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Do you know what I have done? I have done the seemingly impossible, the awesome and unlikely, the god-like and kick ass. I HAVE MADE A REAL SPONGE CAKE!!!

I should back up and explain why this is such a big deal. I love baking. I bake a LOT. I bake so many cakes and cookies and cupcakes that sometimes the kitchen stays sort of crappy and half cleaned for days at a time. Except, being lacto-vegetarian, there's an element of challenge and/or improvisation in most of my baking because I have to make up for the eggs. Honestly, I really enjoy this -- adding a variable element other than my own reliable ability to mess up totally straightforward directions adds adventure to the task. I actually have to discern what role the eggs are supposed to play in the Mr. Wizard episode of the recipe: how much do the eggs in a particular recipe supply the binding, the leavening, the moisture? Obviously, bakers with "alternative diets" have been doing this for years so it's not like I'm pioneering anything here, but it's fun. And for a lot of recipes, this doesn't really mean much. A little extra baking powder, or a little extra soda with a teaspoon of vinegar. Some cornstarch or arrowroot powder. A little dab of yogurt or sour cream or mashed bananas or something. This isn't rocket science. Except when it comes to sponge cake.

See, for those who don't read cookbooks for pleasure, there are generally two types of cakes: butter cakes and sponge cakes. With a butter cake, you take your butter (or margarine or shortening or whatever) and beat it with your sugar, and this incorporates air. Add a little baking powder/soda and your cake has more than enough leavening. With spongecake, however, you incorporate most of your air by folding beaten eggs (usually just whites) into the batter. The leavening comes mostly from the air you already just put in and it stays there from the proteins in the whipped eggs denaturing. This creates a cake of a different texture -- while butter cakes can be fluffy and tender, sponge cakes have a certain firmness, and are prone to being a little dryer. This is just a generally different experience in your mouth (heyoh!), and it lends itself much better to various toppings that need to be refrigerated -- because sponge cakes hold up fine in the fridge, whereas butter cakes get dense and icky. Also, the dryer texture of sponge cakes lends them to soaking syrups, which would turn most butter cakes to mush. Not to mention that sponge cake stays flexible, so you can manipulate it and wrap it up into stuff like jelly rolls.

Ah but this was an impossible dream for me. You can take care of the leavening and binding and moisture of eggs easily enough, but you can't beat egg-white levels of air into damn near anything you'd want to fold into a cake -- let alone something that mimics the chemical reaction of the proteins so it will retain all that air while the cake bakes. So in my no-egg adventures, I've picked up a lot of books on vegan baking. Even though I'm not vegan myself, a lot of these recipes are totally badass -- not to mention most of them remove the dairy from the cake by using margarine, and I can always opt for butter if I'm in the mood, while adhering to the recipe's take on eliminating the eggs. I've gone this route because honestly there just aren't a lot of books on baking for the lacto-vegetarian diet -- most veggies either do eat eggs or don't eat dairy. There are a handful of books geared towards moms who want to make cookies for their egg-allergic kids, but they don't handle this level of dessertitude. So either way, nobody was dealing with my eggless sponge cake problem.

But then I had a flash. Of GENIUS. Here's a recreation of my train of thought: "Finding resources on  Lacto-veg baking is hard! The diet is so uncommon. But wait...my own lacto-veg diet comes from my religious lifestyle. In fact, lacto-veg is the form of vegetarianism adhered to by almost all the Dharmic religions! I SHOULD BE LOOKING FOR INDIAN COOKBOOKS!!!"

So I took a look and sure enough, loads of Indian books on eggless baking. I ordered approximately one million of them. Now that I type all this out, I realize that what I had was the complete opposite of a flash of genius. I've been adhering to this diet and religious lifestyle and eating cake for my entire life and I just figured this out.

So anyway, this is straight up amazing. The books are full of recipes that actually do what the vegan recipes can't -- they achieve the ends of the traditional recipe with the integrated use of dairy. For instance, the magic ingredient in the eggless sponge cake? Sweetened condensed milk. Apparently it holds down the fort with regards to the proteins that only eggs could previously handle while sharing leavening duty with a little baking powder. And it blows my mind. I've never baked anything that's achieved this distinct, coveted texture before, and it just seems impossible considering how much I bake. Also, the cookbooks also feature recipes for all the other delicious desserts that I've wanted to make without eggs but also without tofu, from cheesecakes to gateaus, from mousses to souffles.

So anyway, I'd post the recipe for my Success Cake but I don't know if I have any readers who'd really care. Which isn't to sound snippy but come on, if you don't have to deal with this headache of all this,  you'd probably just want to crack open a few huevos and be done with it! I think I might have a couple of fellow Sant Mat kids who stop by here though, so if you want the recipe just ask. In the meantime I can ecstatically  reccommend two different books, both susinctly titled Eggless Desserts -- one by Tarla Dalal, and one by Nita Mehta. Thanks, ladies.