Kate Hackworthy founded her website, Veggie Desserts, as a place to share recipes for desserts created with vegetables (Hello, Kale and Apple Cake!). Her work quickly gained international press attention and a year after she started, she began winning awards. This led to a monthly national magazine column and in 2017 she released her debut cookbook, Veggie Desserts and Cakes. The blog has since branched out to include vegetarian and vegan meals.
Kate was born in Canada and moved to the UK in her late teens. Her previous career was in marketing and project management for a media company; releasing operas, ballets and documentaries on DVD. She also co-authored a travel book about London, wrote freelance bar and restaurant reviews for magazines and lived in a narrowboat.
Kate is a mum to two small children. She tries to give them healthy, fresh food. Her love of vegetable desserts started with the cake she made for her son’s first birthday. It was to be his first taste of chocolate, and although she wasn’t going to begrudge him that, she wanted it to be a bit better for him. After a few trials, his birthday vegetable cake was ready: one layer of chocolate beetroot and one layer of chocolate butternut squash. It wasn’t exactly healthy, but it was a big step up from a shop-bought cake.
Thus began Kate's love of vegetable cakes!
Since then, she's had ups (parsnip and lavender cupcakes) and downs (beetroot custard… shudder), but there is one certainty: no vegetables ever rot in her fridge. If they don’t make it to the main course, they will make it to dessert. Kate buys organic and local as often as she can. She'd to grow more of her own beloved vegetables but her attempts have been rather poor so far: she spends a lot of time growing slug buffets.
Today Kate lives in a house on land in Somerset where most mornings she scrapes weetabix off the floor. Oh! And she bakes, bakes, bakes all sorts of vegetable cake. While her little ones play, Kate clatters about the kitchen divining new concoctions.