I Tested Five Egg Replacements for Cake, and There Was a Clear Winner

There’s the egg price problem for sure, but whether you’re trying to save grocery money or you have an aversion to eggs for dietary or health restrictions—you too deserve cake. Cake for a birthday or cake on a whim, there should be nothing holding you back from achieving your sugary dreams of the moment, least of all a lack of eggless cake recipes. I tested out five common and accessible egg replacement options to see which one produced the best eggless cake.

The batter

I decided to test a basic yellow cake recipe I’ve used before. It uses a combination of butter and oil, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla extract, and usually eggs. It’s a good layering cake since when it’s prepared as-written (with eggs), it produces a sturdy, level (not domed), vanilla scented cake. In the interest of time, making multiple batches, and reducing mess, I spooned the batter out into cupcake papers rather than into larger cake pans. The first round of cake was prepared with egg as a control. 

The replacements

There are almost too many options for substituting eggs in cake batter, so I focused on the ones I’ve heard about the most often: mashed banana, Greek yogurt, applesauce, aquafaba, and a tapioca flour and baking powder mixture.

Eggs are essential to cake batter and other baked goods, because they’re a binder, can be a leavener, and they’re an emulsifier (they can help keep fats and liquids stable and homogenized). They also add structure and moisture to the finished product. Truly, they’re incredible. We’re looking for a single ingredient to do as much of that as possible, but it’s important to keep our expectations realistic—few other ingredients can accomplish all of that without sacrificing something.

The results

Let’s get to the good stuff—the results. Here are the best egg replacements for cake, and the worst performers.

1. Aquafaba. It’s easy to dismiss aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chickpeas or other beans) until you actually use it. This cake was perfectly delicious, spongy, moist, and with no off-flavors. It was the most similar in structure and flavor to a cake prepared with whole eggs. It’s also the easiest substitution. As long as you saved some aquafaba from last night’s dinner (or do what I do and keep it handy in your freezer), you simply add three tablespoons of the bean liquid per single whole egg the recipe calls for.

I mixed it in during the same stage I would have for the egg, right after the butter and sugar got mixed together. Note that if your beans weren’t low-sodium then you may want to reduce the salt in the recipe by a quarter teaspoon.

2. Tapioca flour and baking powder. This easy to make mixture produced a good quality final product as well. Points were taken off for the mixture being an extra step, and for tapioca flour being possibly harder to source depending on where you live. The cake had more loft and was more tender than the aquafaba replacement, making it more delicate to handle if you’re stacking layers for a big cake. 

Mix one tablespoon of tapioca flour with one tablespoon of cold water. Stir in a quarter-teaspoon of baking powder, and this replaces one whole egg in your cake recipe. The mixture will be very liquidy.

Alternatively, you can simply add the extra baking powder measurement to the dry ingredients. Add the tapioca and water mixture to the bowl after creaming the butter and sugar, and proceed with the recipe. You can usually find tapioca flour in the baking aisle of large supermarkets.