You can't make a (good) sponge cake without breaking eggs

Once again, I must apologize for being late with this update. Even after shifting my regular weekly blog update from Sunday to Monday, it seems, I still can't consistently meet the deadline. My excuse this time is that Monday was the CCL National Conference, which I watched on live stream. After spending the whole day, from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm, listening to speakers on Zoom, I just didn't have the energy to put in another hour in front of the screen updating the blog. (Why are Zoom meetings so exhausting, anyway? I walked for hours on both Saturday and Sunday, and being on my feet all that time wasn't nearly so tiring.) 

Speaking of Saturday, Brian and I spent it celebrating our anniversary in our usual unconventional fashion. We strolled around for several hours in Montclair (a shorter and more affordable jaunt than New York), then headed home for dinner and Brian's homemade anniversary cake. This was his seventh time making it, and he was comfortable enough with the recipe to try something a little different: making the mousse with vegan cream. (The Trader Joe's brand that worked so well for us is no longer available, but we've had reasonably good success with Country Crock.) And since he was already doing that, he decided to take a whack at finding an egg-free version of the sponge cake, as well, and making the whole cake vegan. 

Well, as it turns out, this is a pretty tall order. The cake recipe he uses is a traditional Genoise sponge, and eggs are a pretty essential component of that. They're the sole leavening agent, the main source of moisture, and the main ingredient by volume. However, an Internet search on "vegan Genoise sponge" turned up many different recipes that purported to get around these problems, so he decided to pick a fairly simple one and give it a try.

For this first attempt, he chose the "easy and fluffy" vegan sponge from Bianca Zapatka, which claimed to be "fool-proof." This recipe didn't contain any aquafaba or other egg substitutes; instead it relied on the old vinegar-and-baking soda combo for leavening. Unfortunately, this trick, which works so well in the classic wacky cake, was not nearly so successful here. Even the photo on the webpage shows the allegedly fluffy cake as quite flat, and Brian's was not any loftier. It might have been all right if he'd wanted to serve it straight out of the pan, but torting it—slicing it into two even layers—proved impossible. When he tried, he ended up with ragged slivers.

Concluding that the wacky-cake method wouldn't work for this purpose, Brian asked me to search out a vegan sponge recipe that used aquafaba. I found him two: one from Coconut Craze, which had only four ingredients, and a much more elaborate one from World of Vegan, which added corn starch and a "vegan buttermilk" made from plant milk and vinegar. Brian tried the simpler one first, and it produced a cake he described as "tantalizingly close" to the Genoise sponge. Unlike the first cake, it was genuinely light and fluffy—so fluffy that it lacked structural integrity. When Brian attempted to torte the cake, it simply disintegrated. (Also, when we tasted the fragments, we found they were ludicrously sweet. In taste and texture, it was more like a giant marshmallow than a cake.)

Time was running short at this point, but Brian decided to make one more attempt with the other recipe. This one came out almost exactly opposite to the previous cake in every respect. Far from being too light, it was dense and doughy, and despite having just as much sugar, it barely tasted sweet at all. In both flavor and texture, it was more like a cornbread than a cake. It was much easier to torte than either of the previous sponge attempts, but it was clearly unsuitable for use in our anniversary cake.

After these three failures, Brian was tempted to try simply subbing aquafaba for the eggs in our regular Genoise sponge recipe (from The Joy of Cooking) and see if that worked. But by this time it was already Friday night, and our anniversary was Saturday. So, reluctantly, he decided to go with the egg-based sponge that we knew would work. Thus, our anniversary cake ended up being dairy-free but not vegan. And, much as I hate to admit it, even the vegan cream didn't work quite as well in the cake as real cream. It appears to be a bit more temperature-sensitive, so while the mousse made with it was stiffer than a cream-based mousse when freshly made, it lost its structure more quickly when left out at room temperature. Hence, the layers in the cake weren't as well defined, and they had a tendency to slide apart while being eaten. The cake was still delicious, but it wasn't as stable. 

We also have a new problem: what to do with the remains of the three unsuccessful vegan sponge cakes. They're currently chilling out in the freezer, waiting for us to finish up the remainder of the anniversary torte. Once that's gone, Brian will start tinkering with them to figure out what they might be good for. The first two, which had good flavor despite their poor sliceability, might work well in some sort of trifle. And Brian thinks the not-very-sweet third one could take the place of the biscuit layer in a strawberry shortcake. 

Despite these three consecutive failures, Brian hasn't given up entirely on the idea of making next year's anniversary cake fully vegan. He still wants to try the standard Genoise sponge recipe with aquafaba and see how it turns out. But that's an experiment that should probably wait until all the other cakes in our fridge and freezer have been dealt with.