This dairy-free icing is perfect for kid’s tastebuds or adults who have a sweet tooth. It’s the chocolate icing I made for my Dairy-free Easy Quick Light Chocolate Cakes here. You can increase the amount of cocoa powder, turning it less sweet and more of a darker-tasting chocolate.
One of the difference when using dairy-free margarine to butter is that the margarine is easily over beaten and for this reason I make the icing by hand. If using an electric hand whisk use the slow speed on it and only until the point the icing amalgamates. Butter with fat that naturally stays solid at room temperature has a wider window of tolerance, which the dairy-free (and soya-free) margarine doesn’t. Dairy-free margarine fat content sits around the 60% mark, and butter is normally around 80% fat. Once you’ve over-beaten dairy-free margarine it will release its water content and lose the ability to hold shape.
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This icing is child’s play – still in her pyjamas the 5 year old is enthusiastically giving me a hand.
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[click to continue…]
These two types of doughs were my first attempt at making egg and dairy free doughnuts for allergy kid yesterday. The base for these were taken from a recipe using baking powder kindly sent by Andrew using mash potato. Doughnut recipes whether they’re a yeast version or use baking powder contain eggs normally, eggs in dough softens the dough. Andrew’s idea behind using mash potato was to act as softener as I was trying to make dough without eggs, it’s not only a good idea for that but potato is also an excellent source of fast food for the yeast, and since using quite a bit of sugar and some fat in the dough both of which would not help the yeast, to my mind I wanted to have something in there to aid it.
Andrew tells me that US recipes for doughnuts quite often use baking powder as the raising agent, where here we see yeast doughnut recipes commonly. I can buy doughnuts sometimes in some supermarkets like Tesco or the Co-op which are both dairy and egg free but I can’t always guarantee the recipe is egg free as in Tesco they also make them using egg.
Doughnuts eaten in the UK are soft yeast doughs that should also feel relatively light, and the best doughnuts for my kids are the ones filled with jam, no jam no doughnuts as far as they’re concerned, which meant this defined the shape of doughnuts I made.
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Top photo left: ‘flying sponge’ for yeast dough Top photo right: baking powder dough
Using mash potato in the recipe I decided to make the two versions of doughnuts. The straightforward baking powder recipe, a simple matter of adding everything to the mash and mixing well then rest the dough in the fridge to make it easier to handle the dough, and the yeast version. [click to continue…]
