Instructions: A. You thought we had forgotten you and felt compelled to ask twice. Oh no. We have been busy turning over every stone and looking in every cake, pastry, baking, health-food, and dietetic cookbook we could find, because we love people who cook for their friends.

Eggs add flavor and richness to a cake, but more important, they are responsible for much of the structure of the cake. So it is a huge challenge to bake an eggless cake. The BBCs fluffy online Ask the Chef feature would tell you to make him some cookies. But we dug deeper and our thoughts turned to a group that shuns eggs by choice - those devil-may-care vegans (vegetarians who dont eat anything derived from an animal, including eggs, milk, butter or cheese). If anyone knows how to make a cake without eggs, it must be they. and indeed, we turned up several recipes for eggless cakes. We havent tried any of them ourselves, and leave the experimentation up to you. Since youre not necessarily looking to become vegans yourselves, you might replace the soy milks, vegan margarine and other vegan choices with cows milk, butter, and other traditional ingredients.

An important note: The first of these recipes call for egg replacer or egg substitute. The most commonly available egg substitutes are not substitutes at all, but cartons of egg white, mixed with a little vegetable oil, flavoring, color, and other ingredients. That is obviously not a solution for your friend.

There are egg substitutes on the market that do not contain any egg, but in our experience, they are hard to find. Health food stores may be your best bet. But be sure to read the label carefully before you buy an egg substitute for your friends cake

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