at room temperature
Note: Frosted cake keeps in the fridge for up to 3 days covered tightly in plastic wrap; allow the cake to come to room temperature before serving
(keep in mind for enemies)