Nice Wings You Got There:
The Quest For Vegan Angel Food Cake

Updated in 2020: Recipe posted below. 👼

Plain and simple: There is no successful recipe for Vegan Angel Food Cake posted on the internet. It may not even exist at all. I, like many others, have thoroughly turned over every stone with no luck. In fact, Hannah, of My Sweet Vegan fame, blogged about her attempts at mastering this fluffy white foam cake just a few weeks back. Today, I too tried out the same mysterious recipe she did, the one that is seeming to offer hope in this angelic debacle: Bryanna Clark Grogan‘s Angel Torte. But don’t click so quick! At this link you may purchase access to her Angel Torte recipe by way of her newsletter, which contains many other yummy-sounding recipes, for five smackaroos. Bryanna is very clear about not wanting her recipe posted on the world wide web. I will respect her wishes even though I think the chances of someone perfecting a vegan version of angel food cake will be a collective effort that builds upon her version and that, for the greater good of vegan dessert progress, sharing is caring.

If Hannah isn’t able to achieve success with tweaking a recipe for vegan angel food cake, I certainly cannot. I attempted an angel food cake one other time in my life. Over 20 years ago. As a kid, my older sister and I thought it’d be a sweet gesture to make my mom a cake. You know, like open the boxed mix and add egg, oil and what have you. The recipe called for egg whites. So my sister and I added the only white we knew of eggs… the shells! Needless to say, the crunchy cake was not a success for the reasons my sister and I had wanted it to be. Now, decades later, and with no help from egg, here is my photo report on attempt number 2:

The result was yummy but not really angel food cake. It was dense and heavy despite the airy batter. And I should have used my better judgement and not used a whole wheat pastry flour, which was suggested in the recipe, as it was quite doughy and tough, even a bit hard to put a fork through. I will try it again soon with cake flour and report on the results soon. So that is that.The search continues. While vegans wait for their angel food cake, let them feast on rich devil’s food cake.

Consumer Reports {an aside}: In direct response to writing this posting, I made several purchases. First, in thinking about how trusted vegan recipe sources, the strong community of vegan food blogs and the post-Post Punk Kitchen creative zeal of today’s vegans have progressed a once limiting diet to the pinnacle of decadent deliciousness, I ordered Vegan Soul Kitchen, Isa’s Vegan Brunch and, finally, Vegan with a Vengeance, as well as pre-ordered her Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I also ordered Caustic Resin’s Nice Wings from the iTunes store, a song I only had on a mix tape once upon a time when the Earth was green in a town of Douglas Firs. Exploit those variables in your next advertising meeting!

After over 10 years, this post still gets a lot of activity. I am posting the recipe used in this blog post below. I lost it but then happened upon in my 2009 photo yearbook today, the same day I would attempt yet another vegan Angel Food Cake. It is an image of the book’s page, but it is legible. The recipe is Bryanna Clark Grogan’s.

If you attempt a version of it, please let me know by commenting.