Dairy-free Gluten-free Blackcurrant Cake

A friend’s birthday was last week which meant that obviously we needed to make a cake. They’ve recently been potentially diagnosed with being lactose and wheat and gluten intolerant, so generally thought cake was not going to be an option. Not true! There are loads of ‘free-from’ recipes online and with most big supermarkets now having a free-from range of baking supplies there is no reason why allergy-friendly cakes cannot be baked.

This is a really easy all in one method, and I have reliable sources which say it tasted pretty good too. Also, yes I am a berk and didn’t figure out how much space I needed so the cake says ‘happy birth’.

Ingredients

300ml soya milk

1 ½ tablespoon lemon juice

150g dairy-free spread

225g caster sugar

3 large eggs, beaten

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

225g wheat and gluten free plain flour

1 teaspoon xantham gum (couldn’t find this though so just threw a few spoonfuls of corn flour in)

1 ½ teaspoon gluten free baking powder

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

115g blackcurrant jam

For Icing

Lots of blackcurrant jam

A big blog of dairy-free spread

Lots of icing sugar

First of all, sorry for the total lack of photos but we didn’t have a lot of time to bake this, so I completely forgot. Preheat the oven to 180⁰C.

In a large mixing bowl combine all the cake ingredients together with an electric whisk. We thought the batter looked a bit sloppy, but having never made a cake like this before I wasn’t really sure what the consistency should have been. I shoved a few extra spoonfuls of flour in any way until it thickened up a bit, and it didn’t seem to do anything drastically bad to the cake.

Divide into two sandwich tins and bake for 35-40 minutes until well risen and light brown. Cool on a wire rack.

Cream the spread into a bowl and sift a generous amount of icing sugar in. Spread half of this in between the two cakes with some blackcurrant jam. Spread the rest on the top. We then made a little more icing and mixed some of the jam in it to give it some colour, and piped some decoration.

This is a bit of a cheeky plug but I happen to be the Food Correspondent for my Uni’s newspaper The Galleon. If you fancy seeing other things I’m up to, especially as they tend to be more cooking recipes rather than baking ones, then check out http://www.galleonnews.com/features/food/