After a simple afternoon tea slice straight from the pantry? Here’s one I cooked up this week that was free of our allergens and delicious too.
(See below Libby’s recipe for a Coeliac Friendly version from Jess)
It made enough for a piece each for two afternoons with one or two left over (hmm, not sure where they went…?!) but it is easily doubled so that it lasts longer (or serves more people).
125g Nuttelex
1/2 cup sugar (I used raw sugar and just didn’t fuss that it wasn’t all dissolved)
1/2 cup oats
1/4 cup cocoa
1 cup SR flour
1. Mix cocoa and oats together in a bowl (whilst preheating the oven to 180C)
2. Melt the Nuttelex and sugar together in a saucepan until sugar dissolved (or almost!)
3. Remove from heat and pour it over the cocoa and oats and mix them together.
4. Mix in self raising flour.
5. Press into a 20cm x 15cm baking dish (I used a small pyrex dish lined with baking paper)
6. Bake for 15min at 180 degrees Celsius. Cool in the dish.
Yum! For regular people, just change the Nuttelex to regular margarine or butter.
Verdict
5 thumbs up! Crumbs devoured.
Yum. Love baked treats.
For a coeliac friendly option: replace the flour with a standard gluten free flour mix plus 1 tsp GF baking powder. Replace the oats with crushed GF weet-bix, shredded coconut, or rolled quinoa.
Retro Mummy inspired me to go the rustic look with the baking paper and I love it!
I enjoy reading Retro Mummy’s blog and we have been loving her recent cake recipes. I adapt them to be dairy and egg (and nut when required) free and usually they turn out really well. The best so far has been the Lemon Drizzle Cake. You can see Corrie’s recipe here. I made my cake in my KitchenAid and loved using fresh lemons from our tree, saving them from ending up as balls for my kids to play with in the garden! I have a feeling that this cake would even cope with being gluten free as well – the flavours are so good.
Ingredients
1 cup caster sugar
grated lemon rind from 2 lemons
125g Nuttelex
1tsp vanilla essence/extract
2 eggs equivalent of No Egg, made up with water and mixed well.
3/4-1 cup soy milk (or whatever milk you can have – coconut milk might work really well) I had a juicy lemon so didn’t need as much milk.
juice of 1 lemon
½ cup or 55g desiccated coconut (I used shredded and it was good!)
1½ cups/250g SR flour
Drizzle icing
juice of 3 lemons (2 would be enough if they were as big/juicy as the ones off my tree)
1½ cups icing sugar
Method
Cream the butter, lemon rind and sugar until thick and creamy.
Add in vanilla and combine.
Add in No Egg mixture, milk and juice of 1 lemon and mix until creamy.
Add in flour and coconut and mix until well combined and creamy and fluffy. I’m not sure why mine went super fluffy but I did leave it for a little bit to attend to children so I think the No Egg really got working like eggs. Worth being distracted for!
Pour into a lined cake tin and bake for about 40 minutes in a 170C/340F oven.
While cake is cooking combine the icing sugar and juice of two lemons in a bowl. Leaving it for a while ensures any icing sugar lumps are dealt with by the juice.
When cake is cooked, remove from tin and leave to cool
Drizzle icing over the cake. I drizzled the icing over while the cake was still warm, like Corrie suggested. I think it absorbs it better too.
Enjoy while still warm – mmm mmm!
Results
5 thumbs up and lots of ‘more’ signing from Miss Emmalyn!
It was a sad day when we had to stop eating choc-hazelnut spread in our house. We actually do keep a little in the top shelf of the pantry for when we “can’t bear it any longer” (Cohen isn’t anaphylactic to hazelnuts and we eat it carefully). There are a couple of options out there for our kids these days and it’s great that the big supermarkets now stock them rather than having to order online. I bought Oxfam’s Fair Dark Chocolate Spread last week having discovered it in my local supermarket and treated the kids to it on their sandwiches for lunch yesterday. I had it on my sandwich mixed with Free Nut Butter and that was delicious. The kids weren’t as keen on it though as it is not as sweet as your typical kid-friendly chocolate spread but I felt it hit the spot. It’s also great to be supporting free trade companies where possible. For those who can’t have soy, it does contain soy lecithin as the emulsifier.
