Ananya, Priya has identified the core issue exactly, and it is the single most important thing to internalise here.
A genoise is a foam cake — its entire structure is aerated egg, and the flour is almost incidental to the lift. When you remove the egg you have not removed an ingredient, you have removed the structural system. Anything you drop into that gap is compensating for the wrong thing, which is why the results are dense or gummy and why the aftertaste appears — that flavour is usually the chemical leavening working harder than it should to do a job it was never designed to do alone.
The approach that works is to stop substituting and start with a formulation engineered around a different structure entirely: emulsion and chemical leavening, with the fat, liquid and acid balanced deliberately for a fine, moist crumb rather than a foam. Get the acid and leavening in proportion and the aftertaste disappears, because nothing is being overdosed.
This is a large part of why we teach eggless as a full parallel curriculum rather than as a substitutions module. In the Indian market it is not a niche accommodation — for many bakers it is the majority of the order book, and it deserves to be taught to the same standard as the classical French work rather than as a workaround.
