19 Eggless Desserts to Help You Cope With Eggflation

Eggs are expensive at the moment. Hopefully this won’t always be the case, as they’re a mainstay in most of my cooking, but the price tag has me saving them for moments when they’re absolutely necessary, which means no more cakes and puddings. Luckily, there are many desserts that don’t call for any eggs. Never did. Better still, we live in a time when the vegan version of many cakes and other normally egg-bound sweets are actually fantastic. Here are 19 desserts that don’t need your eggs, not even one.

Chewy, chocolatey, and made with few ingredients, the brigadeiro is a gift from Brazil. Grab a can of sweetened condensed milk, cocoa powder, and a little butter. Stir them together in a pot for 10-15 minutes, and you’re nearly done. Roll them into bite-sized balls and press ‘em into sprinkles, chopped nuts, or coconut. A batch of these makes a lovely Valentine’s day gift for your beloved, or a nice anytime treat for yourself.

I’ll never turn away a strawberry shortcake. (If “I” do, that’s a clone, save me.) Any single component can stand we on its own, but together, they transform into magnificence. Make a soft, oversized (naturally eggless) buttermilk biscuit for the cake. Split it, and pile on the strawberries and whipped cream.

Mochi is made with sweet glutinous rice flour to create a chewy, slightly sticky delight that can be used in a number of ways. You may have seen it in the freezer section of your grocery store surrounding little balls of ice cream, but the center can bet stuffed with a wide variety of fillings. One of my favorites is coconut peanut mochi. Make the chewy mochi dough, fill the center with a sugary, peanut powder, and press the edges shut to form a tiny ball. Roll the entire morsel in shredded coconut and enjoy.

For a dessert that’s not too sweet, plenty creamy, and simple yet impressive, look no further than the Italian panna cotta. There are hundreds of variations on this simple dessert of gelatin-set sweetened cream, and that’s because the base flavors are so flexible, and it’s easy to make. With little more than five base ingredients, panna cotta comes together in about 10 minutes. Allow it to set in the fridge for a few hours and enjoy it as-is, or top it with fresh fruit, caramel sauce, coconut shavings, or fruit compote. For a creative spin on the classic, try this cookie dough panna cotta.

Fruit pies are simple delights that require no eggs at all. (Besides a purely aesthetic, completely optional egg wash on top that you can easily forgo, or use mayo instead.) Press a flaky butter or shortening crust into a pie plate and load it up with a seasonal cooked fruit filling (no one likes watery pie). The only thing you’ll need is a fork, and a heavy hand for the whipped cream.

The Breton cake is the party-sized version of the single-serving, crispy, caramelized kouign amann pastry. It’s composed tender layers of dough, butter, and sugar, and baked in a 9-inch circular cake pan. While baking, its outside sugar crust caramelizes against the metal pan, and creates a palmier-style crunch, while inside, the butter melts into the dough layers. When served fresh, each bite is fluffy, rich, tender, and encased in the most delicately crisp caramel crust. Like many pastries, the recipe will suggest browning the top with a light coat of egg wash, but it’s not necessary if you’re backing off of eggs (and again, mayo works pretty well). I promise you, a final flourish of sugar will take care of the aesthetic.

The chocolate truffle is a highly concentrated dose of fudgy chocolate. Whisk a roughly 2:1 ratio of dark chocolate pieces with hot heavy cream to create a thick chocolate ganache. That alone will send you into a chocolate delirium, but let it cool, and you can roll up spoonfuls of the stuff into balls of silky chocolate contentment. At this point, you can cram them into your mouth, or roll them in chopped nuts, coconut, cocoa powder, or powdered sugar to keep them from sticking together and add a bit of extra flavor.

I grew up eating tofu, and I love it sweet, savory, silken, or firm. Anyone who hasn’t jumped aboard the tofu train should try a chocolate tofu pudding. Making tofu pudding only requires four or five ingredients, and two of them are chocolate. The whole dessert comes together in a blender to make a deeply chocolatey, cool, and silky smooth pudding worthy of date night. Serve in fancy pudding glasses and top with a swirl of whipped cream, or chocolate shavings.

