Step Four: Sour Cream Pound Cake Verdict

The verdict has arrived! By a very small margin, Cake A, the pound cake with homemade sour cream alternative is the winner! To conduct the sample, I surveyed twenty people offering them a piece of “Cake A” and “Cake B” and asking them to rate each cake on a scale of 1 to 5 for flavor. I also asked which cake they preferred and asked for any comments they might have about the cakes.

I was initially concerned that my classmates might not be honest with their opinions because they know me and might not want to hurt my feelings, so I made it a point to tell them that I was not emotionally invested in their preferences. Well, I needn’t have worried. Comments ranged from “Yum” to adding a third choice of “Neither” when asked which cake they prefer.

Being the math nerd that I am, I decided to perform a significance test on the results of my survey to see if the preference was statistically significant. Honestly, the requisites for performing such a test were not fulfilled because my sampling was not random. I preformed what is known as a “convenience sample” in the statistics world because I asked only people who I have classes with.

Here are the results of my sample:
Cake A (homemade sour cream alternative):
Mean= 3.4 Standard Deviation=1.02
Proportion who prefer A: 11/20
Cake B (Tofutti sour cream alternative):
Mean= 3.05 Standard Deviation= 1.07
Proportion who prefer B: 10/20 (Including the person who also circled “neither”)

The results were not statistically significant, for those who were wondering. I ended up with a p-value of .309. When looking for significance, smaller is better and at the very biggest, .1 is considered significant. Another problem I encountered was in my own survey making. When I made my rating scale, I meant to put “Worst Pound Cake I’ve Ever Tasted” for 1, but I said best on 1 and 5. I had to tell everyone to correct it on their individual paper. How embarrassing!

Here is the winning Recipe:

Ingredients (at room temperature)
½ cup Earth Balance Vegan Buttery Sticks
6 tbs ground flax seed + 9 tbs water
1 ½ cups flour
¼ tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
1 cup vegan sugar
½ tsp vanilla
½ cup sour cream alternative from http://www.theveggietable.com/recipes/sourcream.html

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9 by 5 by 3 inch loaf pan. Combine flour, baking powder, and baking soda.
2. In another bowl, beat earth balance buttery sticks and sugar for about ten minutes. Beat in vanilla. Slowly add flax mixture, scraping the sides of the bowl.
3. Add the dry ingredients and sour cream alternative, switching back and forth. Beat just until everything is combined.
4. Bake for 75 to 90 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

The picture shows what the sour cream alternative looked like when I made it.

Step Three: Improvisation

Today was my first experience trying a recipe of my own creation. I attempted to make a sour cream pound cake vegan. Suffice to say it was a disaster! I usually mix things by hand, so I never considered that I might need special equipment for mixing. My mom has an electric hand mixer, but it is small and inexpensive, so when she looked at how much mixing was called for in my recipe, she told me not to use it. She thought the motor might break, but she told me that I could improvise with the food processor. I hadn’t ever heard of using a food processor in that way but tried it anyway. It did not go well.

In all fairness, I’m not sure whether the food processor or the absence of real eggs caused the problems. Part of the recipe said to mix until fluffy…well, I mixed and mixed, but it never really even changed texture. It makes sense that eggs would be needed, but I thought that ground flax seeds would work. Everything I read made it sound like that was the ideal egg replacer for that situation, but I guess not. I made two versions of the cake, one with a commercial sour cream alternative (I used a product called “Sour Supreme” made by Tofutti) and a homemade sour cream alternative that I found a recipe for on this website (http://www.theveggietable.com/recipes/sourcream.html). Tasting the two cakes right out of the oven, neither tastes quite like the sour cream pound cake I know and love, but both taste good to me. I think I like the version with homemade “sour cream” better. Tomorrow I am taking both cakes to school to see which version my classmates like better.

All in all, it took me about four hours to make two cakes, including time spent cleaning up. I am sure it should not have taken so long. I can’t imagine what a bakery would do if it took them four hours to make two cakes. That’s just ridicules. I still need to make a short survey for tasters to fill out tomorrow at school, then I am looking forward to going to sleep. What an exhausting experience!

Mid Step: Vegan Anniversary!

Today marks the one year anniversary of me becoming vegan! I am very excited. I thought this would be a great opportunity to introduce people to the idea of vegan cookies. I don’t know enough yet about vegan baking to attempt my own recipe, but I thought I might get some useful experience using someone else’s recipes. I found a great web site with all kinds of vegan recipes. It’s called VegWeb and the url is www.vegweb.com. I tried the recipe called “Happy Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies.” They were really tasty in my opinion. One classmate actually said they were the best cookies she had ever tasted…I wish I had been the one to come up with that recipe!

