Dairy Free Chocolate Ganache

The hardest part of making large cakes Gluten and Dairy free is that the icing tends to be either super sweet or super soft. Chocolate ganache is the go to for all those dairy eaters out there, the cocoa butter helps with stability ( so no need to add a heap of icing sugar to compensate) and the cream gives it a lovely texture.
There it is, cream.

My "ganache" tastes just as good and works well as a stable cupcake topping, sandwich cookie filling flood barrier for torte cakes and crumb coat for under fondant or modelling chocolate

Gluten Free Food and Allergy Show

This weekend a friend and I headed off to the Gluten free food and allergy show at the north shore events centre in Auckland. It's a yearly event and everything there is gluten free! They have these handy little colour coded labels on the stuff that has eggs, dairy and nuts in, so it's super easy to figure out what you can safely try.
A pretty big chunk of the stalls were selling food that is made here in NZ and is organic and/or vegan or vegetarian so there's something there for everyone even if you can eat gluten and other allergens.

The Best Gluten and Dairy Free Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

With a soft, chewy centre and a light and crispy edge these cookies are the perfect pick me up for a chilly Sunday afternoon.

Gluten and Dairy Free Vanilla Cupcakes

It's hard to make gluten free vanilla cake taste nice, vanilla is such a delicate flavour that it can't really overpower the flavour of the flour, so a Rice flour cake will taste like rice pudding and a cornmeal cake will taste like cornbread.

So this cake recipe has a few more ingredients than I would normally use but this is necessary to get just the right texture and flavour for a tasty cake.

Dairy Free Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Swiss Meringue Butter cream is the ultimate in buttercreams. Made of egg white, sugar and butter, it's smooth and easily pipeable and not too sweet.
The problem with all the recipes I've found is that they are for HUGE quantities using 10 or so egg whites (easily enough to pipe a swirl on about 30-40 cupcakes) so I spent some time figuring out the ratios and experimenting with butter alternatives.

The first experiment was with Margarine (I used Olivani) and it went really yellow and a bit too salty, the second was with Vegetable shortening (I used Kremelta) and it left a weird film of fat over my mouth.
The third and final test (and the recipe I will be sharing today) used half vegetable shotening and half margarine



You will need:

3 Egg whites

Approx 100g-120g Sugar (white or brown depending on the flavour you want)

150g Vegetable shortening

150g Margarine   ( you can of course use 300g butter if you don't need it to be DF)

A bit of lemon juice on a paper towel

About 1TBSP Extract of your choice - here I have used vanilla

Flower Pot Cupcakes for Mother's Day

I found these adorable plastic pots online and have been wanting to use them for something for a wee while. Mother's day is coming up on the 10 May, less than two weeks!
Because these pots are not oven safe I couldn't follow any of the online tutorials for flower pot cupcakes so I decided to do it my own way.