Mardi Gras is right around the corner, and I convinced the higher-ups at work that we needed a Fat Tuesday party. I volunteered to bring the king cake, which ended up being an all-afternoon venture. I followed this vegan recipe from PETA, with a few changes.
I bought a tub of soy yogurt to use as my egg replacer. When I opened it this afternoon, however, it looked pretty darn curdled.... so a few real eggs got thrown in instead. I also subbed Smart Balance margarine for the shortening, upped the lemon juice in the frosting, and topped the whole shebang with colored sugar in stripes of green, purple and gold.
My dough didn't rise very much -- I'm thinking the kitchen might have been too cold for the yeast to work its magic -- so the finished result is a little dense. But it's very tasty, and it's unmistakably king cake. (I hid a nut in the finished product rather than a plastic baby. A bean would have been more traditional, but I worried that my unsuspecting co-workers might swallow it.)
