I generally avoid Crisco except for once-a-year things like the crusts for holiday pies, because it has trans fats. Less than half a gram per serving, so they can claim 0, but it has trans fats and I prefer to be cautious.
The best egg replacer depends on what the eggs are doing in the recipe. For quick breads like cornbread or banana bread or biscuits, that only call for one egg, there are lots of good recipes that just increase baking powder, or increase or add fruit if it's there already, or soft tofu if it isn't. This works well for high-fat cookies like peanut-butter ones. I've sometimes just used a tablespoon of oil and a tablespoon or two of water or non-dairy milk as an egg substitute, but the eggs can't be doing any heavy lifting as structural agents if that is to work.
For recipes that use more eggs, it's correspondingly harder. Ener-G replacer will work fine right up until it doesn't, in which case suddenly your cookies are as hard as a rock. Chickpea water (either drained from a can, or the water left from cooking dry chickpeas at home) will whip up like egg whites and can actually be used to make macaroons or folded into a recipe that calls for that. You have to figure out something to substitute for the yolks, though, in that latter case.
In the absence of a specific request from the vegan guest, it is indeed easier to just make things that don't need eggs in the first place. Any recipe that calls for brushing tops or top crusts with egg can be ignored; you don't need to do that, and often that's the only egg there is.
After a somewhat harrowing period of experimenting with veganizing favorite recipes, I began to rely more and more heavily on vegan cooking blogs where somebody else had the failures and finally came up with a recipe that worked. You need to be wary of people who are obsessed with low-fat baking or who have much of any other dietary obsession other than being vegan (I don't mean food intolerances or allergies, though the more restrictions are put on the baking, the more likely it is to go wrong somewhere), but there are a lot of good and well-tested recipes on the internets.
no subject
The best egg replacer depends on what the eggs are doing in the recipe. For quick breads like cornbread or banana bread or biscuits, that only call for one egg, there are lots of good recipes that just increase baking powder, or increase or add fruit if it's there already, or soft tofu if it isn't. This works well for high-fat cookies like peanut-butter ones. I've sometimes just used a tablespoon of oil and a tablespoon or two of water or non-dairy milk as an egg substitute, but the eggs can't be doing any heavy lifting as structural agents if that is to work.
For recipes that use more eggs, it's correspondingly harder. Ener-G replacer will work fine right up until it doesn't, in which case suddenly your cookies are as hard as a rock. Chickpea water (either drained from a can, or the water left from cooking dry chickpeas at home) will whip up like egg whites and can actually be used to make macaroons or folded into a recipe that calls for that. You have to figure out something to substitute for the yolks, though, in that latter case.
In the absence of a specific request from the vegan guest, it is indeed easier to just make things that don't need eggs in the first place. Any recipe that calls for brushing tops or top crusts with egg can be ignored; you don't need to do that, and often that's the only egg there is.
After a somewhat harrowing period of experimenting with veganizing favorite recipes, I began to rely more and more heavily on vegan cooking blogs where somebody else had the failures and finally came up with a recipe that worked. You need to be wary of people who are obsessed with low-fat baking or who have much of any other dietary obsession other than being vegan (I don't mean food intolerances or allergies, though the more restrictions are put on the baking, the more likely it is to go wrong somewhere), but there are a lot of good and well-tested recipes on the internets.
P.