Help with gluten-free, vegan substitutions in a cake recipe
My son is allergic to wheat, egg, and dairy, and I'm still learning. I made the Smitten Kitchen summer strawberry cake recipe the other day with gluten free flour, soy milk, earth balance, and aquafaba...it came out of the oven beautifully but by the time I served it the next day it had basically turned into soup. I've used these substitutions in other recipes with greater success...was it too wet from the strawberries? Should I have cooked it longer? Do you have any tips? The strawberry cake soup was delicious, but required a lot of explanation when I served it to my skeptical colleagues at work...
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4 Comments
I also think the cake is best eaten hot straight out of the oven because to me large fruit baked into cakes like this tastes slimy and mushy once it goes cold.
In baking I've found that soft tofu can replace egg, volume for volume. Buzz it in a blender or processor with other wet ingredients and it works beautifully. But the "soft" is important...not a brand name, but a texture, and firmer textured tofu won't work as well.
For milk replacement, I prefer the flavor of nut milks, especially almond and cashew to others (rice, soy milk).
For fat, there are loads of cake recipes that successfully use vegetable oil or olive oil. I wouldn't use them as 1:1 replacements for butter, bc fat and water percentages are different, and some flavors don't mix as well. But still, good to know.
For flour, I've not had a lot of taste or texture success with GF flour, but hear good things about this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Cup4Cup-Gluten-Free-Flour/dp/B0096MPAWQ
http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2011/05/strawberry-summer-cake/
The dessert looks more like a clafouti (pastry barely held together with fruit).
Also from the proportions of ingredients & Deb Perelman's comments, even regular flour has trouble holding that much (4c or 1lb) fruit together. So, by analogy, the GF flour, which has less structure, would have even more trouble.
Yes, I think your analysis of too many strawberries is right. And no, cooking it longer probably wouldn't help. Rather, if you like the taste enough to make again, reduce the volume of fruit and plan on eating it day of baking.