Butterwicks origins - the start

Me in the Costwolds wrapping a Butterwicks gift box

What inspired me to create a vegan macaron business?

Hi I’m Jyoti and welcome to the Butterwicks story.

I started Butterwicks as a home-based cakery in 2011 making eggless cakes to order, for our friends and family just for the sheer fun of it. But we weren’t unique and we wanted to be unique!! We wanted to be totally inspired by expressions of surprise and joy on our fans’ faces when they tasted any of our products.

It was a combination of three life events that finally drove me to my vegan macaron adventure. The first an intolerance to lactose, the second my growing sense of compassion and empathy for all living creatures, and the third my son’s adventure to raise money for a noble project to go to Africa to help underprivileged children.

So my son, in his wisdom threw down the gauntlet and suggested we make vegan macarons to raise money. Well the idea ticked all three boxes above and in 2019 we went on a mission to recreate the beautiful French macaron…. without the use of dairy or gluten based ingredients.

We started with aquafaba, a magic ingredient which almost replicated the egg-white. Great taste but very unpredictable and inconsistent composition and shapes. Keep following us and I’ll post our “macaron mortuary” soon to share some of our failures, or rather shall we say our learning experiences.

We needed something far more stable and my research finally led me to enrol on a vegan gastronomy course in Spain and the discovery of a viable and stable alternative to the egg-white. The rest I can say is history and we were off and running.