Babycakes Covers the Classics: Gluten-Free Vegan Recipes From Donuts to Snickerdoodles

I AM ALWAYS ANTSY. I LIKE TO KEEP BUSY, TINKER WITH NEW IDEAS, AND LOSE MYSELF IN THE CREATIVE JOYS OF KITCHEN WORK AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.
I admit, however, that I was almost completely laid out after the publication of my first book,
BabyCakes.
After work, I’d collapse onto the couch halfway through the process of taking off my shoes and socks, exhausted and beaten. It is a sad irony that what may well be my proudest moment left me, a committed mover, completely paralyzed. I wasn’t myself.

But soon a familiar feeling began to take over. Buried beneath the covers in bed each morning, I started imagining new textures and flavor pairings. Within weeks I found myself roaming the aisles of my local grocery and specialty stores, scanning ingredient lists and scooping up new products aggressively. At night, while I slept, my brain was overrun with a nightmare-level excitement. Color combinations I saw on billboards and on clothing racks and in the sky above developed into fresh palettes and texture creations. I bought things my gluten allergies don’t permit me to eat just to break them apart, examine the insides, and in general make a massive mess everywhere I went.

In a matter of weeks I was completely overcome with restlessness. I had a similar feeling when it first occurred to me how to make the BabyCakes NYC chocolate-chip cookie work in 2005. And again when I finally stumbled onto what would become the inner workings of my cornbread recipe in 2006. It was suddenly perfectly clear: An entirely new recipe was near.

This time it was for something bold but simple, noble yet undeniably normal: a plain donut topped with chocolate.

So I baked a vegan, gluten-free donut and put a bunch of melted chocolate right on top. The first one was terrible. The second one, slightly less terrible. On the third try it all came together. It’s no overstatement to say now that BabyCakes NYC changed forever that day. I won’t proclaim here that the cupcake, my firstborn pride and joy, was overthrown. I’ll just say this: The story of the book you’re holding now is as simple as the creation of that first donut and, besides a quick suggestion for its repurposing, you will not find a single cupcake recipe or cupcake reference in these pages beyond this point. Friends, make of that what you will.

Soon after the birth of the donut, ideas for other iconic creations came flooding in. Suddenly I had a recipe for the absolute hero of my childhood, the pancake. And then: the waffle. Re-creating these timeless recipes in a vegan, gluten-free, health-minded manner steamrolled into six months’ worth of absolute chaos inside the BabyCakes NYC test kitchen. My baking staff grew concerned, and probably annoyed—I think they were too weirded out by my obsessive focus to admit to either.

I soldiered on oblivious. But you see, this collection of recipes was a battle less of making ingredients work together than it was of building on what I already knew about my core ingredients. And this is perhaps the single most important philosophical lesson I hope you gained from the first book, or will take away from this one: Once you’ve taken control of your vegan and gluten-free pantry, there are absolutely no limitations to what you can bake.

In many ways, the recipes included here call on the lessons of that first book. I promise to avoid weighing this manual down with unnecessary repetition. In the event you don’t own that effort in creativity and affection, fear not—I’m going to try my very best to simplify as many things as possible and get right to the point. Remember also that you can always scooch your eyeballs over to the Internet: Much of what I included in the first book can be found in a variety of online destinations. Together we will all make it through
relatively
unscathed, that I promise you.