Vegan versus traditional: cake cost comparison

I’ve often seen mentioned that vegan food is more expensive than a standard diet. Given the cost of meat compared to say lentils or chickpeas, I think that this suggestion can be disproved, though I do plan some more research on cost per gram protein in the future. However, turning to the subject of cakes, which is my current focus, I did wonder if there was much difference between a vegan cake and one made to a traditional, vegetarian recipes. The principal difference being eggs, although often you’ll need some more unusual ingredients for a successful vegan cake.

The most expensive vegan cake

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to help her make a ‘vegan cake’. She had vegan guests staying and wanted to give them a treat. This was before my current round of cake research, so at the time my go-to recipe was Vegan Richa’s Vegan Coconut Cake (and a very good recipe it is, too). However, I’d used up all my baking supplies making cakes for the Twilight Christmas Fayre, and so I had to go out and purchase everything listed, and from local supermarkets due to time constraints. When I gave my friend the till receipt I think she was a little shocked at the total of €9.27. We joked it was the most expensive vegan cake I’d ever made!

How to calculate the cost of a cake

Given my experience with the coconut cake, I decided to work out the ingredient costs of a simpler vegan cake and compare this with a ‘normal’ cake. It’s actually quite easy to do. Obviously if you are pricing commercially or for a charity sale there are other factors you’ll need to add on, like the cost of electricity for your oven, washing-up liquid and water, plus your time if it’s a business venture. For a simple calculation, just take the price you paid for the item, the weight or volume of the whole pack and divide these to work out the cost per gram or per mille.

For example, if you have a 1 kg bag of flour costing €1.30, the sum €1.30 ÷ 1000 will give you the price per gram. A box of six eggs costing €1.49 works out at 25c each. On this basis I drew up a little table of ingredients at either cost per 10g or 10ml.

Flour	0.46c/ 1 kg	0.0046/ 10g
Sugar	1.21/ 750 g	0.0161/ 10 g
Vegetable oil (Colza)	1.71/ 1 litre	0.0171/ 10 ml
Vegan spread (butter sub)	3.14/ 400g	0.0785/ 10 g
Levure chimique	0.34c x 5 sachets	0.06 each
Flax/linseed	1.95/ 500 g	0.039/ 10 g
Plant milk (oat)	1.64 / litre	0.0164/ 10 ml
Bread flour	1.30/ 1 kg	0.013/ 10g
Applesauce	0.75c / 720 g	0.0104/ 10 g
Golden syrup (English)	2.86 / 454 g	0.062/ 10 g
Eggs	1.49 6 free-range	0.25c each
Dairy butter	1.99/ 250 g	0.0796/ 10 g

Ginger cake: vegan or traditional, which is the cheapest?

Recently, I had great success with a triple ginger cake recipe. I’ve also made a much simpler version, using only one type of ginger – ground. It’s still a great tasting cake and comparable to the traditional ginger cake I’d previously made, so a good comparison. They’re both of a similar size and baked in a 2 lb loaf tin. The ground ginger works out at 0.21c per gram if you buy the small supermarket bottles (€1.59/ 26g), so if it pays to buy larger sachets online if you use ground ginger a lot.

Here’s the result:

	Vegan recipe	Vegan cost	Traditional	Traditional
Flour	150 g	0.069	200 g	0.092
Sugar	115 g	0.185	200 g	0.322
Ginger	1 tsp/ 1.9 g	0.116	1 tsp	0.116
Levure	1 sachet	0.060	1 sachet	0.060
Milk/plant milk	177 ml	0.290	-	-
Water (tap)	-	-	240 ml	-
Vegetable oil	30 ml	0.051	-	-
Butter	-	-	55 g	0.437
Golden syrup	2 tbsp (30 g)	0.372	2 tbsp (30 g)	0.372
Flax meal	2 tbsp (30 g)	0.117	-	-
Egg	-	-	1	0.25
Totals		1.26		1.65

I was surprised to see that the vegan ginger cake ‘beat’ the traditional version. Although it could be argued that the traditional cake uses greater quantities of flour and sugar, the actual finished cake size is the same. I’ll obviously have to save the coconut cake for special occasions!

 

Ginger and Chocolate Cake