Never make a recipe with egg replacer that says “use your favorite egg replacer” because with a line like that you know that whoever wrote that recipe never tested it with actual egg replacer. It is never that easy.

I found eggs to be the single hardest thing to replace in baking. I have brownie recipes that are delightful until you make them vegan and end up with a pulsating brown mass straight out of a 1960s low budget horror film that has to be chipped out of the tray. With real eggs…lovely. With egg replacer…yuk.

I find it disturbing that the manufacturers of mixes have never actually tested their own product without eggs. Given the resources that they have at their disposal I think that an experiment that cost me only about $12 to run (once with Ener-G and once with flax seeds) and which took only about 15 minutes is a good use of their time and resources. I figure that for $300 or so in labor and materials they too could figure out how to make their product egg-free thereby opening it up to a much wider audience.

I also dislike recipe writers who don’t test thier recipes. I tried a quinoa muffin recipe and made something utterly inedible. And I have eaten some pretty bad failed experiments (like last weeks strangely sticky lemon bars or the crystalline, crunchy key lime pie I tossed tonight). But this was literally gag inducing, which says a lot.

So there has been a delay in my GFCF ice cream sandwich recipe as the egg-free version of the cookies are edible but weird. I am not sure they can be saved. I can say with confidence that they were tested and that they failed the test.

I will tell you if you can replace the eggs. Note that the chocolate cupcake recipe was tested repeatedly without eggs and works beautifully as written.

So if someone says you can use egg replacer and doesn’t tell you any other adaptations that heed to be made. Be afraid, be very afraid.