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Baking Vegan: How to Make Cakes, Biscuits and Bread without Animal Cruelty

Vegans don’t always have it easy when it comes to baked goods. Because even if some bakeries now offer vegan alternatives, many cakes, biscuits and even breads still contain animal products such as butter and eggs. So how about just baking it yourself? This article will show you exactly how vegan baking works and what to look out for.

Why bake vegan at all? Being vegan means consistently avoiding products of animal origin. According to statista.de, more than 1.13 million people in Germany now live vegan – and the trend is still rising.

While a large number of meat substitutes and milk substitutes have long since found their way onto supermarket shelves, vegan baked goods are still the exception rather than the rule. Vegan baking is actually quite easy, is neither more complicated nor more expensive than traditional baking and the results are just as delicious. So why not just do it yourself?

Baking Vegan: Tips & Tricks

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been vegan for a long time, want to please vegans in your circle of acquaintances or simply want to try out vegan baking recipes – with our tips you can make your favorite baked goods without animal products.

Rely on vegetable fats: Butter is a dairy product – and therefore taboo in vegan baking. Instead, use purely vegetable, preferably palm oil-free (organic) margarine. Of course you can also use oils. The following applies: 100 grams of margarine are replaced with 75 to 80 milliliters of oil (e.g. rapeseed or sunflower oil). Nut butter, such as almond butter, is also an interesting alternative to conventional butter – make sure you use organic and fair trade quality. If you want to improve your ecological balance and save calories at the same time, simply replace 100 grams of butter with a mixture of 120 grams of oat yoghurt and a tablespoon of semolina. Another option is to make your own vegan butter.

Egg substitute instead of eggs: In traditional baked goods, eggs are used to bind the dough better. As you will quickly find out when baking vegan, this is often not absolutely necessary. If you still want to use an egg substitute, you can buy one in most organic stores and some supermarkets – or you can simply make your own egg substitute using simple ingredients that you probably have at home anyway: banana , applesauce or flaxseed can effectively replace eggs in baking. Read more: Make your own egg substitute: 6 ideas for vegan eggs
Plant-based drinks instead of cow’s milk: plant-based milk alternatives have long been found in every supermarket and most drugstores, often even in organic quality. Depending on what you’re baking, cow’s milk can usually be easily substituted one-to-one with milk alternatives such as oat milk, soy milk, or almond milk.
Plant-based cream: Plant-based cream substitutes can also be found in most supermarkets, for example based on oats, soy or rice. Alternatively, you can easily make vegan cream yourself. More on this: Vegan Cream: Recommended Alternatives
Aquafaba instead of egg whites: There are some baking recipes that use egg whites. This is the case, for example, with biscuit doughs. But there is also a vegan variant here: aquafaba. Aquafaba is the soaking liquid from chickpeas and beans. Aquafaba is whipped into the perfect vegan egg whites and is even suitable for mousse au chocolat.

Baking with vegan chocolate: What would chocolate chip cookies be without delicious pieces of chocolate in the batter? In general, many dark chocolates are vegan by nature, although you should pay close attention to the list of ingredients. Those who value sustainability and fair production conditions should choose organic and fair trade chocolate. In the (organic) supermarket you will also find vegan white chocolate and purely plant-based “milk” chocolate with different cocoa contents.
Agar-agar instead of gelatine: Anyone who bakes fruit cakes sometimes seals the fruit layer with a gelatine-based icing. However, since gelatine consists of animal bone and cartilage residues, among other things, this is not an option for vegan baking. Instead, you simply replace the gelatine with agar-agar, a purely vegetable powder made from red and blue-green algae. Here too, pay attention to organic quality in order to get a residue-free product. More on this: Gelatin substitute: vegan plant-based alternatives

What else should you keep in mind when baking vegan?

