The Vegan Cake Bible: Bake, Build and Decorate Spectacular Vegan Cakes

In this comprehensive volume, Australian baker Kidd (Bake Vegan Stuff) offers a delicious and accessible guide to crafting bakes that eschew animal products. Aiming to demystify the art of vegan baking—which can befuddle with its reliance on ingredients like egg replacer aquafaba and the seaweed-derived gelatin substitute agar agar—Kidd devotes roughly a third of her colorful book to helping readers understand the basics, from vegan ingredients to the science behind building flavor, texture, and structure into bakes free of animal products (salt, for example, is key to balancing sweetness and enhancing flavors). Informative how-to charts help troubleshoot a range of potentially vexing issues, such as sinking or dense gluten-free cakes (both of which could be resolved by using a combination of gluten-free flours), while step-by-step photos take the guesswork out of decorating with elaborate embellishments such as marzipan roses. There are classic vanilla and chocolate cakes to mix and match with fillings and icings, along with a sumptuous selection of vegan and gluten-free layers and loaves from around the world—among them an English Battenberg cake with a checkerboard pink and yellow interior, a rose water–infused Persian love cake, and a decadent almond sponge with caramelized apple and ginger meringue buttercream. This definitively puts to rest the notion that vegan bakes can’t compete with their conventional counterparts. (Apr.)