We fielded that question for at least 10 days – the kids were super excited about our weekend away in the country, and so was I. There was some trepidation on my behalf though – having kids with allergies makes travelling quite a bit harder and requires some forward planning – but I think my preparation made our weekend a great (and allergy safe) one.
Before you go:
– think about where you are going and staying –
What type of accommodation are you booking? I think self-contained is a great idea for families with food allergies. It doesn’t give the cook as much of a holiday but it certainly reduces the risk.
Is there a hospital in the vicinity? This is something to think about if you are dealing with anaphylaxis. We had a district hospital nearby and I knew we were only a short air-lift to Perth.
What activities will you do that could be risky? We were staying at a farm where we would be feeding animals – I made sure I remembered to ask the farmer when we arrived if there were nut products in the feed – there was, so we were able to help our kids adjust to the fact that they coudn’t feed certain animals and the farmer was fabulous too – he let our kids feed the other animals so they didn’t miss out.
Feeding Katie the Kangaroo
– plan your meals –
Dinner – I planned our menu for the weekend and froze two dinners/partial dinners from our meals in the week so that I didn’t have to cook much while away. We had soup and rolls the first night – all I had to do was reheat the soup and put the rolls in the oven for 5mins. The second night I used the leftover taco mince I had frozen in a pasta bake – so I cooked pasta and added some grated carrot, cooked broccoli (just throw it in the pot of boiling pasta 5min before it is finished) and then I took Jemima’s portion out before sprinkling cheese on top and baking in the oven.
Ready to bake my Vegan Chocolate Fudge Cake – thanks to RetroMummy
Snacks – I brought fruit and dip and crackers (as well as baby snacks)Â but I also baked a cake for us to have as a treat (see here for the recipe). Very exciting for the kids!
Lunch – we planned to have bakery lunches as we knew there was a bakery in the town. Those who could had pies and Jemima had hot chips as the bakery wasn’t as well stocked as we had hoped. Very thankful for the humble hot chip! The one thing that could have gone wrong was that the pie Cohen chose didn’t end up being the one he got (the lady picked up the wrong one) but we didn’t notice until he was a few bites in. That made us very thankful that there hadn’t been a satay pie or something and that we will need to be more careful next time!
Breakfast – we had special “holiday” cereals that we don’t normally allow at home. 2 days of Coco Pops and Nutrigrain was super exciting for the kids and easy for me. Emmalyn was very happy with her Weetbix still especially with the view of the alpacas out the breakfast window.
Saying hello to the duck who was after our breakfast!
– Make a list
My Mum always wrote packing lists so that’s what I do too. I write it a couple of nights before so that it’s in the back of my head and I am less likely to forget something come packing night.
Don’t forget your medications. As well as our regular emergency bag (epipens, asthma prevention meds and ventolin), I make up a little first aid kit including Panadol, Nurofen, Redipred (that’s a prescription one so only if you need it), our extra epipen, bandaids and Paraderm Plus (an antiseptic, anaesthetic and anti-itch cream – covers lots of bases).
Out collecting rocks and feathers
While you are there:
– Activities
Fresh sour dough with lemon infused olive oil
With little kids, not doing much driving is the best choice for us so we enjoyed being a walk into town (that option had made the accommodation very appealing) and spent time exploring the farm, feeding the animals, playing in their playground and made one drive out to an olive oil company for a parents’ choice activity – yum!
We continued with our regular rest routine as Emmalyn needed to sleep anyway and the kids (and us!)love their downtime.
We enjoyed not having anything else to do and having my husband around without work needing to be done was great.
We brought a couple of toys each as we planned to be outside most of the time. The best one for the older two was Jemima’s Lego briefcase with a couple of extras. How great is Lego?!
We had such a wonderful weekend away – hoping we can do it again soon!
I love gingerbread and when put in house form with royal icing, it’s even better. Since making one a year at church Christmas events a number of years ago, I’ve tried to make one each year for our family. This year I happened to be in Ikea and checked their ingredients on their gingerbread house kits – no egg and no dairy! So I grabbed it – not having to make a house myself this year was very enticing!
[Please note that the tags for this post are to do with the royal icing not the house.]
Ingredients list (apologies for the depth of field blur!)