To ensure that the cruelty-free baked goods are 100 percent successful, you should not overdo it when mixing the ingredients, otherwise a vegan dough can quickly lose consistency and become tough. So sometimes it can be worth using the whisk, spatula or fork instead of the food processor to mix the ingredients.

Depending on the type of oven, your vegan pastries may also cook faster than traditional recipes state. It is best to set the timer 15 minutes before the regular end of the baking time to make sure that cakes, biscuits, rolls and the like do not become too crispy.

Incidentally, when baking bread and rolls, most recipes are already vegan – or can be veganized quickly. Instead of the honey used in some bread recipes, you can use some organic sugar beet syrup, for example, and replace the quark in quark rolls with vegan organic soy quark. Buttermilk is easily replaced with a plant-based milk alternative with a dash of vinegar.

Is Vegan Baking Healthier?

You can decide for yourself how healthy your vegan baked goods will be. For example, if you use whole grain instead of white flour and at least partially replace the sugar content in sweets with low-calorie sugar alternatives such as organic erythritol, you can definitely produce healthier baked goods.

In general, the major health benefit of vegan baking is that purely plant-based ingredients are virtually cholesterol-free, while animal products such as eggs, milk and butter contain a lot of saturated fatty acids and trans fats. With high and regular consumption, these can promote heart and vascular diseases.

Vegan is not always sustainable

While vegan ingredients are always free of animal components, they are not always sustainable, since some of the products have extremely long transport routes to the local shops (e.g. coconut oil, cocoa, chia seeds, Agr-agar) or come from conventional cultivation and are therefore are not free from environmentally harmful pesticides.

If you also want to implement the topic of sustainability in baking, you should therefore rely on fairly traded organic products and prefer regional and seasonal ingredients.

Veganized Recipes vs. Vegan Recipes

Veganized recipes are conventional recipes that are made with purely plant-based ingredients instead of the traditional ingredients. This is particularly recommended for vegan baking beginners and for everyone who would like to recreate the taste of baked goods they love. For example, have you ever baked vegan cheesecake, apple pie, vegan biscuits or purely plant-based stollen yourself? It’s easier than you might think – and the taste is in no way inferior to the original recipes.

Of course, vegan baking is also possible with a variety of more experimental, vegan recipes in which sugar is replaced with dates, for example, and unusual types of flour such as lupine, almond or coconut flour are used. These recipes are not replicas of well-known originals, but developed vegan from the outset and represent their own category. They therefore offer a less comparable, but precisely because of this, interesting taste experience. They are often all about “Clean Baking”. Due to the often exotic ingredients, you should pay close attention to the origin and, if possible, prefer regional products.

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Cooking Tips

Bake Imaginative Cakes Quickly for Spontaneous Visitors

Have you announced a spontaneous visit for “afternoon coffee” again? While making coffee is not a big challenge, preparing a delicious cake is a bigger challenge. After all, the end result should not only taste good but also be visually convincing. Now use simple recipes to bake cakes quickly.

Bake a cake quickly

It can happen that spontaneous visitors announce themselves. Then you rarely have time for unusual and exotic recipes. In addition, you usually only have the basic ingredients for cakes in the household. But who doesn’t want to offer their guests more than a few biscuits? So that you and your visitors can eat delicious cake, we have put together simple and popular recipes and give tips on how to spice up your cake. Because grandma’s cakes are back in fashion. In addition, note our tips for an affordable fruit cake.

1) The classic: crumble cake from the tin

To bake a cake quickly, you can choose the classic crumble cake. Because this is quite easy to prepare and it tastes good to many. In addition, it can be easily produced in large quantities on sheet metal. To do this, proceed as follows (take the ingredients from the table):

  • Preheat the oven to 200°C and line a baking tray with baking paper.
  • Knead the ingredients for the crust together and roll out the part on the baking sheet.
  • Then pierce the ground with a fork. Pay attention to regular intervals.
  • Then spread the bottom with jam.
  • Knead the ingredients for the crumble together and sprinkle over the jam.
  • Then bake the crumble cake for about 15 minutes in the preheated oven.

