The Dessert You Didn’t Know You Needed: The Vegan Piecaken

If you can’t choose between pie and cake for dessert, we’ve got the recipe for you. The vegan “piecaken” might be the craziest thing you’ve ever seen, and it’s the perfect treat to show people how fantastic animal-free food can look and taste.

We started with 3 “accidentally vegan” pies* (though you could always make yours from scratch, of course). The combination of 1 apple, 1 cherry, and 1 razzleberry works particularly well. We baked them according to the directions on the packages, and they smelled so good that we almost ate them right then and there.

Then, we found 3 boxes of “accidentally vegan” cake mix. You can use 1 flavor or try 3 different varieties—1 for each pie. The instructions on the box usually call for you to add 1/3 cup vegetable oil, 1 cup water, and 1 egg, so we used Follow Your Heart egg replacer instead of the egg.

We mixed up our cake batter and used it to cover the bottoms of three 9-inch round cake pans. Next, we carefully placed our cooled pies into the pans on top of the batter, before adding more batter until it filled the space around the pies and their tops were just barely covered. If you pour too much batter on top, it will overflow in your oven—so be careful!

Then, we baked the 3 batter-covered pies in the oven at 350°F for about 30 minutes. After they had cooled, we carefully removed them from the pans. Next, we frosted each of the 3 pie-cakes and stacked them to form a single cake. It’s very simple to make your own vegan frosting, but in the spirit of this “accidentally vegan” recipe, we used Duncan Hines’.

We could’ve stopped there, but we didn’t. We took some sliced almonds and blueberries and laid them on top of the cake to make “flowers.”

And here’s the mesmerizing video to prove it all happened:

We hope your diet is full of nutritious plant-based meals—but for the occasional treat, why not make this animal-free masterpiece? You can also receive healthy plant-based recipes by ordering a free vegan starter kit today:

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*Ingredients may change or vary by region, so always check the packaging to make sure that products do not contain milk, eggs, or other animal-derived ingredients.

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