Eggless Cupcake Challenge

I didn’t get a chance to blog yesterday, as I was working on a hmmm project I guess you’d say.  I have a friend who has some severe allergies, and many of them being food allergies. One of those is eggs. Eggs?!?!? Let me tell you something… I never in my life realized how many things have eggs or egg product in them!  She brought me this Egg Replacer powder and I basically looked at it like “What the heck do I do with this???”. I’m always up for a challenge though, and I have felt especially bad that she hasn’t even been able to eat any of the treats I have made. I even thought about making her a fruit basket but then I found out she’s allergic to just about all the fruits I use as well! So I started digging online and researching some egg substitutes and how to use the egg replacer powder. It was actually quite interesting. At first, I tried it with a simple cake mix (although the box says it doesn’t work well with it). I wanted to get an idea of what I was working with and wanted to make something easy for her to be able to make on her own if it actually worked. She isn’t a fan of the from scratch baking.  I mixed the powder with a little water and then added it to the mix in place of the eggs and stuck them in the oven. The cupcakes came out ok visually, a little lighter than usual and obviously flatter than usual since eggs are part of the leavening in the batter. However, they were the strangest consistency! They felt squishy, yet heavy.  Then when I went to taste one and break it apart, it was as if the whole thing fell to crumbs. They weren’t dry, dense crumbs, as corn bread would be.  They were more like moist, velvety crumbs but when you touched them and put them together, they’d turn to a dough. I was absolutely befuddled by this. I had never really felt something that consistency. The closest thing I can compare it to is the “Moon Sand” that’s out for the kids now, or kinetic sand. It was really interesting, but they tasted good!

Next, I wanted to try it in a scratch recipe.  I chose a lemon cupcake recipe since she isn’t allergic to lemons and it would give her a little flavor. I found the egg replacer worked a little better in this type of recipe, but I still had a problem with the rising and it being slightly crumbly. The taste, however, was still quite good. I decided to make some homemade vanilla buttercream and pipe them onto them and let her try them to see what she thought. She loved them! I was so excited for her. I’m still not done with this challenge though. I want to try to tweak the consistency. I read to try gelatin with the egg replacer so I want to try that. I also read to use soda as an egg substitute as well. So I have much more work to do and experimenting with this, but overall she was happy that I produced something edible without eggs that she could actually enjoy! I’ll take any suggestions if any of you have them though, especially regarding consistency.  It was an interesting challenge but I’m up for more research!