Wednesday 15 February 2017

Adventures in Dairy Free baking and other nonsense

My creative weekend ended up more with me being a domestic goddess than a creative genius.  I still found time to have fun with my chalkboard though, we are off to Norfolk later in the month and these are some of the things that remind me of our past trips there, judging by the size of the fish and chips I was rather hungry when I drew this!




I treated myself to a small bunch of spring flowers as I was keen to use my latest charity shop find of this little fat jug. The hyacinths smell amazing although they do tickle my nose a little bit.


 


I ventured into a new avenue with my baking this weekend - dairy free.   My granddaughter has been diagnosed as having an allergy to cow proteins in milk so to support my breastfeeding daughter I picked out a couple of dairy free cake recipes to make to show her a bit of support.

My first was this vintage carrot cake recipe from the "Flour on my face" blog, as the recipe is from the USA it uses cups for measuring.  This involved a bit of guessing on my part such as, how may carrots make 2 and a 1/2 cups the answer was three medium ones, do I have enough of all the ingredients, the answer was no not enough sunflower oil but I topped it up with olive oil and it was OK.  The biggest problem I encountered was that after 30 minutes the middle was still runny! this was due to my baking tin being 8x8 so not the same as the one advised,  A quick Google suggested reduce the heat and cook for a bit longer and eventually it was cooked.  Tastes great but I didn't make any icing to go on the top which I think it needed.  For a non-dairy free cake the usual cream cheese topping would be scrummy,  I failed to take any pics of this but hopefully you all know what a carrot cake looks like.






The second cake I baked needed a little forward planning as it was a tea loaf so I had to soak the fruit over night.  I used this recipe from "Kitchen delights" blog and they have provided some excellent notes. Note to self on this one, make sure you pick up raisins in the supermarket and not currants you ninny!  I must confess that I made a bit of a mistake when baking this, a slightly over hot oven resulted in a bit of a dark top, I dropped the temperature and covered the top with foil and continued to cook it for far too long. The result is a little bit drier than I would have liked but it is still a very nice cake and I will give the recipe another go.






So how has everyone been spending their weekends this February? and can anyone recommend any good dairy free blogs to read?

2 comments:

  1. It's a vegan site rather than just dairy free, but I really like minimalistbaker.com, I always look there first when I want to bake something.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks thrift deluxe I will have a look around

    ReplyDelete