Apple, Ginger and Cinnamon Tea Cake

Apple Ginger and Cinnamon Tea Cake. yellowreadis.com. Image: Two pictures of tea cake

About a year and a bit ago (I think, it feels like forever), with a specialists help, I finally managed to figure out that I have developed an allergy to egg. If you can’t hear the wailing and the knashing of teeth over here, you are lucky! Egg was one of my favourite foods, was an essential part of my baking and was a very difficult ingredient to replace. Not so much for its sticking power (banana does a great job for that), but for the light and fluffy-ness it adds to sponge cakes. So I have been experimenting for months and months with increasing despair – trying to bake a half-decent vegan, gluten-free sponge is hard!

But with the help of Jaime Oliver, and his magnificent Vegan GF sponge recipe, I now have cracked the code. This is not the same recipe, though his recipe is superb (I am incapable of not-tampering with any recipe). But it gave me a few pointers in the right direction for how to craft my own recipe that is repeatable and delicious.

So this is it, my Apple, Ginger and Cinnamon Tea Cake!
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Pear and Miso Stir-Fry

 

It’s been a while since I did a foodie post, so I thought I would share one of my more surprising successes. This is a lovely and simple gluten-free vegetarian stir-fry I made with what was left in the cupboard at the end of a long week. It’s a slight variation on our usual stir-fry sauce, but it worked! I particularly loved how well pears go in a stir-fry. It was a rare success in the what’s-in-cupboard-oh-that’ll-do method of cooking.
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Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Egg-Free Banana Biscuits

After a number of tasty disasters, I have finally been able to create my first success at gluten-free, dairy-free and egg free baking. These lovely biscuits did not last long – my kids (yes, both of them which is a miracle) gobbled them up. My daughter really loved them, and as she has an aversion to all baked goods, this was worth a victory dance or two (or three, who’s counting?).

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Everything Substituted Spice Carrot Cake

This recipe started as an experiment to see if I could make a gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free cake. We also had a lot of carrots, since my little girl loves buying carrots at our grocer. So it was only natural to combine the two and make a delicious and light carrot cake.

This cake is lovely on its own, but it is even better with the vanilla-cream and nutmeg icing. I had trouble taking really good pictures of this cake, and tried a few times – each time I had less cake to work with (over the course of 48 hours), because it was extremely popular and everyone kept gobbling it up!
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Gluten and Dairy-Free Chinese Beef Buns

Whenever I walk past a Chinese restaurant, I tend to get a little sad because of all the lovely food I can no longer eat. I particularly miss the lovely steamed buns which are springy and glutinous and soft inside. So in desperation, I checked online to see if there were any recipes that were able to show me how to make a gluten, dairy and yeast free Chinese bun. Nada. (Of course I was hungry, so it’s possible there’s one out there somewhere.) Thinking about how my bread mix doesn’t have yeast in it but does rise, I decided to experiment, and it worked!

These buns are so close to my memory of what Chinese buns should be it’s scary. There were a few hiccups along the way, as I misjudged the length of time they would need to steam and had to do some bun-surgery. I also created some wonderful carbon when the steam-water ran out and charcoaled in the steamer. Very lucky escape that one – and the buns weren’t hurt either!

This is so worth giving a try – you may need to fiddle around with the quantities for making the buns till you get them just right. I will be doing these ones again as they were a hit, so I’ll be able to let you know if they continue to work.
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