Why Aquafaba Is the Best Egg Replacement for Cake Baking

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.

Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

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.

Left: Aquafaba cupcake. Right: Tapioca and baking powder cupcake.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

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.

The tapioca flour, baking powder, and water mixture.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

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. 

3. Banana. Bananas are a great helper in batters because they actually can mimic some of what eggs do: they can bind, add moisture, and their fibers provide structure and can help keep fats and liquids suspended like eggs. Plus, they’re pretty easy to access in every region and in most grocery stores. The finished product is sturdy and moist, making it a good cake for handling and decorating. That said, bananas make your cake taste like bananas. If you don’t like that, then this totally stinks.

To use banana as an egg replacement, mash up enough banana to make a quarter-cup of banana glop per egg needed.  

4. Greek yogurt. I love when yogurt or sour cream is added to cake batters because the cake is always moist, flavorful, and tender. However, it’s not a very good egg replacement. While the flavor of the cake was delicious, the yogurt added no structure and completely caved in while cooling. For context, I used a quarter-cup of Greek yogurt to replace one whole egg. The only reason I ranked it above applesauce is because the flavor was delicious—but this would never work for a cake that I’d serve in public. Imagine if I had used an eight or nine-inch cake pan. The cake would look like a bowl. 

The applesauce and yogurt cupcakes (two on the right side) both fell after cooling.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

5. Applesauce. Applesauce produced similar emulsifying results to bananas but without the benefit of firm structure. You can see in the picture above that after the cake cooled, it dipped in the center. Not as dramatically as the yogurt one, but still, not great. Applesauce adds moisture but since it has less structure, the batter falls while cooling and then you end up with a stodgy center. Furthermore, I found applesauce cake to be slightly nauseating in flavor, and it overly sweetened my cake even though I used the natural kind with no added sugar. If you must use it, use a quarter-cup to replace one egg.

If you’re looking to seamlessly make cakes and cupcakes without extra steps or special ingredients, use aquafaba for the best results. It’s vegan, has good structure and moisture, and doesn’t negatively alter the flavor of your cake. It doesn’t need to be whipped for recipes where the eggs aren’t whipped, but—as an added benefit—this is the only ingredient where you can whip it to replace whipped eggs in a recipe. Aquafaba is a versatile cooking helper to keep around, and it’s essentially free if you’ve been draining it from your beans all these years.