If someone tells me a cake is vegan plant-based, I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment: I've had a lot of bad vegan baked goods. Some bakers are vegan for health reasons, and minimize all the other things that make food worth eating, but even a fully hedonistic vegan baker is at a serious disadvantage. But much less now that there are precision-fermented egg whites! I made an eggless cake last weekend that was indistinguishable from the summer cakes we'd eat growing up.

Julia and I host a monthly effective altruism dinner. Since many EAs are vegan, we try to have good vegan options. Julia let me cook this time, and I adapted one of my favorite family recipes into a vegan apricot berry cake.

This dessert is all about the fruit, and while quality helps the thing you really need is quantity: it's about 3/4 cup of raw fruit per person and we were expecting a crowd. The best place in Boston for produce in quantity is Haymarket, and my kids love to go there because it's right next to a playground with a very fast (and TikTok-famous) slide. We played there for a while and then bought a lot of fruit:

I paid $8 for 4.5lb of very good blackberries, $1 for 1lb of raspberries (some were moldy, which I knew when I was getting them) and another $8 for about 6lb of very large (but russeted) apricots. We ate a lot fresh, picked out the bad raspberries, and filled each pan about 1" deep with chopped fruit:

I poured the batter over, baked for about 50min at 375F, and took them out when the top was golden brown and they were 200F internally:

I'd tried other egg substitutes and not been happy, but the texture here was just right, and I really think I wouldn't have known:

Several people asked me for the recipe: peach cake.

(Our family calls it peach cake regardless of the fruit content, but I avoided that here as a nod to legibility.)