Cakes for comfort food!
If you’re like us, you've had nightmares at the thought of giving up your beloved baked goodies when going plant-based. Fret not, we’re here for you!
Vegan cakes can be just as fluffy, moist, and gooey as non-vegan cakes. Many believe that butter and eggs are crucial to baking; however, various successful vegan bakers have experimented and proven that even without these animal products, vegan bakes can be delicious and decadent. In this article, we'll look at various things you can do to ensure that your vegan bakes are perfect!
@s1224's review of vegan croissant at Privé Tiong Bahru
1. Prep right
The key to excellent baking lies in having both your ingredients and the oven at the right temperature. Ensure you give enough time for your oven to preheat, and pay attention to whether the recipe calls for ingredients to be at room temperature, cold, or frozen. Have your pans well-greased and lined before you start working on the ingredients, so when you add the final leavening agents like baking soda, the batter's ready to go in the oven right away, making the cakes softer. For a perfectly baked cake, try to use the middle rack; that way, both the top and bottom gets an equal amount of heat.
@bronwynpaige's review of Miyoko's Cultured Butter
2. Supplement it!
We now live in a world where vegan supplements for almost all animal-derived ingredients are readily available. Check our dairy substitute guide and guide on substituting everyday ingredients to know how you can easily replace non-vegan ingredients.
Since vegan substitutes aren’t exactly the same as their non-vegan counterparts (duh), they may taste or react differently. You can experiment with different ingredients to discover which works best for you. The beauty of doing this is your ingredients work according to your taste, not the other way around. So, if you love a coconut-y taste, go with coconut milk, but if you'd like to skip the strong flavors, go for oat milk.
3. Know your ingredients
Did you know you can use fizzy drinks as a leavening agent? Or that you can make your own buttermilk by adding vinegar to your plant-based milk? When veganizing a recipe, you can work with what you have instead of buying vegan substitutes. However, when you opt for substitutes, be sure to know the purpose of each of the ingredients. This is especially true for the recipes that call for using eggs. Read the recipe to figure out why the eggs are being used. If they’re used as a binding agent, you can substitute it for flax eggs, however, if it’s used as a leavening agent, you can opt for baking soda, aquafaba, or even your regular can of soda!
@clairecancook's review of Earth Balance Original Buttery Spread
4. Fatten it up!
You may have heard that everything tastes better with butter. Thanks to vegan substitutes, you can indulge in all the buttery goodness in your baked goodies, and still leave the cow milk for the calves!
Traditionally, you heat the butter in a saucepan until it turns brown and it has a distinctly nutty flavor. This “browning” happens when the milk solids burn, and since vegan butter doesn’t contain milk solids, it wouldn’t turn brown. So, you can invest in vegan butter that's made specifically for browning purposes like Earth Balance or Miyokos cashew butter. Or you can try making your own vegan brown butter!
5. Using Yeast
Yes, yeast is vegan. It's a type of fungi so you can look at it like you look at your mushrooms. So, if a recipe calls for yeast, bring it on!
There are three distinct types of yeast, and you can take advantage of each by knowing what works best for your recipe. There’s baker’s yeast, nutritional yeast, and brewer’s yeast. Baker’s yeast is used as a leavening agent in bread and other baked goodies. Nutritional yeast has a cheesy, nutty taste, and is used in recipes as a cheesy supplement or to give the food a slight cheese-like flavor. Brewers yeast is a by-product of beer and is rich in calcium, potassium, amino acids, and much more. It has a distinctly bitter taste and is generally used in supplements, so as a baker, you will probably only work with bakers or nutritional yeast.
