We propose a new way of implementing several elementary quantum gates for qubits in the coherent state basis. The operations are probabilistic and employ single photon subtractions as the driving force. Our schemes for single-qubit phase gate and two-qubit controlled phase gate are capable of achieving arbitrarily large phase shifts with currently available resources, which makes them suitable for the near-future tests of quantum information processing with superposed coherent states. ; Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted version