Vegan Test Kitchen: Egg Substitutions in Chocolate CupCakes

Welcome to the first installment of a new feature I will be doing on the blog: LVB Vegan Test Kitchen!

I am always experimenting with new ingredients and new ideas and I thought others might like to see what I discover and maybe benefit from all my trials and errors and also successes! I’ve always loved America’s Test Kitchen and dream of one day running a real vegan test kitchen, but for now this will have to suffice (if anyone wants to hire me to test recipes though… :-).

This first experiment is with egg replacers.  There are so many out on the market nowadays, it can get overwhelming deciding which one to use.  I almost always end up using flax seed because it’s the first one I ever learned to use, it’s easy – I always have flax seed in my kitchen, and it almost always works just fine. Plus I feel good adding a little extra healthiness into the dessert! But I got to wondering the other day if a different egg replacer might give me different and potentially better results, and so this experiment was born.

I used 5 different egg replacements, although there are quite a few more out there.  I would have loved to try The Vegg but couldn’t find it in stores, and also there are some old favorites like applesauce, pureed silken tofu, and chia seeds that I left out because, well, I’m one person and I was about to make five different batches of cupcakes. If only I had a sous chef, professional photographer, photo editor and dishwasher, then I might make 10 dozen cupcakes!  It’s always fun to do these things but it’s also quite a bit of work.

Keep in mind that this is just one chocolate cake recipe that I tested.  It is by no means an end all, definitive guide; different cakes will want different textures, depending on the usage and final desired end product (I’ll expand on this as I evaluate each egg replacer).

This post was in no way, shape or form sponsored by any of the products or companies whose egg replacement products I used. I did not receive compensation to write this or use the products.  This is solely my opinion based on my own experiment.

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Gretchen’s Vegan Bakery Egg Replacements Mastery Course

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The five egg replacements I chose to test are Coconut Yogurt, Aqua Faba (brine from a can of chickpeas), Flax Seed, Neat Egg, and Ener G egg replacer.  The recipe I used, my favorite chocolate cake, is usually made with flax seed.

 

When you replace eggs in a cake recipe, it is important to know what the function of the egg is and how to replicate that function with your substitution.  If you are adapting a non-vegan recipe, you need to compensate for the moistness and moisture that eggs provide and also the leavening.  It is often forgotten that eggs act as leavening agents as well, but it is a very important function.

For any recipe that I substitute actual eggs, I add 1/2 teaspoon baking powder to give it the little extra rise it will be missing from the eggs.  In this particular chocolate cake recipe, since I’ve been using it a long time with flax seeds substitute, I had already made that adjustment so I didn’t change anything other than the egg substitute used when making these five batches of cupcakes.

For each substitute, I either followed the directions on the package or used the commonly accepted substitution ratio.  They are:

• Yogurt: 1/4 cup for each egg
• Aqua Faba: 3 tablespoons unbeaten liquid for each egg
• Flax Seed: 1 tablespoon flax seed + 3 tablespoons warm water for each egg
• Neat Egg: 1 tablespoon Neat powder + 2 tablespoons water for each egg
• Ener G: 1 1/2 teaspoons + 2 tablespoons for each egg

Goal: To see which egg replacement worked best with a particular chocolate cake recipe (recipe is posted at the end), made as cupcakes.

Overall Results and Conclusions:  All the egg replacements worked fairly well; I was actually pretty surprised at how similar they came out. When I asked my friends to try them, we all had a hard time really picking out the differences between each batch, and then once we added frosting on top, you couldn’t really notice a difference at all. The overall conclusion is that all of these worked and made a nice chocolate cupcake with minor differences that only a particularily picky person would pick up on (like me haha).

TLDR: All of them worked. These are 5 very different substitutions and they all made good cupcakes. No one, veggie heads and omni’s alike, had any problem devouring them :-).

Some of the differences that were noted are that :

1. The Coconut Yogurt was the moistest, richest, and densest with the best chocolate taste. It also took longer to bake (22 min, as opposed to normal 18 min) and did not rise as well as some of the others, in fact it was the flattest of all the cupcakes.
2. The Neat Egg and EnerG  Egg rose more than any of the others.  In the case of the EnerG, leavening is added to the powdered product (so the product accounts for the leavening eggs usually provide and since I did in this recipe as well with the extra 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder, there was extra). The Neat Egg uses garbanzo bean powder to provide leavening naturally.
3. The Aqua Faba was the second moistest and definitive favorite of one of the testers as the relationship between moistness, rise and flavor was equally balanced to make a nice well-rounded versatile cupcake.
4. The Flax Seed one was pretty middle of the road; it rose but not as much as the others, it wasn’t the moistest,  it wasn’t the driest, it wasn’t the strongest flavor and it wasn’t the weakest either.
5. The Neat Egg was the driest. While that might not have been the greatest thing with these cupcakes, don’t disregard it right away. There are some cakes where a dry crumb is important, like Sachertorte, or any cake with a wetter filling so it can soak into the layers.
6. The Ener G was the least flavorful. It may be something about the powder that hides a bit of the chocolate taste; I’m not entirely sure of the reasons why this would be. This may not be the case with all cakes using Ener G (remember, this is just one recipe), so more experimentation would be needed to clarify that.

Final Conclusions: Making this cake recipe into cupcakes, I would use the yogurt hands down.  It was a perfectly moist yummy cupcake even though it didn’t rise as much as the others.

If I was using this recipe to make a layer cake, I would not use yogurt, as it’s moistness would make it more difficult to cut into layers and it would get soggy with a filling; for that application I would use the aqua faba or flax seed, or if I needed a drier cake base, I would use the Neat Egg. I don’t think I’ll be using the Ener G. It rose nicely but the flavor was pretty lacking and that was sad.

 

Experiment for yourself, don’t be afraid, it’s just cake!  See what ones work best in your recipes and don’t be surprised if you find one works best for certain applications while another works best for a different one.  Not using eggs is opening up a whole world of versatility that eggs alone cannot do.