The next issue was the royal icing – I love its lemon tang but it’s traditionally made with egg whites so I needed a replacement. I could have used No Egg but I wasn’t sure how it would go so I had a search online and found that someone else had done the experimenting for me. She decided that the glycerine worked better in the hardening factor – rather essential for a gingerbread house (less so for just decorating cookies) and since I had some in the cupboard, that’s what we went for. I did also look up whether or not it was safe to be eating something I’ve always just used in making homemade bubble mix or on dry skin but I guess if you can use it on your lips, it’s ok to ingest too!
Here’s the recipe:
Mine ended up slightly more runny than I wanted it but it still worked well, even for attaching decorations
The BBC’s egg free royal icing
500g / 1lb 2 oz icing sugar (You can use icing mixture too)
2 lemons
3 – 4 teaspoons glycerine
Sift the sugar into a the bowl of a mixer.
Juice and strain the lemons.
Beating continously, gradually add the juice and glyercine to the sugar
I halved this recipe and had enough for my house and decorating with a little left over.
My main tips for construction are to build the walls and wait a while for them to set before putting the roof on. Ensure you’ve reinforced the inside corners with extra icing. Hold the roof pieces for a few minutes until you are sure they won’t slide.
Construction complete. Next time I will put the chimney together and then attach it to the roof instead of trying to do both at once.
Our decorations are dairy, egg, and nut free (and quite a few are wheat free too) – skittles, musk sticks, mint leaves, jelly babies, licorice (black and strawberry), marshmallows and edible glitter.
Decorating with edible glitter!
The final product and my cheeky monkey sneaking into view 🙂
Wishing you a Merry Christmas as we celebrate the birth of our Saviour. I’ll have a blogging break until late January.
I love cooking gingerbread at Christmas time. I am looking forward to making a gingerbread house with my kids soon too! I’ve adapted an already adapted recipe based on Sheriden Rogers ‘Entertaining at Home’ (1994 p143 – I think!) that my friend gave me. After the results of my recipe, I can only imagine how yummy the ‘normal’ version is. The kids loved helping with the cookie cutters.
This gingerbread is crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. It’s hard to even tell it doesn’t have ‘normal’ ingredients in it. This is a big amount of dough so I usually divide it in half and get about 50 small cookies (I use the Tupperware cookie cutters as pictured).
250g dairy free spread
185g brown sugar
2 eggs worth of egg replacer
300g honey
750g plain g.f. flour
pinch salt
3 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice
3 tsp bicarbonate of soda dissolved in
125ml boiling water
Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celcius (325F)
Cream dairy free spread and sugar until light and fluffy (use a large bowl and a mixmaster/kitchenaid is best)
Beat in egg replacer
Add honey and mix
Sift together dry ingredients and then add to mixture in parts alternating with dissolved bicarb soda
If dough feels too soft, add a bit more flour
Refrigerate for 2 hours – overnight
Roll dough out and cut out with cookie cutters
Place on trays with baking paper lining
Cook until lightly browned (about 20min)
Remove from oven but leave on tray for 5 mins before transferring to a wire rack.
Tips – I found the dough got easier to work with after it had been out of the fridge for a couple of minutes.
– If you are using normal flour you might need a bit more to make it into a dough. When I made it this week, I had to add quite a bit. I would add more of the spices next time too.
Welcome to the Itchin’ Kitchen where I aim to provide simple, nutritious food for my family, as well as catering for multiple food allergies and sensitivities! But it’s not just itching we try to avoid – it’s also anaphylaxis, hives, eczema flares, failure to thrive due to a limited diet, vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Plus I tackle fussy eaters and family meal times.
You can find out more about me by clicking on the ‘Meet Jess’ tab above.
My background is in Psychology and I am a Diploma qualified Nutritionist as well as being an experienced food allergy Mum. I hope that this blog can encourage you in feeding your family – especially if you have fussy little ones or if you’re new to the world of food allergies. I aim to make allergy friendly food nutritious, delicious and fun.
If you don’t have food allergies – this is still the kitchen for you – with recipes that everyone can enjoy. The recipes are labelled well with alternatives and options so that you can easily find a range of recipes to suit your family and friends.
Make sure you follow along (by subscribing to the RSS feed or by clicking on ‘Follow’ to get email updates) and let others know about us as we share our experiences here in the Itchin’ Kitchen. I’d love to hear your comments as we go.
Itchin' Kitchen 