2) Quickly prepare a sponge cake

You can also prepare a classic sponge cake for spontaneous visitors. Because this is very uncomplicated and can be spiced up as you wish. So you can certainly impress your guests. All you need are the ingredients below.

And this is how it works: To bake a cake quickly, first, stir the butter with the sugar and eggs until fluffy, and then add the baking soda, cinnamon, cocoa powder, and rum. Then mix everything with flour and yogurt. Then chop the chocolate into pieces and mix them in as well. Finally, put the dough in a loaf pan and bake the sponge cake at 200 °C for about 35 minutes. A quick cherry cake from the tin also tastes good.

Ingredients for a sponge cake

  • 125 grams of butter
  • two eggs
  • 1.5 cups of sugar
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • a little cinnamon
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tbsp cocoa (powder)
  • 1 cup of yogurt
  • ½ bar of chocolate (preferably whole milk)
  • depending on your taste maybe a little rum

3) Bake a vegan cake quickly

The tastes and food preferences of your visitors can vary greatly. If your visitor eats vegan, you should consider that. But don’t panic! Because you can quickly and easily make a moist vegan chocolate cake with just a few ingredients. Use the following ingredients for this. All you have to do is mix them together. Then put the dough in a greased form and let the whole thing bake for about 35 – 40 minutes at 180 top and bottom heat. Then you can decorate it with a chocolate glaze and fresh fruit. Or how about classic powdered sugar?

Ingredients for vegan chocolate cake

  • 200 grams of flour
  • 35 g baking cocoa
  • 180 grams of sugar
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • half a pack of baking powder
  • 240ml water
  • 100 ml sunflower oil

Incidentally, the trend toward “healthy snacking” is unbroken. Accordingly, it can be worthwhile for many simple recipes to bake completely without eggs, sugar, or flour. Because the market now offers many replacement items. In addition, also note tips for grandma’s classic plum apple cake.

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Food

One Basic Dough, 3 Different Cakes: Vegan and Delicious

Simple cakes succeed with ingredients that everyone has and are quickly prepared. We will show you how you can bake three vegan cake variations from a basic recipe.

Many cake recipes contain ingredients that you have to buy first and don’t have in the kitchen cupboard. If it has to be done quickly, this is usually impractical. Here we present three vegan cakes with ingredients that everyone has at home. So you can start baking right away.

Tip: Even if you probably don’t have to go shopping for these recipes – look out for ingredients with a meaningful organic seal the next time you go shopping. For example, the Bioland or Naturland seals stand for high standards. With imported goods, you should also rely on fair trade products. In this way you support climate-friendly cultivation methods on the one hand and fair wages for smallholders in other countries on the other.

Simple cake with ingredients that everyone has

Ingredients:

300 grams of flour
100 grams of sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 packet(s) of vanilla sugar
1 pinch(s) of salt
120 ml vegetable oil
200 ml liquid

Directions:

Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix them together.
Then add the oil and liquid. In this step you mix in other ingredients in the individual variations if necessary. The type of liquid also varies in different cake recipes.
Mix all the ingredients to a smooth batter and pour it into a cake pan. Bake the cake at 160 degrees Celsius for about an hour. A loaf pan works best. For a Gugelhupf you would have to make 1.5 times the recipe so that the form is optimally filled.

Cake variation 1: cinnamon and cardamom

Kanelbullar is what cinnamon rolls are called in Sweden and are made from yeast dough. Cinnamon and cardamom are added to the dough and provide the typical taste. Preparing yeast dough usually takes a long time because of the resting time and can go wrong. The sponge cake alternative, on the other hand, is very simple and tastes similar.

In addition to the basic recipe, you will also need the following ingredients:

1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
You can use plant-based milk as the liquid. It doesn’t matter whether you choose oat, almond or soy milk.