Pastries, puddings, and pies are fabulous, but sometimes there’s no substitute for cake. To make a cake that doesn’t require the lifting or binding power of eggs, try this Nutella-Banana lava cake. The flavor combination of chocolate, hazelnut, and banana is a crowd-pleaser, but the banana acts as a stealth binding agent, eliminating the need for eggs. Drop in a spoonful of Nutella in the center and you’ve got a gooey “lava” that doesn’t require the specific timing of other lava cake recipes.

One of the primary reasons you bake a dessert is to cook raw ingredients. When no eggs are involved, baking becomes a lot easier to avoid. Fudgy, dense, eggless desserts are usually a good place to start. Try a no-bake cheesecake that sets up in the fridge, or no-bake chunky peanut butter bars.

Some occasions call for a dessert that’s simple and dainty. Kaju katli, also called kaju barfi, is just the thing. Made from a cooked sugar syrup, floral aromatics, and ground cashews, this Indian dessert is satisfying and packed with flavor. You can decorate the top with a coating of edible silver leaf, or keep it simple with a sprinkle of crushed nuts.

Rather than cracking into your egg supply to make an enriched dough, you can use a bag of store-bought, refrigerated pizza dough to make a cinnamon roll that’s way better than anything that comes out of a can. (Use this recipe to roll up a batch of your own.) Keep an eye on them as they finish baking (take them out when they just spring back), and you’ll be rewarded with tender rolls packed with buttery, cinnamon flavor.

Making your own frozen desserts can be a lot of fun, especially if you have some children who need something to do. Making ice cream requires egg yolks or whole eggs, so make a sorbet, frozen yogurt, or granita instead. Sorbets and granitas are closely related, so it’s more a question of what texture you’re seeking. Both usually involve blending fruit with a sugar syrup. Granita is frozen and grated with a fork intermittently while freezing to make a shaved ice, while sorbet is aerated with a blender or ice cream maker for a softer, smoother texture. Frozen yogurt is just as simple, but churned with a dairy base, and the consistency of the yogurt smooths things out without the need for egg yolks.

Perfect in its simplicity, the shortbread cookie is made with three pantry staples: butter, sugar, and flour. The lack of a strong binder, like eggs, allows this biscuit to crumble and melt in your mouth. Mix up the dough with softened butter and shape into balls, squares, or press it into a tart shell.

Did someone say shortbread tart shell? I know the perfect thing to fill it with: a soft, slightly chewy caramel. Top it off with a rich layer of dark chocolate, and you’ve got a millionaire shortbread tart. Millionaire shortbread is normally cut into bars, but there’s no law against slicing it into pie-like wedges.

It may be 25°F outside, but you can bite into a summertime treat nonetheless. This three ingredient key lime pie uses sweetened condensed milk as the clutch base ingredient to provide sweetness and body. For a vegan version with sweetened condensed coconut milk, try this recipe. Other recipes for chill-and-serve key lime pies use cream cheese or whipped cream to create a fluffier base. Before settling on a recipe, decide if you want something dense and silky or light and fluffy, then choose your base accordingly. Whichever you choose, make sure to let it set in the fridge before slicing.

There’s fancy food, and then there’s comfort food. Fried dough, in all of its global iterations, is the most comforting. Take the pressure off of yourself and pick up a bag of premade pizza dough from the fridge or freezer section, and turn it into your favorite deep-fried county fair treat. Fry the pieces and toss them in powdered sugar for a simple batch of zeppoles, or try your hand at fried Oreos. Wrap the dough around a cookie, secure the seam well, and fry.

Tres leches is a single layer cake with an open crumb, perfect for soaking up a sweet mixture of three different milks. Evaporated milk, whole milk, and sweetened condensed milk are blended together and poured over a layer of cake. The open crumb soaks up the liquids over the course of several hours, and the whole thing is finished with a whipped topping. The cake layer is usually the component that requires eggs, but luckily there are vegan recipes for that. If you’d like to stick with the original dairy-based soak, mix genres and bake up a vegan cake, then soak with the three classic milks.

Most confections rely on the structure of melted sugar, or melted chocolate, and don’t even bother with eggs. Try your hand at making honeycomb on the stovetop, or melt some chocolate and gather your inclusions to make a gorgeous chocolate bark. Stir peanuts into hot, buttery caramel and cool it in a thin sheet for a delicious peanut brittle. Snap these confections into large or small fragments, and store them in airtight containers to keep out the humidity.