Bake Off's Ruby Bhogal on the intense challenge of vegan baking

Ruby Bhogal might not have a date, venue or dress sorted for her wedding, but one thing’s for certain: the cake is going to be immense.

As a finalist on The Great British Bake Off in 2018 – Rahul Mandal won her season, and she was a runner-up alongside Kim-Joy Hewlett – she’s got plenty of experienced bakers keen to help out on her big day.

"What I do know is I want to have a cake table, [and] there’s no point going on a show like Bake Off if I’m not going to utilise the connections and friends I’ve made on the show," says Bhogal, who’s engaged to presenter James Stewart.

"I’ve had so many people offering to make a cake for me – I’d be stupid to not say yes."

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Mandal has been "pestering" Bhogal for a date for a wedding "so he can start prepping", so one thing’s for sure: "The dessert table is going to be absolutely epic."

Bhogal, 35, even says she will "definitely make one of the cakes", after recently baking her first-ever wedding cake for her cousin.

She’d turned down plenty of previous offers to bake wedding cakes, saying: "It’s such a huge day. What if something went wrong? I am so clumsy, what if I tripped over my own foot when I was walking in to drop the cake off? I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened, and I literally can’t bear the thought of ruining someone’s day."

But she changed her mind for her cousin, saying she "couldn’t bear" the thought of someone else making the cake: "No one else is going to put as much care and time and attention into a wedding cake than me."

Despite an awful lot of prep and a slightly stressful journey transporting the cake from her base in Wandsworth to the Midlands, Bhogal says: "It all went really well. I was surprised at how well it went – to the point where I couldn’t say on social media that actually it was a bit of a breeze, because I think I was more stressed because people were telling me how stressful it was going to be. The outside noise was really getting in my head."

She ended up making a cardamom sponge cake soaked in cardamom and rose syrup, with raspberry jam and a white chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream – inspired by a recipe in her debut cookbook, One Bake, Two Ways.

It’s been six years since Bhogal was on Bake Off, and while many other former contestants have already put multiple cookbooks out, she’s been taking her time – building up her profile in the food industry and appearing on TV shows like Steph’s Packed Lunch and This Morning.

The book is full of 50 recipes – from sticky Jamaican ginger cake and salted caramel doughnuts to chai custard creams and banoffee monkey bread – with a regular version next to a completely plant-based variation. Bhogal’s foray into vegan baking might surprise Bake Off fans, who will remember that during Vegan Week on the show, her two-tiered cake dramatically collapsed – in a moment that has since been much-memed, with Bhogal saying: "I literally will never not be haunted by that."

Bhogal isn’t vegan herself, and says of plant-based baking: "I don’t say it lightly when I say it’s a challenge."

So why did she want to include both vegan and non-vegan bakes in the book? "I grew up in an Indian household and we predominantly ate vegetarian food, then really only ate meat on special occasions. Even now, my mum really only cooks meat on a Saturday, other than that it’s vegetarian food. My sister is the one who is vegan in our family, so we are very much all from mixed diets.

"I wanted to have something that my mum could have on our bookshelf at home and grab something to make for whoever is in the family."

It's a cruel, cruel world. Poor Ruby. #GBBO pic.twitter.com/giBpHPFxkj
— British Bake Off (@BritishBakeOff) October 9, 2018

But Bhogal admits that coming up with 100 recipes was an uphill battle, and the cookbook is two years in the making. "People think it’s easy enough to substitute a lot of things," she says of creating plant-based recipes.

"But what I wanted to make sure was that the substitutions weren’t products you find on the shelves in the supermarket that are full of loads of additives, words you can’t even pronounce and a load of numbers at the end of it. Because if we’re making something from scratch, I want to make sure that it is of good quality.

"Some people think of baking as quite sinful – for me, I think it’s just a way of life. It’s very pleasurable. Food is a very connective thing for me, so I wanted to make sure that what people are consuming is of decent quality, so you won’t find those egg replacers that you’ll find in shops. I tried to opt for lots of natural ingredients instead."

There were, admittedly, "a lot of failures along the way", she says – after multiple attempts, Bhogal just can’t crack vegan choux pastry ("it was wild how many times I tried and it just did not work").

But ultimately, there are plenty of benefits to vegan baking – with Bhogal saying she even prefers plenty of the plant-based variations in the book: "Because it’s somehow lighter, and it’s a lot quicker. You’re also not having to spend a lot of money on eggs – because at the moment, it feels like I need to remortgage every time I go to the supermarket, my God, the cost of ingredients is crazy."

Because you often don’t have to bother with creaming together ingredients in vegan bakes, Bhogal says: "Often they’re simpler, they bake quicker, and they are lighter in the end result."

One Bake, Two Ways: 50 Crowd-Pleasing Bakes With An All-Plant Option Every Time by Ruby Bhogal is published by Pavilion Books. Photography by Matt Russell. Available now.

Bake Off's Ruby Bhogal on the intense challenge of vegan baking

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