When baking vegan, recipes can start to get complicated. Since baked goods usually rely on one or more animal products such as eggs, milk, or butter, finding good replacements or recipes that don’t use these ingredients can be tricky. Luckily this doesn’t need to be a complicated switch. Here are some tips.
Use “Regular” Recipes
There are plenty of vegan recipes that lay out lots of different ingredients used to mimic the exact texture of a given food, or that use lighter, healthier ingredients than regular recipes. These are super helpful if you’ve got time, but often they’re more complicated than they need to be. It may be easier to simply use a regular recipe and replace things as needed.
Proper Substitutes
For many cake and cookie recipes, the only things you need to replace are eggs and dairy, and perfectly good vegan replacements are readily available at most stores. Simply buy plant oil butter (like coconut or sunflower seed butter, or other butter replacement), your preferred plant milk, and bottled egg replacement. Then substitute at the same rate the recipe calls for. The egg replacement bottle should let you know how much to use per egg called for.
Usually, these recipes will come out delicious even with the replaced ingredients, because the oil and sugar are what make them yummy treats. Similarly if you don’t want to replace too much or don’t have egg replacement lying around, you can look for egg free recipes and substitute your dairy ingredient. Often these egg free recipes are still fewer steps than specifically vegan recipes, and will have ratios more true to the traditional recipes.