You can either put the finished batter in a cake pan or in muffin cases. Muffins don’t take that long in the oven, so you can take them out after 20-30 minutes.

Cake variation 2: coffee and cocoa

You always have coffee and cocoa at home. Not only drinks can be prepared from it, but also a vegan cake.

You have to change and supplement the basic recipe as follows:

You only need 250 grams of flour instead of 300 grams
Divide the 200 milliliters into: 100 milliliters of coffee and 100 milliliters of plant-based milk.
In the second step of the basic recipe, you add two tablespoons of cocoa and one tablespoon of sugar.
When buying coffee and cocoa, pay particular attention to fair trade and organically certified products. In conventional agriculture, the ecosystem suffers and smallholders often work under poor conditions.

Cake variation 3: banana with chocolate sprinkles

You can make the ingredients for the third variation of the basic recipe yourself if you don’t have them at home. You can make grated chocolate by chopping leftover chocolate or grating it with a Parmesan grater. You can also make the banana juice yourself.

In addition to the basic recipe, you will need the following ingredients:

50 grams of grated chocolate
200 milliliters of banana juice as a liquid

Tips: How to use up cake leftovers

A whole cake can sometimes be too much. But that’s not a problem: you have many options for using the leftovers instead of throwing them away.

You can use cake leftovers in the form of rum balls or desserts, for example.
Alternatively, you can freeze the cake. It’s quick and makes it durable. With pieces of cake in the freezer, you can also defrost a piece spontaneously and don’t always have to bake a whole cake right away.
Cake pops are cakes on a stick. You can also use leftover cake for this.

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Cooking Tips

10 Tips for Baking Homemade Cakes

These tips will definitely come in handy 🙂

  1. Egg yolks can be saved by placing them in a jar of water and placing the jar in the refrigerator.
  2. If you need protein, you can extract it from the egg by piercing it with a thick needle on both sides and blowing the white out. This will leave the yolk in the shell.
  3. Use a paper funnel to separate the white from the yolk.
  4. The coolly kneaded dough sticks to your hands, but rolls out well with a bottle of cold water.
  5. Butter will not darken when frying if the pan is first greased with a little vegetable oil.
  6. To make the cake easy to remove from the mold, after the oven, you need to put it on a rag soaked in cold water.
  7. If the sunflower or olive oil becomes cloudy and has an unpleasant odor, add a spoonful of table salt per liter. After a few days, the settled oil can be drained.
  8. To cut a crumbly cake, the knife must be heated by lowering boiling water.
  9. To prevent the dough from burning, you need to put a frying pan with water or an asbestos sheet under the baking sheet.
  10. The rolled dough is easy to transfer to a baking sheet if you screw it on a rolling pin and unfold it on a baking sheet.
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Food

Flavored Tea: Cakes and Unicorns in a Cup?

We love it especially in winter: hot, wonderfully aromatic tea. Gladly flavored with appetizing flavors that make the tea taste like marzipan or, in summer, like tropical fruits and more. But what are we actually drinking?

Flavored tea is not always “real tea”

“Tea” is, strictly speaking, just the beverage brewed from the leaves of the tea plant. Green tea is simply the dried leaves of the plant. Black tea is more labor intensive. The leaves are first dried a little, then rolled and then oxidized in high humidity.

Everything else that we serve as “tea” is strictly speaking an “infusion drink” and therefore only “tea-like”. This includes everything that we colloquially refer to as “herbal tea” or “fruit tea”, although there are of course also mixtures of dried fruits and herbs, which we also call “tea”.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s “real tea” or “infusion drink”: the shelves are full of the most diverse types and flavors. In the trade, tea compositions with imaginative names are lined up box after box: “Strawberry Cheesecake”, “Peach Panna Cotta”, “Blueberry Muffin” or “Unicorn Tea” are just a few examples of tea types that definitely do not contain what they are supposed to be are named. Wouldn’t be so appetizing to serve a brewed cheesecake in a cup, would it?
But what’s in it if there’s no muffin or unicorn swimming in the teapot?

