Vegan Ventures: Erin McKenna’s Bakery

To highlight the delicious perks of her vegan lifestyle, Daily Bruin staffer Alejandra Reyes-Velarde showcases 10 diverse vegan restaurants in the West Los Angeles area. She will be joined by Daily Bruin staffer William Thorne to bring a meat-eating perspective to vegan cuisine. They will alternate reviewing a restaurant each week.

Drake’s photograph sat at the end of a bakery counter, in a room flooded in pink with fairy lights and lanterns all around. A speech bubble emerging from his mouth exclaims, “It’s Kosher!”

If Drake said it, it must be true. Erin McKenna’s Bakery is also gluten-free, wheat-free, soy-free and of course, all vegan. I have no idea what is in the pastries, but the West Hollywood bakery is my 5-year-old self’s fantasy come true, with added health bonuses. The bakery looks like a unicorn flew into the room and vomited all over the walls. Or as Will put it, like the way a neurotic teenage princess would organize her room.

Erin McKenna Bakery’s walls are covered with vintage portraits of an unknown family with wonderfully disgusting clothing and paintings of fluffy poodles and kittens with long necks. Martha Stewart’s portrait also sits on a counter along with other housewife cooking magazines.

Some ’80s records line the wall by a single table directly next to a small bar. Though only two people can sit in the area, it is the perfect place to wait for pastries to be packaged.

While waiting at the front counter to request our order, we expected an old woman or a teenage girl to welcome us. But instead, a man with tattoos along his arms greeted us cheerfully, adding to the cute bakery’s quirkiness.

Everything about the place screams teenage girl’s dream, but children are clearly not the bakery’s target customers. Located in an affluent strip of Larchmont Boulevard, the bakery hosts middle-aged women and young couples who ogle at their selection of cupcakes, donuts, cakes, éclairs and soft-serve ice cream.

The small selection rotates from classic vanilla and chocolate to original flavors like cookies and cream and coffee crunch. Will and I opted for the coffee crunch donut, which comes in a cupcake form too. Bits of cinnamon, chocolate chips and chocolate sauce are drizzled over the small coffee crunch donut.

Though more simple, I favored the cupcakes. The carrot cupcake brought the creaminess of carrot cake frosting to a small cupcake sprinkled with cinnamon. The bakery’s chocolate brownie cupcake was also a perfect version of a classic cake, with chocolate chips generously sprinkled inside the cupcake topped with vanilla frosting. There were also several frosting options, including chocolate, strawberry or mint.

The bakery’s pastries are just the right amount of spongy and aren’t dry. The cupcake frosting, made of coconut oil, is creamy and tasty without being at all artificial. The donuts have a similar consistency to crumbling cake.

Most vegan pastries try so hard to mimic regular pastries that they become unoriginal and unimpressive. At UCLA’s dining halls, vegan pastries are dry and have a distinct vegan taste that can push nonvegan customers away from trying them. But Erin McKenna bakes vegan pastries without exactly replicating traditional pastries.

Other bakeries ask customers to pay an unreasonable amount of money for less-than-satisfying sized cookies and cakes that, contradictory to the typical cheery atmosphere of bakeries, lack any kind of love.

Vegan restaurants are easy to find throughout Los Angeles, but good vegan bakeries are rare. The few that are successful, like Erin McKenna’s, are only found in wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods where customers don’t look twice at the price tag.

I am not a Beverly Hills housewife or even a Beverly Hills neurotic teen, but I’m grateful Erin McKenna’s Bakery can cure my sweet tooth.