Could you tell a vegan cupcake from a non-vegan cupcake?



Brie at Rite of Cake asked 50 college students to judge vegan and non-vegan cupcakes, and this is what happened:

Basically I made a batch of 100 mini vegan chocolate cupcakes and 100 regular (Martha Stewart) chocolate cupcakes (both with the standard already vegan Wilton buttercream frosting) and challenged people see if a) they could tell the difference and b) which cupcake they liked best. They had to vote on which cupcake was better without knowing which was the vegan cupcake and then once they decided I would tell them which was which and tally their vote on a giant poster. This was accompanied by informational posters about the pros/cons of veganism and all that jazz to provide an educational activity (aka doing my job).

Fun stuff, right? What was interesting was that most people actually preferred the vegan cupcakes to the regular cupcakes and many people said that they liked both cupcakes evenly. It was a neat experiment and all the girls who participated loved it, so expect some more variations on the Cupcake War and enjoy the recipe below.


Visit Rite of Cake for the vegan chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

Comments

Interesting survey. Sometimes vegan cupcakes taste just fine to me, but other times they are not so good. I guess it depends on the recipe.
Stephy said…
i've definitely done this before, and many people can't tell a huge difference between the two.