Flavor additives are not always synthetic

Anyone who immediately thinks of “chemistry” when they think of flavored tea should read the list of ingredients carefully. A tea with added aroma is not always a mixture of synthetically produced flavors.

The classic “Earl Grey”, for example, is flavored with bergamot essential oil, provided it is of good quality, and many other flavored teas do not require any artificial additives by using natural, highly aromatic ingredients such as citrus peels, spices and dried fruits or essential oils. But this is usually not the case and a supposedly healthy tea quickly becomes a “chemical cocktail”.

What is what: natural, nature-identical or artificial?

Flavorings are roughly divided into three groups and must be declared on the list of ingredients:
Natural flavorings: This includes everything that is produced from plant, animal or microbiological raw materials by distillation, extraction or other processes; for example vanillin from vanilla beans.
Nature-identical flavorings: The name can be the same, such as “vanillin”, but there is a manufacturing process behind it that does not use natural raw materials, but runs completely synthetically. From a chemical point of view, however, such flavoring substances are identical to the substances of the same name of natural origin.
Artificial Flavors: This group includes all flavors that do not occur naturally in food. Some of these are modeled after natural flavors, an example is ethyl vanniline. However, many are often quickly recognized as “artificial”. Just think of the colorful variety of aromas, which with names like “green apple” or “banana” only taste remotely like their natural counterpart.
In addition, there are the aroma extracts already mentioned, which are declared as such by name, for example essential oils and also smoke and smoke aromas.

How much aroma is allowed in the tea?

Many flavored tea blends in particular smell (and taste) very strongly of artificial flavorings and have very little to do with the natural ingredients. In Europe, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is responsible for testing flavorings and setting maximum levels. After successful approval, your panel of experts assigns an “E number” to the additive. Important to know: natural flavorings also have E numbers.

For all these E numbers, it is regulated by law that only as much ends up in the finished food as is harmless to health. But if you buy good quality food, you can do without such additives. And, to be honest: does tea really have to taste like cake?

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Cooking Tips

Choose the Right Baking Pan for Cakes

Instructions and tips for choosing the right baking pan for cakes. The cake is still one of the most popular delicacies: There are plenty of delicious recipes for the most diverse types of cake. What many people forget, however, is that it’s not just the recipe that counts, but also the right baking pan.

Choose the baking dish according to the recipe

When baking, it’s not just about the right recipe, but also the right cake pan. This is determined by the baking mold and there are many different ones: silicone baking molds and sheet metal molds made of various metals, with and without a special coating.

There are also ordinary standard forms, as well as very complex motif baking forms. And in a wide variety of sizes. Not only the material is fundamentally different, but actually also the later cake form. Therefore, think about which cake recipe is used to find the right shape. For an affordable canned fruit cake, you can use a baking sheet or round springform pan. These molds are also ideal for grandma’s simple plum apple cake. While other cakes cry out for more unusual shapes.

Know-how of the right baking pan

But which form of buck is the right one for the individual? Every baker and every hobby baker has its own preferences and requirements. This applies to the taste of the cake, but clearly also to the texture of the baking pan.

For example, I prefer silicone baking pans, but my sister-in-law has always sworn by metal baking pans with a high-quality enamel coating. So far we have tried both variants – always with good and less good results. In order to be able to make an individual choice, you should take a closer look at the properties, advantages, and disadvantages of each type of baking pan.

Silicone or metal? With or without coating?

As mentioned, my favorite is the silicone baking pan. Molds made of silicone are very flexible and heat-resistant and there is no need for annoying greasing beforehand and then attaching cardboard afterward. After baking, the finished cake can almost always be removed from the mold easily and without much effort – and above all without unsightly crumbling. In addition, silicone can be used not only in the oven but also in the refrigerator. Today, however, this also applies to many sheet metal shapes.

