Adventures in Vegan Baking!

[Pipsqueak]

Further to a post I made on here about vegan-curious veggies and vegan baking, I've been exploring cutting out eggs and dairy in my baking. My first efforts were tasty but not very risky; vegan rock cakes, which I blogged about here:

Date, Walnut and Orange Rock Cakes (Vegan) | Penniless Vegetarian UK



While it's easy to substitute non-dairy milk for the cow kind, and non-dairy margarine for butter, the biggest challenge facing vegan bakers is to replicate the simultaneous binding and raising properties of eggs.

Vegans use a number of strategies to get around the lack of eggs, depending on what kind of cake is being baked and that's something I'm just beginning to learn about. Soya yoghurt, bananas, baking powder and vinegar, as well as ground flax seeds and more recently chia seeds are all employed in different ways.

I've been given some useful links to tips, that I can't access right now, but will update with shortly.

My next experiment is going to be with a vegan lemon drizzle cake - for Easter Sunday. I'm going to try this recipe here - fingers crossed:

Lemon Drizzle Cake | The Vegan Green



Anyone else bake veganly? Any tips, recipes or suggestions welcomed!

[juker]

I have posted a super easy fruit cake which is vegan, will bump it up. Kruidkoek (Dutch spice cake) doesn't use eggs either

[Pipsqueak]

I have posted a super easy fruit cake which is vegan, will bump it up. Kruidkoek (Dutch spice cake) doesn't use eggs either

Ta Juker, i'll pop a link here if that's ok: Super quick/easy/healthy christmas cake recipe

Adn here's the link to the vegan baking tips page from the Post Punk Kitchen that I could'nt find before:
Vegan Baking: The Post Punk Kitchen Shows You How! | Post Punk Kitchen | Vegan Baking & Vegan Cooking

[Pipsqueak]

I've made two vegan lemon drizzle cakes now, the first one was a disaster for reasons I now understand, and learning from my mistakes, the second turned out much better.

One of the things that I didn't realise (though it is logical) when first baking vegan - and thus without eggs - is that it seems that until they've cooled down vegan sponge cakes are much more fragile and prone to basically falling apart than eggy cakes. But! Just so long as you leave them alone until they've cooled down, they firm up and consolidate in texture just the same as cakes with egg in.

I now have my ground flax seeds, but haven't tried using them as yet, so that will be the next thing to try out.

The recipe I linked to above is being rewritten, but will be restored once done. I've also made this recipe however, so anyone who fancies trying a vegan lemon drizzle cake (and I do recommend trying out vegan cakes) can find another recipe here:

Vegan Lemon Drizzle Cake (Dairy-free / Egg-free) | Bit of the Good Stuff

[juker]

Really good tip about leaving alone until completely cooled

[Pipsqueak]

Really good tip about leaving alone until completely cooled

Yeh, I pretty much destroyed the first vegan sponge I did becasue of impatience, once it'd cooled down totally, the un-destroyed remnants were just fine!

A second thing I'd say is probably important, is to ensure you've greased and floured your tin properly, (lining & greasing would probably be best in fact, or using a tin with a loose bottom) you don't want your sponge half sticking to the tin and half on the floor. Regular cakes can be *shaken* a bit, to help them exit the tin, but that's probably best avoided with vegan ones for reasons stated - unless you've replaced the eggs with a proper *binding agent* of some kind anyway.