I did think that they were a little bit too oily, though. Through my reading, I have discovered that using more oil is one way to hold the cookies together without eggs. I have also heard that apple sauce can do the same job, so maybe when I make recipes I can focus more on apple sauce or use a mixture of vegetable oil and apple sauce. It turns out there are a lot of different replacements for eggs. I’ve come across flax seed, a commercial product called EnerG, vegetable oil, apple sauce, tofu and water. However, they can’t all be used for the same purpose. For example, flax seeds can’t be used in “wet” desserts like apple pies because the texture would be grainy. Instead silken tofu could be used because no binding is necessary. On the other hand, silken tofu wouldn’t work as well in cookies because it adds too much moisture. Instead, flax seeds could be used to help hold the cookies together.

Step Two: Am I Just Reinventing the Wheel?

I have also been looking into existing vegan recipes. They are much more prevalent than I realized. There must be hundreds of cookbooks including some that are specifically for baking. I keep running into two books: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitzand Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I’m really excited that so many books exist, but it does make me question the usefulness of my original product idea. I was planning to come up with some vegan recipes of my own concoction.

I haven’t entirely given up on the idea, but for my own personal use, I think I would be just as likely to use a cookbook like one of these as to attempt to make one of my old cookbook recipes vegan. Like I said before, why reinvent an existing process? I guess I’ll focus on recipes that I know I really liked before becoming vegan. I know I would really love a piece of sour cream pound cake, for example. Since starting the project the idea of that pound cake has been floating around in my head. Yum!

Step One: Research

I have been researching the history of baking in general as well as vegan baking specifically for my class research paper. I will refrain from boring you with too many details, but there were a few points that I found really interesting. For example, the first baked good, baring no resemblance to what we now think of as baked, can be traced back 20,000 years ago! The “bread” as it’s considered was a mixture of ground grasses, wheat, and water left to “bake” on a flat rock in the sun. I would like to point out that such bread would be vegan ;) Seriously, though, who decided that was the first known example of baking? I would imagine some ground up grasses and water could have been accidentally left out in the rain, then baked in the sun without anyone consciously trying to make something edible.
I’m certainly glad that I was born in the twentieth century. It is believed that ideas like cooking and baking foods were discovered independently in different civilizations. Now, I can just check out a book at the library or search the web for all kinds of information, no need to reinvent a known process.

Greetings!

Hi! My name is Jessica Downs and I’m a high school senior in Georgia. I look forward to compiling my experiences learning about baking, veganism, and entrepreneurship on this blog! I hope you’ll join me on this voyage! Here are some Q and A’s that you might be wondering about:

Vegan Baking?! What’s the point of this site?

At my high school, each senior is charged with coming up with a project that relates to a career that they might consider pursuing, so I decided the project would be the perfect opportunity to learn more about vegan baking. My interest in baking dates bake to my earliest memories in the kitchen with my friends and family cooking up sweet holiday treats. My interest in veganism is a little bit more recent. In October of 2008 I stopped eating any animal products. This ranges from the more obvious meats and fish to the more conspicuous eggs and dairy. Needless to say, these two passions did not seem to mesh together very well.

While I’m not sure what I will ultimately do with my life, I can easily imagine myself opening a business of my own. I also see myself baking vegan goods for friends and family. Although I don’t necessarily see myself owning my own bakery, my project addresses two of my interests simultaneously.

What makes vegan baking so different from regular baking?

Most baked products (cakes, cookies, breads, etc.) have at least one of the following

· Butter

· Eggs

· Milk

None of these is vegan, and they play a role that goes beyond taste. Eggs in particular serve a vital structural role in most baking. Imagine meringue which is made entirely from eggs; it has a structure all by itself. The same concept applies to cakes and cookies. Eggs hold the ingredients together and change the texture into a lighter more enjoyable treat. The challenge exists not in replacing non-vegan flavors but in replacing the roles of these ingredients without adding new and unpleasant flavors.

Why are you recording this into a blog, though?

My mother, a journalism major, actually turned me onto the idea. Since my project appeals to such a niche market, I decided to use the internet as a means of connecting with the outside world. If I did open a vegan bakery, an extraordinary amount of advertising would probably be necessary to reach enough people interested in buying vegan to support the business. Blogging, specifically, is such an exciting new medium for communicating because it allows for two way communication. I can post information about my journey, and I hope you will post comments asking to learn more about an entry, offering constructive criticism, or just asking for clarification on something I have written.