No Flour, Eggs or Butter? No Problem! 23 Cake Recipes for When You’re Missing an Ingredient
On lockdown and feeling the urge to bake, but missing something apparently vital? Then pinch some ideas from great bakers past and present.
Flourless chocolate layer cake. Photo by Oxana Nigmatulina / Getty Images.
Cake
has taken on a new significance now that most of us are stuck at home
all day, every day. We’re comfort-eating and baking like there’s no
tomorrow. But what do you do when you fancy a sponge, but can’t find
eggs or your oven is broken and no one will fix it? Here are some
recipes to get you through every ingredient shortfall.
If we suggest you replace one missing ingredient
with another that you don’t have, or that you would normally never
dream of buying, bear in mind that no two kitchen cupboards are the same
and you may find that grocers can still supply “fancy” alternatives
such as ricotta or flaxseeds while the staples are but a memory.
No Self-Raising Flour
You can make any cake that calls for
self-raising flour without it. Nigella Lawson doesn’t even bother
keeping any, as she explained a few years back.
As long as you know the ratio (2 tsp baking powder to 150g plain
flour), it’s easy to make some. There are a lot of decent bakes that
include this process in the method, from Dan Lepard’s sour cream butter cake (billed as the easiest cake in the world) to Claire Ptak’s picture-perfect raspberry vanilla sandwich.
No Baking Powder
Baking powder isn’t the only way to get some
rise into your bakes. German yeasted cakes are a wonder – wholesome and
weighty; as close as a sweet can get to lunch, and all the better for
it. If you’re baking bread, set aside a bit of the leavened dough for
Felicity Cloake’s perfect plum cake, German baking expert Luisa Weiss’s Apfelkuchen or the myriad other cinnamon, cardamom and honey-scented options to be found elsewhere.
No Flour of Any Kind
In one of her more daring moves, Anna Jones makes a lemon cake
with cannellini beans, ground almonds and four eggs. It is a stone-cold
winner – fudgy, rich and sweet. For something more decadent, try the
classic flourless chocolate cake. The recipe I have used for years is as
follows: melt 200g butter with 100g dark chocolate over a bain-marie,
then mix four egg yolks with 100g sugar, and fold that into the
chocolate mix. In another bowl, beat the egg whites into stiff peaks,
gradually adding a further 100g sugar, then fold into the chocolate mix
and bake in a buttered tin at 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas mark 4 for 45
minutes or until set in the middle. Serve with whipped cream, Greek
yoghurt or creme fraiche – if you have any – and a dusting of icing
sugar.
No Sugar
Bakers keen to avoid refined sugar have plenty
of options, such as syrups (maple, agave, date), fruit (dried and fresh)
and sweet root veg (carrots, sweet potato). Nadia Lim does a beautiful banana loaf with coconut. Leela Cyd does one with dates. But having no sugar in lockdown times may call for a more 1950s approach. In her new book, Oats in the North & Wheat from the South,
Regula Ysewijn makes a very old-school slab of parkin using only tinned
sweeteners: heat up 200g golden syrup with 45g treacle and 200g butter,
then mix in 200g oat flour (just blitz up some oats in a food processor
if you have none), another 100g oats that have been less finely
blitzed, 2 tsp each of bicarb and ground ginger, a pinch each of nutmeg
and salt, one egg and 2 tbsp whisky (or milk). Bake at 160C (140C
fan)/325F/gas mark 3 for about an hour then leave it to cool in the tin.
(As an aside, Ysewijn says: “Never fan! Fan is super-evil and should be
avoided at all times!”)
If your stockpiling involved stashing away a tin of Nestlé Carnation instead, you could opt for this recipe from Australia (although obviously you won’t want to sprinkle icing sugar on top).
Banana bread … ideal sugar-free recipe. Photo by Nina Van Der Kleij / Getty Images.
No Eggs
Vegan bakers have a few tricks up their sleeves.
Mix 1 tbsp chia seeds or milled flaxseeds with 3 tbsp water and set
aside for 15-20 minutes, and you have what’s known as a vegan egg, which
generally works as a direct swap-in, say, for a brownie or a loaf cake.
If your recipe calls for whipped-up egg whites, as it may for an airy
sponge, you can (with some effort) whip up aquafaba (AKA chickpea brine)
into frothy white peaks. Again, 3 tbsp is the equivalent of one egg and
2 tbsp for an egg white; Anna Jones tells you what to do here.
Or take a tip from Ruby Tandoh’s moist chocolate fudge cake. Where most recipes caution that you should not
overmix the batter once you have added in the flour, Tandoh’s solution
for not using eggs is to do exactly that. You flavour the mix with sweet
spices, sweeten it with dates and brown sugar and then beat it for a
good minute to give it some structure. Once baked, it is slathered with a
mix of melted dark chocolate and golden syrup.
No Butter
This one is easy. Use olive oil. Ideally you’d make Maialino’s version with Grand Marnier and orange, but Rachel Roddy does an excellent stand-in with ricotta (which you could replace with strained full-fat yoghurt) and lemon.
The citrus or dairy gives the bake a good tang, but I would happily eat
a really basic one, too, flavoured only with vanilla essence (such as this Kim Boyce recipe, only using plain flour and without the chocolate or rosemary.) And then there’s the similarly basic French gateau au yaourt. Clotilde Dusoulier’s version calls for vegetable oil, but I’ve tried with the dregs of many bottles, and it’s always a winner.
No Fat of Any Kind
The beauty of yoghurt lies in the fluffy, tangy,
moist crumb it fashions, with or without added fat. Thomasina Miers’
version uses Greek yoghurt, four eggs and a remarkably tiny amount (35g)
of plain flour, with lemon, pistachio and cardamom for flavour. The
BBC, meanwhile, lists an entirely fatless sponge (filled, with delicious irony, with a huge amount of whipped cream) that is so striking it deserves a try.
No Dairy
Another doozy. If you haven’t tasted a
clementine cake, like the one with which Ben Stiller’s Walter Mitty wins
over hostile Afghan warlords, you simply haven’t lived. I love the fact
that using the whole fruit brings bulk, liquid and flavour. Nigella’s
recipe is my go-to: boil up four clementines (I’ve done it with a
couple of oranges, too), then blitz them to a pulp. This is then used as
the base for a batter of egg, sugar, ground almonds and a little baking
powder.
No Raising Agent of Any Kind (i.e. Eggs, Baking Powder, Bicarb, Self-Raising Flour)
Meera Sodha’s superlative chocolate, olive oil and passion fruit cake
would fit several categories here, featuring neither eggs, dairy nor
raising agent of any type. It’s a treasure of a recipe. Ysewijn suggests
Cornish heavy cake (also in her new book). Essentially a giant rock
cake, it has been made since well before there were things such as
self-raising flour; her recipe dates from 1920. You roughly mix 50g each
of butter and lard with 340g plain flour, 50g sugar and a tsp of salt.
Pour in 125ml of milk or water and knead to combine, before adding 180g
currants and 50g candied peel and kneading again. The dough is then set
aside for an hour or two, before being baked in a tin, sprinkled with
sugar, at 190C (170C fan)/375F/gas mark 5 for 40-50 minutes.
No Oven
This should be where your cake plans hit a wall. But no. No-bake fridge cakes are a thing, and Cloake’s perfect no-bake cheesecake
is hard to beat: a base of buttery, syrupy cornflakes, a filling of
lemon-spiked cream cheese and ricotta, a two-hour chill in the fridge.
Cornflakes! Of course you’re making this right now.
Dale Berning Sawa is a French-South-African freelance writer based in London, covering culture, food, health, tech and work
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