Dairy free first birthday cake recipe?

[patt1980]

My little girl is going to be 1 later in the week and i was wondering if anyone has a tried and tested dairy free and ideally sugar free or low sugar recipe they could share. She is cows milk protein intolerant but can have soy, wheat and eggs. There are a few online but not being a great baker it would be good to try one that someone has made successfully:-)

Thanks.

[susyp]

You just have to use pure sunflower margarine instead of butter. It works very successfully. We make cakes with it all the time. :-)

susypx

[newtoedf]

I agree, i usually just substitute for butter in normal recipes. Just be careful that the marge doesn't contain milk powder I think most do. I usually use flora cuisine and just substitute it by weight for butter. It's no good for icing though. For that you do need a solid marge, waitrose do a kosher marge, tomor, which doesn't really taste of anything (a good thing for icing!). There's a vegan marge called pure which is widely available but tastes terrible in icing.

I don't worry too much about sugar for special occassions but there is a good dairy-free banana and sultana cake in the river cottage baby and toddler cookbook which is very low in sugar but very tasty. Let me know if you'd like to borrow it.

Can you guess I did a lot of dairy-free baking while breastfeeding my dairy-free boy!

[susyp]

we use the pure sunflower - there is also a pure soya one if you prefer which my daughters nursery use for all their baking.

my hubbie makes the cakes but I think he just makes icing with icing sugar and water ie not buttercream icing. but i can't make cakes so could be wrong on that!

i just gave our builders some of our cup cakes we made over the weekend and they ate far too many of them so clearly it's not possible to taste the difference.

oh and i think my hubbie sometimes uses stork for pastry as i'm not sure the marg works so well in that case.

you can also get lots of substitute chocolate - there is one called moo free which is in waitrose which is not made with soya like most of them. We were fine avoiding chocolate until she started nursery though.

we make chocolate cake using cocoa. Delia has a good recipe using cocoa rather than chocolate.

happy baking!

susypx

[patt1980]

Thanks alot. I use the pure soya margarine for day to day stuff but hadn't thought it was as simple as just replacing that for butter in recipes (you can tell i don't bake regularly!). I actually have the river cottage baby and toddler book Newtoedf but thanks for the offer. I love cooking just not baking so admit haven't read the sweet recipes really but will check them out. I will get on and bake tomorrow then as it is her first day at nursery so will have a WHOLE day and know i won't know what to do with myself other than worry how she is settling in!

Thanks again.

[fager]

There's a vegan marge called pure which is widely available but tastes terrible in icing.

http://www.nlmlol.info/g.gif

[Gidget]

Could just do a drizzle icing with sugar and juice, like lemon or orange, if making for example a carrot cake. Also if you make a carrot cake can use oil instead of margarine/butter. I saw a tasty looking dairy free carrot cake recipe on the BBC Good Food website when I googled dairy free cakes. It had wonderful reviews.

[mrs f]

the nigella lawson flourless choc orange cake is delicious and dairy and wheat free

also she has a damp apple and almond cake which is also dairy free and delicious... nicer than using marge?

[newtoedf]

I'm with susyp on the Marge issue: The cakes still taste great and you really don't need a specific dairy free recipe