Incorporating vegan and gluten-free ingredients into my baking has been a test of my patience.

Alternative products must be handled in a completely different manner than other baking ingredients. When I first started writing my recipes, it often felt like I was baking backwards: I had to unravel what I knew about traditional baking and reform it into a new process. Throughout my trials and errors, I developed a lot of helpful and simple tricks that I recommend for making vegan and gluten-free cakes.

Although baking with alternative ingredients might be intimidating, in some ways it’s more straightforward then traditional baking. For starters, forget the worry of creaming butter and sugar properly or the fear of overmixing a batter. In my recipes the ingredients are organized into dry and wet ingredients. The wet ingredients are generally added to the dry ingredients, mixed for about 5 minutes, and they’re done. Without the use of eggs, butter, or gluten you don’t have to take the tedious precaution of combining ingredients in a certain order or avoiding overmixing.

However, baking in general, no matter what materials you might be using, is a science, using a balanced percentage of certain ingredients to achieve a specific product. If the balance is off, the entire formula will be affected. I offer both volume and weight measurements because I recommend weighing ingredients using an electric scale rather than measuring by volume. It’s much more accurate and will help you achieve a similar product each time. Specifically, when substituting ingredients that are of different densities, such as different gluten-free flours or unrefined sugars, I find it valuable to weigh them out, so that no matter what ingredient is being weighed, the formula will stay precisely balanced each time. Although I’m from the U.S., I almost always use the metric system (grams, as opposed to ounces) while I’m baking. It’s much easier, and also easier to calculate if you need to multiply a recipe to produce larger batches.

Once the cake batter is mixed, there are a few more tips I’ve discovered that make an immense difference in the quality of the cakes. Vegan and gluten-free cakes tend to be more delicate in texture than regular cakes. Instead of cutting them into layers after they’re baked, I separate the cake batter into multiple pans—two to four—to make the layers, filling each 2-inch-deep pan about one-quarter to half full. Then I generally only need to trim the tops to level the cakes and they’re ready to be layered with icing.

If you have access to a convection oven, I would recommend using it over a conventional oven. This is fundamental advice for all types of baking, but I’ve found it to be particularly helpful when baking with vegan and gluten-free ingredients. A convection oven circulates the air in the oven with a fan, which bakes desserts more evenly. If you are using a conventional oven, use an oven thermometer to help monitor the temperature and lower it by about 10 degrees, rotating your baked goods about every 10 minutes. Baking cakes as close to the center of the oven as possible also helps, this being the most balanced temperature point in a conventional oven. Regardless of what type of oven you bake with, keep the door shut for at least the first 10 minutes of baking. Up to that point, the structure of the batter is very unstable, and if the door is opened, the cakes can deflate.

Now that you understand how to use alternative ingredients as well as the proper tools and equipment, and with an open mind and a willingness to try new things, you’ll be able to create vegan and gluten-free desserts and sugar decorations that will not only please the eye but the palate and body too. Happy vegan and gluten-free baking!