Dairy-free and/or soy-free cake recipes?

If you search for "vegan soy-free cake recipes" you should find a number of good options. Enjoy Life makes several dairy-free and soy-free ingredients, and for shortening your best bet is Spectrum palm oil. (If you can buy in bulk, Sweetex Z is also dairy-free and soy-free.)

Earth Balance is the preferred butter substitute in the vegan world. And any of the alternative milks will work. To add the fat of whole milk, for one cup, I drop about a tbsp of Earth Balance in a measuring cup and then fill the alternative milk to the correct amount. I do use vanilla soy as my sub, but I have heard good things about the almond milk. Be sure to buy it in the cold cartons. The shelf styles in the boxes are odd tasting.

Earth Balance is very soft and the taste is well gross really. I have some in my fridge and thought I'd use it for my dairy free customers but I won't use it because I can't get past the gross taste. Don't use it in meringue icing, it won't hold up. It's really soft. Use the Whipped Cream Buttercream recipe posted in the Recipe section. It is Dairy Free and has a much better taste. That is what I use. In cake recipes you can substitute shortening for the butter in equal portions without any trouble. I do it and have perfect results every time. I use Crisco because it is gluten free and easy to get where I live.

Good Luck.

It took us months of R&D to get good dairy-free/soy-free recipes down, and we started with recipes available online and several vegan/allergy-friendly cookbooks. In both cases you can usually see ratings and reviews to help determine which recipes to skip and which to try.

To find online retailers your best bet is to start with the manufacturer, they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Make sure you buy the right kind, we use Earth Balance vegan buttery sticks and our dairy-free frosting (which is also egg-free) tested better than our butter-based frosting.

The EB vegan buttery sticks do contain soy, there is a soy-free version but it contains sunflower (which can be cross-reactive with peanuts) so we've never used it.

Jason I have the EB Original and it is gross. No getting around that. It is soy-free. It has a very odd flavor. I wouldn't waste my time with it unless someone requested I use it or they like the flavor. But for those of us used to butter, Earth Balance is just plain gross.

I'm not sure which product you are using, because EB Original is not soy-free.

This is the product we use:
http://www.earthbalancenatural.com/product/vegan-buttery-sticks/

I am used to butter (I don't have a dairy allergy) and the EB sticks taste just fine to me.

I'm not going to publish our proprietary recipes (since they are in fact trade secrets) but I thought sharing the process we used to get there and some key ingredients would help you along.

If you don't find my comments helpful you are under no obligation to read them or reply to them.

For a white/butter cake I use the following, but I sub rice milk for milk and add 1 tsp extra of vanilla extract.

http://www.crisco.com/recipes/details.aspx?RecipeID=1338

For chocolate cake I use this recipe with corn oil.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/wacky-cake-viii/detail.aspx

These are my most requested cakes from family and friends.

For frosting, I opt to use spectrum palm oil in place of butter in the standard American Butter cream. I am very sensitive to aftertastes and Earth Balance has a strange aftertaste to me. If I need a super smooth surface on the cake I use Sharon Zambito's recipe for buttercream subbing the dairy-creamer with rice milk (I use Sweetex).

I agree with Jason. I am a traditional artisan scratch baker and I have had no problem using Earth Balance in the right recipes. Ther is a vegan baker in town and her cupcakes are $7 each. Her vegan cream cheese buttercream is incredible. When I tried to make it the first time, it was awful. Her Earth Balance recipes are also excellent. I think she is a better baker than I am. Her products are the only ones I personally buy to personally. The right knowledge will make these products shine. Poor recipes will taste utterly inedible.

The reason you are not seeing a sharing of recipes is because pulling off incredible baking using alternative ingredients is very labor intensive. Making a so-so product is easy. The web recipes, even the 5 star, are bad.

I probably spend an average of $100 at the health food store to develop a vegan or GF recipe only to find the $5.00 ingredient was the best. My alternative recipes are as good, and in one case (German Chocolate), it is better than my dairy/gluten offering. To mainstream these recipes is quite an accomplishment and because the recipes are so rare, they are not shared. I share all but one of my traditional recipes and do not share my alternative recipes. I think it will be quite a few years before great recipes in this category hit the web in any consistency.

I did buy the book by the Cupcake Wars winner, Doron Peterson. I haven't made any of the recipes yet, but she did win over many traditional bakers. She's been on several times. The recipes look sound and she seems to be very proud of her work. I suggest buying her book. She has an almost perfect rating on Amazon.