{Vegan} Vanilla Crazy Cake for Two

Vanilla Crazy Cake gets its name from how CRAZY easy it is to make! This delicious white cake is egg-free, dairy-free, and hassle-free. Best of all, this adapted recipe makes just two small slices–perfect for a quick & cozy indulgence! Adapted from Totally the Bomb.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of crazy, it was the age of crazy cake, it was the epoch of belief that this crazy cake is the best thing that will happen to you this year.

While it still irks me that one of the most famous sentences in all of English literature is a grammatical run-on, I’ll forgo my inner Christmas Scrooge for a moment so that we can appreciate the wisdom of Dickens’ dessert choices here. Although Charles Dickens would have you believe that most Victorians ran around gobbling up “goose and plum pudding” for Christmas (see A Christmas Carol!), most holiday fare was considered a luxury and premium items such as fresh butter, eggs, or milk would have been in short supply for most ordinary folks. So, as I was saying…

Haaave you met this Vanilla Crazy Cake?

Vanilla Crazy Cake gets its bizarre name from–I kid you not–its crazy simplicity. While it wasn’t actually a popular cake during the Victorian Era, it was a hit during the Great Depression, a time when fresh ingredients such as eggs and butter were mostly inaccessible. All you need is flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, vinegar, oil, and vanilla!

These days, though, I find the idea of baking a full cake–even a crazy easy cake–exhausting, especially since it’s just Wallflour Boy and me hunkering down together, fighting a never-ending battle against the (increasingly less) stretchy bands of our sweatpants. So instead of making one ginormous cake that we’d be eating for weeks on end, I made this adorable two-serving layer cake instead.

If the idea of a two-slice layer cake sounds crazy–well, it kind of is, and I’m kind of head-over-heels in love with the concept! Erika from The Pancake Princess (who is a true baking goddess, by the way–definitely check out her blog ASAP) has been making single-slice layer cakes since 2013 and I’ve always admired her towering single-serve creations from afar, so we were particularly excited to try this baking hack.

Our verdict? A resounding YES to single-slice cakes forever. While I prefer to make two 3-layer cake slices (ostensibly so that I can share–but sometimes I devour both slices anyway), you can always turn this into a single-slice 6-layer cake if you’re feeling extra indulgent.

Finally, a cake that even Ebenezer Scrooge could be proud of.

Happy holidays, everyone!