Vegan Suzy Q Cake

A delicious, copycat recipe, this Vegan Suzy Q Cake is a cream-filled devil’s food cake recipe with lots of fluffy, creamy filling. It’s like a Ding Dong snack cake! Just like the snack you used to buy at the store! Just imagine two rich, chocolate cakes with a thick layer of fluffy cream filling in between and topped with more cream filling.

How to Make Vegan Suzy Q Cake

The Vegan Suzy Q Cake is very easy to make! Start with heating your oven to 350F. Spray 2 round cake pans with vegetable spray.

In a medium bowl, pour the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt. Stir to combine.

In a mixing bowl, combine the vegan butter, oil, and sugar and mix on medium speed until smooth. Add remaining wet ingredients and mix again until creamy.

Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix again until well combined. Pour batter into prepared cake pans.

Bake for 20 – 25 minutes, until toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean. Once done, remove the cakes from the oven, and set aside to cool for 10 minutes, before inverting onto plates or wire wracks, to cool completely.

For the Fluffy Filling: Combine the milk and flour in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil while stirring. The mixture will thicken. Once it’s very thick, transfer to a lidded container, then cover and refrigerate until completely cool.

In a mixing bowl combine the vegetable shortening, sugar, and salt. Beat on high until the sugar is dissolved. Rub a little bit of it between your fingers, if it’s grainy, the sugar has not dissolved yet. This may take several minutes. 

Once the sugar is ready, add the vanilla and the cooled flour mixture, beating until smooth and creamy.

Spoon about half of the fluffy filling over the bottom cake, spreading evenly across the top. Then place the second cake on top of that. Spread the remaining fluffy filling evenly over the top cake.

Snack Cakes That Aren’t Vegetarian

I like understanding about the names of the dishes I cook. This recipe is no exception.

Suzy Q. Who is she? Why did Hostess name a snack cake after her? Why only chocolate and banana? Why not peanut butter cream filling (doesn’t every popular snack food use peanut butter at one time or another)?

Well, to be honest, I gave up a lot of these questions once I became vegetarian. What’s the point? It’s not as if I eat Suzy Q Snack Cakes anymore, because the ingredients include beef fat.

Who would ever believe that a snack cake isn’t VEGETARIAN!

Suzy Q Cake Recipe

A friend of mine introduced me to this homemade cake she called the Suzy Q. It’s like a grown-up version of the childhood favorite snack cake! She shared the recipe with me and I looked at the ingredients.

Her recipe wasn’t vegan, so I devised a plan to make a vegan version in a tasty kind of way. It was fairly easy to veganize the cake, which is what I think about most cake recipes. Obviously if there are a lot of eggs involved in a cake, it can get a little tricky. But for this cake, it was a matter of figuring out what kind of egg

That’s how this vegan Suzy Q Cake was born!

This recipe requires a mixer to make the frosting so light and fluffy, but it’s definitely worth it!

Origins of the Name

Of course, now that the vegan Suzy Q cake had returned to my repertoire, I was back to pondering the origins of the name. Where does the name Suzy Q come from? Well, according to the Hostess site itself, “Suzy Q is the name of a popular dance step, a song, a recording artist and a common nickname.”

And just as life mimics art, one of the company’s vice presidents had a daughter named Suzy Q. It makes sense then, that the cream-filled devil’s food cake invented in 1961 was named after her.

Adapting this Vegan Suzy Q Cake

Here’s the part where I apologize if you came here looking for a really healthy recipe. I feel the need to reiterate that my goal in creating and posting recipes (or adapting existing ones) is to show how you can be a vegan and still eat really delicious foods.

Sometimes that means uber healthy food, and sometimes it means complete indulgences, like this one. However, if you prefer to make some changes to the recipe, I’m all for it. In fact, I’ll help you get started with this list of suggestions:

• You could skip the fluffy filling and go for a vanilla drizzle, like on my Ginger Pear Cake
• I could totally see adding some peanut butter to that fluffy filling
• If you want to make a Banana Suzy Q, use my Vegan Banana Cake recipe
• You could make these into cupcakes and insert that fluffy filling in the middle and on top
• Make this cake in a 9X13 baking pan and spread the fluffy filling over the top

There you go, lots of ideas to adapt this recipe. However, you slice it, be sure to serve this vegan Suzy Q cake with my Vegan Hot Cocoa. It’s SO good!

I hope you love this recipe as we do! Have you tried it? Be sure and leave a comment and a rating of this recipe below and then take a quick photo and share it with me using #namelymarly on Instagram. I love seeing your creations!

Enjoy!