Delicious Dairy Free Birthday Cake

I had been talking to my sister-in-law Misty about making a birthday cake for my youngest niece–Kendall’s–1st birthday since oh, the kid was about 9 months old. Misty casually mentioned the idea, and I’ll admit, I was crazy about it from the start. Because a first birthday party for a little girl is a great big old excuse to make a cake that is over the top cute. And I LOVE cute!

The cake planning was going GREAT until we hit an unexpected snag a month before the big event–Kendall had developed a bad milk allergy. So we needed a dairy free cake recipe. When Misty told me, I figured this was no big deal. Milk is a common enough thing to have issues with, so I figured there would be lots of recipes out there. Boy, was I wrong.

I went to site after site of trusted food recipes, and after none of my favorites yielded a recipe, I turned to the great cookbook in the ether–Google–to see what I could find. It seemed that no one had simply a dairy free yellow cake, that wasn’t also gluten-free, vegan, or from some scary boxed mix. Not that there is anything wrong with gluten-free or vegan recipes, they just weren’t what I was looking for.

So after a few days of frustrated searching, I decided to take a different route. Why not adapt a known recipe to be dairy free? I knew that Whole Foods sold a vegan butter substitute–Earth Balance. Now to see if I could find a buttermilk replacement. Here Google was a bit more helpful–after a quick search, I found that people had luck with mixing vinegar and soy milk to make soy buttermilk. Who would have known?

I did decide to do a test run–the unknown baking habits of soy buttermilk and vegan buttery spread scared me just a little too much to adapt the recipe cold for an event as important as a first birthday party! So a week before, I baked a half recipe, enough to make just a single 8 inch round of cake. I made up some rhubarb sauce as a topping. And I served it up to my batch of recipe tasters, The Usual Suspects.

The result? They. Loved. It. Yeah the texture was a little bit different than your standard yellow cake, but it still tasted great. And you know if five adult foodies love a cake, kids will go crazy!

With inspiration from some fun fondant and a spring themed party, Eileen and I put together a design for a butterfly cake with a little whimsy and a lot of buttercream! The stuff first birthday dreams are made of.

Delicious Dairy Free Yellow Birthday Cake
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

This cake, although dairy free, is the real deal. It’s a big, dense but moist yellow cake. When you make it, don’t be alarmed if the batter looks more curdled than what you’re used to. It happened both times I made this recipe, and had no effect on the final cake.

Ingredients:

4 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (1 cup) vegan butter substitute, such as Earth Balance
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 cups full fat soy milk
2 tablespoons white vinegar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray a 13 by 9 pan, or two 8-inch round cake pans with non-stick spray for baking.

Combine two cups of soy milk and vinegar and set aside.

Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat butter and sugar at medium speed until pale and fluffy, then beat in vanilla. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. At low speed, beat in soy milk mixture until just combined (mixture will look curdled). Add flour mixture in three batches, mixing until each addition is just incorporated.

Spread batter evenly in cake pan, making sure to push the batter to the edges and into the corners, which will help to give you a more level cake. Bake until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 50-55 minutes for a 13 by 9, or 35 to 40 minutes for rounds. Cool in pan on a rack 10 minutes, then run a knife around edge of pan. Invert onto rack, then cool completely, about 1 hour.

When cake is cool, ice with your favorite icing. We actually used a real buttercream (with butter) per Misty’s request. We just made sure Kendall didn’t have too much of it. But if you’re going dairy free, a crisco buttercream would work great here.

Feed the cake to the happy birthday baby! Who, by the way, ate every single crumb of her cake!

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