Whether you’re a vegan or you’re trying to make a birthday cake for a vegan, cream cheese substitutes can be used to make the icing. How you ultimately go about it will depend on where sugar fits in each individual vegan lifestyle. Many people cut out sugar as well as dairy, meat, and eggs. Some do not.
For the icing you are going to need a high quality replacement. The replacement must stand up to the whipping. A soy-based product can be whipped well, but it takes a little finesse. Overdoing it will cause it to turn into a liquid mess. Under whipping will cause it to be runny or chunky.
The whipping needs to be carefully watched. If you are using sugar, you won’t need much. In essence, you want to add about one-half tablespoon to every eight ounces of replacement product. Natural almond or vanilla can be added as well.
Some recipes will provide a lot of variations that you can add, but it is always best to start simply. The product that you’re using is not going to respond the same way to chemical changes. Whipping is the addition of air, which will lead to a different consistency, than using a dairy based product.
With the basic ingredients already added, you want to use a high-speed mixer to whip it into the icing. Watch the blending closely and add speed every 20 seconds until you have the blender all the way up. Here, you want to wait until the mixture looks thick enough to spread. Then stop the mixing.
With a good cream cheese substitute you will find that the end result is attractive, thick enough to hold up to layering onto a cake, and tastes good. While the initial adjustment to whipping products like this might take a couple of practice attempts, once you have it under control and understand the chemistry of the changes you’re imposing, the process becomes quite simple.