It takes a little finesse to get vegan cooking right and even more to nail vegan baking. One of the most common animal products in the latter, and one of the first that you’ll want to understand how to substitute, are eggs. In regular baked goods, they provide the moisture and structure necessary to create your dessert’s shape and soft texture.
If you’re whipping up a vegan cake (such as our vegan carrot cake), you’ll need to use something else instead. To help us figure out exactly which plant-based egg substitute is the best (because there are multiple), we spoke to vegan chef, author of “The Modern Tiffin,” and TV host Priyanka Naik. Her pick? Just Egg. “It is a mung bean and chickpea flour-based mixture that provides a gelatinous and binding texture,” Naik told Look. “For cakes, we generally need to achieve a moist and sometimes light-airy texture.”
It makes sense that this is her go-to choice, since Just Egg also looks and cooks up very similarly to the real thing. Specifically, the protein in mung beans is what gives this product its eggy flavor, and the brand adds in turmeric and carrot to give it a yellow hue. In general, you can replace the animal product with this vegan version in a 1:1 substitution.
Pick the right substitution with an eggspert’s help
While Naik advises using Just Egg for standard vegan cakes, she veers into other territories when talking about specific types of the dessert. For loaf cakes, she recommends deploying a full-fat, plant-based yogurt instead (like almond, cashew, or coconut) for its binding, moisturizing, and fat-giving properties — along with a flax egg (ground flaxseed mixed with water). But for cakes that require egg whites (like angel food recipes), you’ll want to go with aquafaba, aka the liquid in a can of chickpeas; be sure to get an organic can with no salt added. After you refrigerate it for an hour, you can follow Naik’s tutorial with Today for whipping the liquid into peaks.
But it’s not just the egg replacement itself that you’ll need to consider when making a vegan cake. As with any baking recipe, the balance of the other ingredients matters too. For traditional cakes, along with Just Egg, Naik incorporates “a fat like coconut or olive oil to achieve a lighter, airy cake.” This is similar to what she does in her recipe for coffee cake with homemade gooey caramel drizzle – instead of an oil, she deploys vegan butter. It may take a little finesse to get your plant-based cakes exactly right, but with Naik’s advice for plant-based cooking and baking, you can easily choose the right egg replacement option.