Metal baking molds, on the other hand, are a lot more robust than silicone baking molds. They wear out slower and last a lot longer than a silicone cake pan. Here, however, the quality of the individual mold is very important – the lifespan of the baking mold can therefore vary greatly. But that doesn’t have to mean that a cheap baking pan has to be a bad one. When buying, simply check the workmanship, the impression of the material, and possible seams or transitions. With the right care, you can conjure up delicious cakes and tarts even with a cheap baking pan and you will enjoy them for a long time.

By the way, if the dough sticks to the mold despite everything, it often helps to simply put the still lukewarm mold in the fridge or on the cool balcony for a few minutes. In my experience, a wet towel wrapped around the mold only helps to a limited extent and only with a metal mold.

Which baking pan and which cake go together?

Finally, the question arises as to which baking pan is the right one for which cake. Here, too, there are numerous variants, motifs, and types of sheet metal. My children love playful shapes for their birthday cakes, but these are really only suitable for very simple and dry types of cake: for example marble, chocolate, or sand cakes. Unfortunately, sensitive and rather sticky types of dough quickly stick to the “details” of a motif mold – even if it is very well greased or made of high-quality silicone.

The commercially available standard forms are somewhat less complicated: springform tins, baking trays, and loaf tins. Incidentally, cool and fresh fruit tarts are best baked in springform pans, warm fruit cakes on a baking tray or also in a springform pan, and sand or bundt cakes in a Gugelhupf or loaf pan.

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Food

Are Rice Cakes Healthy? What You Need to Know

That rice cakes are healthy is an accepted fact. You can find out here why the popular snack is still not harmless to health.

Rice waffles are considered healthy and low in calories: A waffle contains just between 20 and 40 kilocalories. According to the list of ingredients, rice cakes often contain relatively few ingredients and usually no questionable additives.

The crispy snack is also popular as a snack for children. But according to several studies by Öko-Test, the popular waffles are not harmless to health.

Rice cakes as a healthy snack?

Arsenic is found in all rice products. However, the contamination is particularly high in rice cakes. In order to produce the supposedly healthy rice cakes, the producers have to extract the moisture from the rice grains by heating them up. This increases the concentration of the pollutant. Research is still being carried out into other reasons for the high arsenic content in rice cakes.

According to the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), inorganic arsenic is classified as a carcinogenic substance. In addition, even small amounts can damage the nerves, skin and blood vessels, as well as cardiovascular diseases and have a negative impact on development. The BfR is therefore of the opinion that foods should contain as little arsenic as possible.

Other pollutants: acrylamide, mineral oils & Co.

The second factor challenging rice cakes as a healthy snack is acrylamide. According to scientific studies, this substance is also suspected of increasing the risk of cancer. However, the exact connection has not yet been clearly clarified.

Acrylamide is formed when carbohydrate-rich foods are heated to high temperatures, such as when baking rice cakes. As a result, however, it is also found in many other baked, roasted or fried products, e.g. in chips or fries.

There is no fixed limit for the daily intake of acrylamide. The consumer center recommends consuming as little as possible. Children are considered to be particularly at risk. Because of their lower weight, the acrylamide concentration in their body rises faster.

Healthy despite rice cakes? You should note that

The investigations of the BfR showed that we ingest relatively high amounts of inorganic arsenic through rice products. This is particularly dangerous for children, who are even more sensitive to pollutants.

Nevertheless, the BfR recommends consuming rice in moderation as part of a balanced diet and alternating it with other types of grain. Appropriate amounts of (low-emission) rice cakes can also be part of a healthy diet.

Especially people suffering from celiac disease often consume large amounts of rice and rice products. In this case, you should also regularly include other gluten-free grains such as buckwheat, corn or millet in your diet. To avoid arsenic in rice cakes, you can also use alternatives such as spelled and corn cakes.

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