Here it is, the all-vegan birthday cake buffet and two-course dinner for my family and friends at my home-home (Fauerbach, near Frankfurt, my parents’ home and where I grew up). No big new recipes, sorry, but I wanted to share these lovely photos with you – maybe they motivate you to celebrate a vegan birthday as well : ) (If you wanna read more about my way to veganism, click here.)

It really took some time to do the research, decide about the recipes and what kind of food I wanted to make. It needed some planned shopping at different places cause I can’t buy all the fancy vegan things at my home-village like I can do in Berlin. And it required some patience to convince my parents that I will have a vegan birthday, and would – more importantly – turn their kitchen into a crazy mess for two days…

But the one and a half days of shopping and preparing, most of the time together with my Mum, were fun and even relaxing (as I mentioned in a previous post, preparing food is like a relax therapy for me).

I had about 15 people around over the day and we started with a cake buffet. This is the Triple C with a simple frosting made of margarine, icing sugar and raspberry syrup plus blueberries…

Here’s a Russischer Zupfkuchen (‘Russian twitch cake’) without the ‘twitchs’ (it usually has some chocolate dough flakes on top, but we forgot – instead, there’s a cute little I-have-to-check-if-it’s-ready-fingerprint of my Mum’s thumb on it, haha). It’s the Puddingtörtchen recipe with 250g more vanilla soy-yoghurt, so about 750g in total, for the filling. The baking time also increases to about 50 minutes. Rest is the same!

Simple but tasty – a strawberry biscuit cake with a simple vegan biscuit crust (just google and translate it, you’ll find plenty of easy recipes – I’m sorry I don’t know the exact translation for this special kind of dough). The topping consisted of strawberries and vegan fruit cake glaze which was coloured with cherry juice. I served soy whipped cream on the side. Surprisingly ninety percent of my guests stated that it tasted senstational,  making the whipped cream one of today’s most popular ‘dishes’ ; )

My favourite cake, even though the chocolate crust broke a bit while cutting… Donauwelle! A very traditional German cake recipe, meaning ‘wave of the river Donau’, with a dark and yellow cake dough base, sour cherries, vanilla pudding cream and dark chocolate. The recipe I used was veganised by Vegan Guerilla. Mum and I forgot to mix the margarine in the pudding layer, but that turned out to be a ‘good mistake’ – it was less filling and greasy, therefore left some room for more cake!

My photogenic favourites: Cupcakes made from Triple C dough and the same simple pink frosting from the cake above. If you’re doing a cupcake version of the Triple C, reduce the baking time a bit to prevent them from drying out.

Before dinner, I served some appetizers – puff pastry squares, made after a simple recipe from a German recipe collection. Just get some puff pastry, brush a thin layer of some soy-milk on the dough, put tomato slices and olives on it and cut into pieces (before baking!). I used a self-made pesto (made from cashew nuts, sunflower seeds, basil, parsley, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper, mixed with a hand blender) and sprinkled it on top.

Dinner was my standard vegan lasagna in the best version ever – recipe soon to come! Sorry for teasing you, but this recipe is just so good that it’s worth a separate post. Meanwhile, check out our very vegan cat Nelly – chewing on a bunch of flowers instead of chasing mice ; )

Not only Nelly enjoyed the day. I had a great time with my friends and family, they liked the food and were really interested in my vegan diet. It sounds sentimental, but this made me so happy – seeing everybody enjoying the food, asking how I did this and that, and showing interest in veganism. Thank you for a wonderful day!

On the picture: Busy new-vegan chef in the red-striped top (my Mum), my lovely grandparents (top left), two of my best friends and me (top right), and my very interested and supportive aunt (below in the middle). x

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