The Ultimate Guide To Vegan Baking Substitutes

Are you ready to transform your favourite baked goods into irresistible, mouthwateringly delectable delights, all while keeping it 100% vegan! With these game-changing vegan baking substitutes, you'll be in dessert heaven in no time! 

We all love ourselves some baked goods, but a lot of ingredients that are involved in traditional baking are usually derived from animals, and for those of us who are in the vegan lifestyle or who choose not to consume animal by products, finding substitutes can often be a struggle, and especially substitutions that don’t completely the alter the end result of the baked product. Nowadays though, thousands of brands are coming up with products derived from plants, nuts and the like while still maintaining the same great taste (if not better and healthier)! Having a hard time trying to pinpoint which ingredients work best for you and your baking endeavors? Not to worry because we’ve compiled a list of great vegan substitutes for your next baking session! 

Vegan Milk

Probably the biggest staple in baking is milk, it’s truly the backbone of the baking world, but for those of us who are sticking to a particular diet that doesn’t involve milk whether by choice or necessity, we want options that’ll still give us the results we’re looking for in our baking needs, and there are a handful of brands out there like Elmhurst, that has a milk for about every nut (maybe not every nut but close!). You can have your pick of milk with a unique flavour from the nuts they’re derived from to give your baked goods a hint of a nutty taste like hazelnut milk, cashew milk, almond milk and walnut milk to name a few! Not only do they have different nut-based milks, but they also have unsweetened versions as well so you don’t have to worry about too much of an overly sweet pastry. 

Milkadamia is a brand of nut milk that’s made from, you guessed it, macadamia nuts! With the same silky smoothness of dairy milk but without the dairy, you can seamlessly integrate it into your baking sessions! With flavours like unsweetened vanilla for a hint of vanilla without too much sweetness and original macadamia milk that has the rich and creamy taste of macadamia nuts, you’ll never have to go back to regular milk!  

Vegan Butter

But what about butter? Well luckily for those of us who are looking for alternatives, the internet came up with just about a thousand and one substitutes that are not only healthier but butter (get it? Like better). If you have no vegan butter on hand or if you just don’t fancy vegan butter and want to try out something different, vegan shortening might just be the next best thing to try out in baking so you can get all those delicious and crispy pie crusts, cookies and the like! If that’s not your jam, then vegan coconut oil works just as well for all your baking needs, but if you love yourself some fruit and have some extra time on your hands to mash and mush, mash up banana until it’s almost paste-like and you got yourself a sweet substitute for butter! Or if you don’t want to put too much time into mashing up fruits for baking aside from when needed, any kind of nut butter also works. We’ve heard oat butter’s been used before and it yields some pretty good results, but it usually works best as a finisher or topper since oat butter tends to have little granules of oat that may not agree with everyone’s palate, still, don’t knock it until you try it!   

Vegan Eggs

One egg, two eggs, three eggs–no more eggs for us! We’re sticking with a no dairy, no animal by-product needed baking session, and through many different trials and a few hundred errors, there are so many different substitutes to name, it all just depends on what you like, and of course, what you’re making. Though ingredient substitutions like ground-up flaxseed won’t have much of an effect on the taste, it can affect the texture of what you’re making so use as needed and experiment often! Like the butter substitutes, mashed-up bananas or even avocados work great in vegan baking as an egg substitute! Of course, there are also vegan egg replacements that mimic the consistency and properties of using a regular egg in baking, but if you don’t have that on hand, chia seeds that are ground up into a powder will also work as a good binder for baking! Or, if you’re making a pumpkin-based item or you just love the taste and idea of pumpkin-based goods (Halloween’s coming up and tis the season for pumpkin spice lattes after all), pumpkin puree is a great addition and substitution for eggs and gives that great pumpkin taste! 

We hope this list of suggestions helps you on your vegan baking endeavors!