Salad cakes: The 'cakes' made from vegetables that are going down a treat in Japan

Could this be a way to have your cake and eat it?

(Vegedeco)

If you’re trying to trick yourself - or anyone else for that matter - into eating more veggies, a Japanese cafe may have found the solution.

Vegedeco Salad Cafe in Nagoya create incredible cakes that in fact aren’t cakes at all, but rather salads.

Yes, salads that look like cakes. They’re reportedly all the rage in Japan.

It’s either ingenious or a cruel, cruel trick.

The inventor of the salad cake, Misuki Moriyasu, says they’re “fun to look at, fun to eat and full of joy using a new shape of salad.” She invented the salad cake as a guilt-free alternative to regular cakes in 2015.

As salads go, they’re certainly prettier than most.

“It looks like a normal cake - but it's made of only veggies. You can have it for breakfast, lunch - and it's very suitable for dinner with wine,” Moriyasu told CNN.

The cakes feature ‘sponge’ made from soy flour (because butter, sugar, flour and eggs are obviously overrated) and ‘frosting’ made of tofu.

They’re filled with all sorts of marinated, diced and cooked vegetables such as radish and daikon

Everything is gluten-free, sugar-free, low carb and vegan. Yum.

But if you stop thinking about the salad cakes as a poor alternative to a cake and a prettier version of a salad, they seem much more appealing.

And it’s hard to deny that the salad cakes are absolutely stunning.

Each salad cake takes about an hour to make and Moriyasu now has 50 different designs.

They're apparently particularly popular with Japanese women, but they have received mixed reactions online:

It just goes to show - never judge a book (or a cake) by its cover.