Thursday 2 February 2012

A recipe for you, from me!

Cakes! Gotta love 'em! My baby certainly does! Living dairy free, doesn't mean living cake less! You can buy a limited selection, mainly from the Free From section in the supermarkets or you can make your own.

There are plenty of dairy free recipes out there,  but many of them are quite complex as they try to avoid the magic ingredient - milk!! I prefer to keep things simple - taking recipes I've used before and just substituting with dairy free alternatives. In most instances, this seems to work quite well.

For the purpose of this blog, I've chosen a recipe from an old and well-used book by Marguerite Patten. It's a Victoria Sponge recipe, which can be used to create a traditional sandwich cake or individual cup cakes. Some recipes for Victoria Sponge require milk, but this one doesn't. All I've done is  take a leaf out of my mother's book (she never used butter in her baking, when I was growing up, it was always margarine) by substituting Pure Sunflower Margarine for the butter and I think it works really well. 

Victoria Sponge

Ingredients
225g/8oz   self-raising flour
225g/8oz   dairy free margarine
225g/8oz   castor sugar
4    medium-sized eggs
(if the eggs are very small, add a dessert spoon of water)

Method
1.  Sieve the flour into a bowl.
2.  Cream the sugar and margarine together until light and fluffy.
3.  Beat the eggs.
4.  Add a little of the beaten egg to the creamed mixture, stirring carefully.
5.  Now a little of the flour, again stirring gently.
6.  Continue adding a little of each, until thoroughly mixed.
7.  Grease and flour two tins (20 cm/8 in) and divide the mixture between them.
8.  Bake for 20 minutes,  at 350-375 degrees F,  180-190 degrees C, Gas Mark 4-5.
9.  Test in the normal way, by pressing the cake with a finger., then turn out onto a wire rack.
10. When completely cooled, sandwich together with jam and dust the top with icing sugar.

If making cup cakes, you might find that the mixture cooks a bit more quickly. I make a quick glace or 'butter' icing (made with dairy-free margarine) and get my little one to add some decorations of her own!

Enjoy! 

No comments:

Post a Comment