Allergen-Free Baking Errors

While I usually share stories of baking projects that the entire family loved, today I am opening my kimono and sharing some of my failures. After all, part of the process of learning to bake allergen-free is to make mistakes, right? And it’s even better if we can figure out how to fix those mistakes. So here goes…

Mistake example one:

I recently used a free sample of Orgran vanilla cake mix to make some chocolate chip cupcakes. I have mentioned before that I love the fact that Orgran puts the substitutions for the allergen-free ingredients right on the box – no guesswork. In this case, instead of 5.5 oz. water, 2 eggs, and 2.1 oz. margarine, I was to add 8.4 oz. water and 15g vegetable oil.

I mixed up all my ingredients and popped my cupcakes into the oven. During baking, I smelled some burning and took them out early. They looked very greasy. I let them sit and there was oil seeping over the edges of the tin. I took them out of the tin and tried to ‘drain’ them on paper towels, wondering what I had done wrong – and then threw them in the trash.

It turns out I should have paid more attention to learning metric conversions in math. What did I do wrong? I added 15 ounces of vegetable oil rather than 15 grams. I was actually supposed to add less oil than the recipe with eggs. 15 grams would have been something like ½ an ounce – a very small amount of oil – and instead I ended up opening a whole new bottle of canola oil.

Lesson learned – pay attention to the details.

Mistake example two:

I was excited to try King Arthur’s gluten free brownies. I had received a sample from them to review, but sadly (and this is no reflection on the product), my experiment failed.

I substituted Earth Balance for a stick of butter, and used EnerG egg replacer instead of the two eggs. I melted the Earth Balance, combined everything together and baked the brownies. Instead of a fudgy brownie with a nice crust (like the picture on the box), I had a mess that resembled burnt chocolate sugar. (In case you’re wondering, it was edible but not servable.)

I am still trying to figure out what I did wrong with this one. I had a similar problem when I tried Trader Joe’s brownies a few months ago – but in that case I used applesauce to replace the eggs. After some research I have a suspicion that my error was in melting the earth balance and adding it piping hot to the replacement eggs. If I had used room temperature Earth Balance would this have worked?

Does anyone have a solution for this problem? If not, I’ll keep working on it until I figure it out.