dairy free lemon drizzle traybake

Since discovering one of my nephews is dairy intolerant I have been making an effort to experiment with dairy free baking. Lemon drizzle cake is a family favourite so it was the first recipe I wanted to play with.

For this cake I used Mary Berry's lemon drizzle traybake recipe, substituting the softened butter for Vitalite dairy free margarine and the milk for soya milk.

The only noticeable difference through using a dairy free margarine was the texture. The batter was looser and it produced a very soft, moist cake with a smooth surface rather than the hard sugary top you usually get with a lemon drizzle. Flavour wise it was excellent and received thumbs up from everyone. I don't think anybody would have noticed it was dairy free had I not pointed it out.

If anyone else is new to dairy free baking (or gluten free baking) I highly recommend visiting iced gem bakes. I found her breakdown of dairy free margarines really useful.

cake and crockery clutter

Just a quick post of a vanilla chai latte cake I baked for a friend this week. I've baked it before (see post here) but altered the quantities to make a 6 inch sandwich cake. It was too tiny and cute not to photograph.

It was one of those quickly-plonk-the-cake-down-and-photograph-before-rushing-out situations which actually worked out really well. I thought it looked pretty surrounded by all my crockery clutter on the dresser.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of that shade of green.

Red and turquoise pyrex

Coloured pyrex dishes are like buses: nothing for ages then suddenly two appear at the same time! A couple of weeks ago Mum came back from her sister's with a little red pyrex dish. My aunty was having a clear out and had found Granny's bread and butter pudding dish and decided to pass it on to me. It used to get taken out for Sunday dinner every week when Mum was little and she always had soft spot for it.

Days later, I was in town waiting for Mum to come out from the dentist and what did I spy in the charity shop? A matching turquoise pyrex dish for 50p. Isn't it strange when things like that happen.

Both dishes are heavily marked and worn, but it just adds to their character and charm. They have been well used but still have plenty of life in them to make a few more puddings.

Mmmm, lots of pyrex.

Dad's birthday carrot cake

For Dad's birthday this year I decided to make a carrot cake. He has been growing vegetables this year so I thought it would be a great idea to use some of his homegrown carrots.

I used my usual carrot cake recipe as I like its chunkiness. It turned out slightly wetter than usual, and it was definitely fully cooked, so I'm putting it down to the amount of orange juice I added (it was a pretty big orange.)

I decided to keep this cake dairy free by using an orange glaze (just icing sugar with fresh orange juice) rather than cream cheese icing as we're fairly sure now that my eldest nephew is lactose/dairy intolerant. I wanted to bake a cake which everybody could enjoy.

Although I probably still prefer a cream cheese icing, the orange glaze complimented the cake really well. I'm on the look out for more dairy free bakes so I'd be delighted if anybody has any good ones to share.

Now for some funny photos! Dad has quite a few hilariously weird carrots. I used only the best mutants for his birthday cake :)

I drew eyes on the carrot on the right as his "growths" looked like an awesome moustache. You have no idea how much enjoyment I got from this.

Easily amused :)

apple, blackberry and almond crumble

Last week mum and I had a crumble craving. Embarrassingly, I could probably count the number of times I've made a crumble on one hand. They're so quick and easy to make, not to mention incredibly tasty and comforting, that I have no idea why I don't make them more often.

Probably because I would become morbidly obese if I allowed myself to make pudding every night.

But at least with crumble you get to fool yourself that it's nearly healthy. Look, it has *two* types of fruit!

Sweet, buttery crumble with tart blackberries and apples. What's not to like? I toyed with the idea of using cinnamon but went with almond instead. I liked the sweetness and extra texture it added to the crumble topping. 

Apologies for the shoddy night time photographs, the grainy quality is pretty horrific. No amount of brightness or contrast could help, but the crumble was too tasty not to share.

Apple, blackberry and almond crumble

I didn't particularly follow a recipe, but this is roughly what I did:

filling:

1 small packet of blackberries

5 or 6 small eating apples - peeled, cored and cut into chunks

demerara sugar for sprinkling over the fruit

crumble:

100g plain flour

100g butter, cubed plus extra for greasing the dish

100g demerara sugar

50g rolled oats

50g ground almonds

handful of flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 180C/160 fan/Gas 4 and butter a small ovenproof dish. Cut up enough fruit to sufficiently fill your dish. Once you're happy with the amount, sprinkle demerara sugar on top. The amount you use will depend on personal taste or the type of fruit used. At this point you could choose to soften the apples by lightly simmering/stewing them in a pan with a small amount of water, but we were lazy and didn't so our apples were still a little bit crunchy (which I quite liked.)

To make the crumble topping, rub together the butter and flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, oats and ground almonds. Sprinkle your crumble mixture on top of the fruit in the dish and scatter a handful of flaked almonds on top. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for roughly 40 minutes until the crumble topping has browned. Serve warm with custard, cream or ice-cream. Personally, I'm a fan of Bird's custard :)

my birthday

I turned a quarter of a century old last Thursday. I can no longer say I'm in my early twenties, which is quite sad, however I will never be too old to have a chocolate birthday cake adorned with chocolate stars and jazzy candles from my mum.

In an attempt to make me more grown up and sophiscated (ha!) I received a new Orla Kiely travel bag and purse for my birthday as I've been using the same ones since I was 17 and needless to say both were getting grotty and knackered. I love that they match my yellow Zatchel handbag which I bought at the beginning of the summer (and is borderline surgically attached to me.) My new purse only just fits in it though so I'm hoping the leather will stretch over time to accommodate the purse.

Other lovely gifts included necklaces, a gorgeous turquoise scarf, Orla Kiely tupperware (I sense there may have been a theme somewhere...!) and these hilariously cute bunny slippers.

Cake wise I did pretty well this year. Not only did I have mum's chocolate cake, but also a massive slice of Victoria sponge at a cafe for lunch and a banana pineapple cake from my sister in law. I loved that she left the pineapple pieces quite chunky, making the cake really juicy and full of texture. Admittedly my stomach felt a little worse for wear by the end of the evening, but what's a birthday without a few cake sweats?

It has also been one year since I received my yellow kitchenaid. The novelty hasn't worn off as I still get a little thrill every time I use it. Is it sad to celebrate an anniversary with your kitchenaid? I decided to take another self portrait in her shiny mixing bowl. Ooh yeah stretchy forehead!

In other news I went to my first ever yoga class last week. The following day my body felt as if it had suffered some sort of minor trauma! I'll persevere with it though as it should eventually help my rubbish, ageing(!) muscles and joints.

Apologies as well if the layout of my blog looks weird or keeps changing. I fancied a revamp so I've been fiddling with bits and pieces. For some reason when my webpage initially loads my title and tabs are in the wrong font and I have to reload it to get the nicer handwriting font. No idea why it does that, but it's annoying.