Super subs: alternative ingredients for traditional baking

Milk adds structure to cake batter so it doesn’t collapse, adds moisture and can help form a delicious crust on the surface of your sponge, making it an important part of a cake recipe. While there are soy and nut milks out there, they will profoundly alter the texture of your sponge and may not work at all. If you’re baking for someone who only avoids milk because it doesn’t agree with them, making them feel bloated or sluggish, try a2 Milk – it lacks the protein we have trouble digesting and works in exactly the same way as regular milk, so won’t affect your recipe whatsoever.

Butter isn’t the demonised ingredient it used to be, but many of us still choose to limit our intake. It’s easy to replace, however – just use oil instead. Vegetable, sunflower, olive and rapeseed oils all work well and result in a lighter, moister sponge (although they tend to lack the richness of traditional butter cakes). Use a little less oil than you would butter, however – around seventy to eighty percent of the original weight should work. If you’re just trying to cut down on dairy instead of eliminating it completely, try adding a splash of milk to add a little creaminess.

Eggs act as a binder and rising agent in cakes, so they’re another important element to any cake mix. If your recipe calls for a large number of eggs, then it can be hard to replace them all with something else, but there are several options if you only need a substitute for one or two. There are several egg replacements on the market, which can be spooned and mixed into the cake batter without altering the flavour or texture very much, but for a more natural substitute, replacing an egg with a pureed banana can work wonders. It might sound strange, but it’s actually a very effective way of binding everything together – just make sure you increase the amount of baking soda by up to fifty percent to help the cake rise.

Another alternative is to stir a tablespoon of ground flaxseed into three tablespoons of water until it becomes thick and gelatinous. Be warned, however, that flaxseed has quite a distinct taste, so should only be used in cakes already heavily flavoured with something else, like chocolate.