Madeline Adams
Cake without an egg? Cake without cream? You can usually easily replace animal products when baking. With our tips, vegan cakes, cookies and tarts are a success, even for beginners.
Advent time is baking time: In many kitchens it smells like cinnamon, vanilla and oranges. Have you ever thought about baking vegan? We will show you which ingredients you can use to easily replace eggs, milk, cream and co. and still bake delicious cookies and cakes.
Baking vegan: How to replace animal ingredients
First of all: There are now great plant-based alternatives for many animal-based ingredients that you can use 1:1. With other baking ingredients, you need to get a little more creative and maybe experiment a bit.
Replace eggs
Eggs can either bind or loosen dough or make it nice and moist. But this also works with vegan alternatives: For more juiciness, you can use either two tablespoons of applesauce or half a ripe banana instead of an egg. To make the dough nice and fluffy, simply use a teaspoon of baking powder instead of an egg.
If you want, you can alternatively use vegan egg powder, which is suitable for sweet and savory baked goods. Egg substitutes are based on vegetable starch, such as from corn or potatoes. A teaspoon of the powder mixed with water usually replaces an egg. What speaks against the fixed alternative: The products often contain unnecessary additives such as phosphate. Mineral oil and chlorate were also partly a problem in our test of egg substitutes. Apart from that, the starch powders are comparatively expensive.
Tip: Sometimes you can do without egg substitute. For classic shortcrust pastry, for example, you can simply omit the egg. Vegan yeast dough can also be made without eggs: with fresh yeast, flour, water, margarine or vegetable oil, some sugar and a pinch of salt.
Vegan egg whites for baking
Sometimes all you need for baking is the egg white. You can also make egg whites vegan. You only need chickpea water from a can or jar, or you can use the water left over after cooking dried chickpeas. Beat the water as you would egg whites with a whisk or with a hand mixer and add some baking powder or locust bean gum. You have already made vegan egg whites, also known as aquafaba.
Bake vegan without butter
Butter gives cookies and cake batters a delicate taste, which is why it is on the list of ingredients in most baking recipes. But you can also use vegetable substitutes for butter. The classic here is margarine, which consists primarily of vegetable fats. But margarine is not always vegan and not all products on the market are recommended. In our margarine test, mineral oil and palm oil were the biggest problems.
Replace milk (products) vegan
A dash of milk makes dough nice and fluffy. But you don’t have to use cow’s milk for this, you can simply use plant milk. Plant drinks are not only suitable for vegans, but also for people with a lactose intolerance. Simply replace milk in baking recipes with plant-based alternatives such as soy milk, oat milk, almond milk or coconut milk. Depending on the drink, your cake will get a slight additional aroma, almond and coconut milk have a stronger taste than oat or soy milk.
Cream is also a must in many cakes and tarts. Instead of conventional cream, simply use plant-based cream. In most supermarkets you can buy vegan cream made from soy, almonds, spelt, oats or coconut. You can use this like normal cream.
Quark or yoghurt keep cake bases moist and fluffy. Here, too, you can use a vegetable quark or yoghurt, for example based on soy. When buying, it is best to look for an organic seal and make sure that the soy was grown regionally in Germany or Europe.
Baking Vegan: Important Tips
Gelatine is not vegan: it is based on animal proteins, most of which come from pigs. When baking vegan, you can replace gelatine with the plant-based gelling agent agar agar, corn starch, locust bean gum or guar gum.
Milk chocolate is not vegan, dark chocolate often is. So that cookies or cakes do not taste too bitter, you can mix dark chocolate with vegan white chocolate.
Baking vegan is not automatically healthier, but the plant-based ingredients are usually cholesterol-free. Which is always a good idea: Use less sugar than specified in the recipe and mix light flour with darker ones.
If you are baking vegan for the first time, you can try vegan baking recipes first. From the outset, these were designed exclusively with plant-based ingredients. Later, you can gradually replace the animal products in your recipes with vegan alternatives.
Mix vegan batters for a shorter time than conventional ones. Otherwise, they could not rise so nicely and become tough.
The baking time may also vary slightly. It is best to check ten minutes before the end of the actual baking time whether the dough or the cookies are ready.
