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I have another batch of tasty, dairy free sausages from Waitrose. These are honestly labelled as being outdoor bred and barn reared. These are sausages for eating just as sausages, rather than in casseroles which would be a waste of their special, individual flavours.
OK
English Pork and Sweet Chilli Sausages
These are 81% pork with 1.66g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg.
6 Oak-smoked Sausages with Italian Herbs
These are 83% pork with 1.39g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg.
6 Gourmet Pork Sausages
These are 83% pork with 1.73g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg. I can see nothing particularly gourmet about these. The only thing which makes them slightly different from the ordinary pork sausages is that they have rather more salt in them to make them seem more tasty. I find this rather dubious as a qualification for the term gourmet.
6 English Pork and Caramelised Red Onion Sausages
These are 80% pork with 1.7g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg.
6 English Pork and Bramley Apple and Apple Sauce
These are 74% pork with 1.53g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg.
6 Toulouse Style Sausages
These are 86% with 1.22g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg.
8 Honey and Rosemary Pork Chipolatas wrapped in Bacon.
These are 1.48g salt in 2 sausages. They are £6.48/kg.
10 Aberdeen Angus Beef and Cracked Pepper Chipolatas.
These are 80% beef with 0.78g salt in 2 sausages.
10 Pork and Herb Chipolatas.
These are 88% pork with 0.88g salt in 2 sausages.
NOT OK
Be careful! The following sausages in the same range have milk in them.
6 English Pork, Plum Tomatoes and Fresh Basil Sausages.
6 English Pork, Wholegrain Mustard and Buttered Onion Sausages.
As usual, I shall add these reviews to the rest on the reviews page so that you can compare them all and find what suits you.
The last few weeks have been a bit thin on posts here and this is because I have become obsessed with salt! I was asked to collect some figures of the sugar and salt content of bought food for my children’s lower school. They’re in the process of putting together a healthy eating policy that will cover the packed lunches and I went off to see just what was in some of the things which turn up in children’s lunchboxes. It took quite a while to get a comprehensive picture, but the results were interesting, to say the least. In fact I was so horrified by the salt content of the food which is on the shelves of our supermarkets and the frankly devious lengths to which food companies are going to conceal this, that I HAVE to pass on some of the facts and figures. Some of the worst offenders are not going to be on any dairy free shopping list as they are processed cheese products and we are spared the task of avoiding them. I have reams of figures and, unless people want me to, I’m not proposing to put them all up. However, some things are dairy free and those things I shall put up. There are also major labelling issues and many people don’t realise what they are and therefore don’t know what they are getting when they buy some foods.
Labelling issues
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rdas
We are all bombarded with “recommended daily allowances” (rda) of things these days. They turn up on most food packaging. However, we don’t hear very much about the fact that there are different rdas for children. This is particularly crucial when it come to salt. Plastered all over crisp packets and processed cheese stuff is the adult rda for salt, but what are the child’s figures? Well here they are:
Babies = none
Child 5-7yr old = 3g
Child 7-10yr old = 4g
Child 10-14yrs = 5g
Adult = 6g
This makes a huge difference when looking at the % of daily allowance figures on packaging. Far too many companies put the adult % of rda on products clearly aimed at the children’s lunchbox market. For instance, look at these:
Oreo Snack Packs
Each pack has 4 biscuits, but it says in very small print that the figures are per biscuit.
Salt = 0.1g per biscuit = 2% rda
That doesn’t look too bad, until you realise that this translates into:-
Salt = 0.4g per pack = 13% child’s rda!!!
IN 4 BISCUITS !
These happen to have milk in them (as well as lots of sugar and salt!) so they’re not in the shopping list, they’re just here as an example of sneaky labelling.
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Did You Know?
Not all companies label salt as salt.
Sounds odd, but it’s true. Some give you the sodium content and some even hide this by using the chemical symbol for the element sodium, Na.
Why do they do this?
Well, it just so happens that sodium only makes up part of salt, which is sodium chloride. So, of course, the figures look very much smaller for the sodium content than they would for the salt content. Responsible companies give you both the sodium content and what that means as salt, which is more than twice as much.
Salt = Na (sodium) x 2.5
Some Top Salt Offenders
Morrison’s Twists
1.02g salt per portion
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Dorito’s Cool Original
0.8g salt per portion
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Tesco Value Sausage Roll
0.6g salt per portion
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Real McCoy’s Salt and Vinegar
1.02g salt per portion
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The last one would give a 5-7 yr old child a staggering 44% of its daily salt allowance in one small bag of crisps!!
It’s the sodium in salt which does the damage, but to make comparisons easily, you need all the labelling to be the same. It’s not helpful to have some companies giving the sodium content and some giving the salt content. For everybody to have a chance of drawing proper comparisons, the figures have to make sense and since rdas are given for salt rather than sodium, you have to wonder why food companies would choose to put the sodium content without the salt conversion…unless they don’t want us to know just how much salt is really in things…? To stand a chance of keeping track of the real salt content of many foods, you have to be prepared to stand in the supermarket multiplying things by 2.5 in your head. That’s after you’ve had the patience to find where on the pack they’ve chosen to hide the little box with the figures in the first place!
There will be more on this theme! Once you start looking you have to be concerned. Having become very concerned myself, I have to pass this on.
This week’s batch of reviews is cereal bars. These have a very mixed press at the moment. The school dieticians seem to regard them as pretty much second to the spawn of Satan. I’ve become involved with the whole Healthy Eating Policy thing in my kids’ lower school and it’s a minefield! More of all this later… there’s so much that it deserves a whole post of its own. (Or two, or three, or maybe more!!) However, back to cereal bars. There is no doubt, looking at the ingredients, that they have a lot of sugars in them. Some have a large amount of fruit in them, and this inevitably means that there will be large amounts of naturally occurring fruit sugars present. Some, however, have large amounts of added sugars too in all sorts of forms. Therefore, as with the mueslis, you have to balance the health benefits of the fruit content with the sugar content.
There is also the fact that you have to think about how you use these things. They are great for that car trip from school to an after school activity requiring energy such as swimming, football or dance. The sugars in these bars will give an instant lift to perk up a child who is fading a bit after a day in school, but the best also provide some longer burning fuel in the form of oats or rice. What you have to watch for are those which stack the odds in favour of sugar at the expense of cereal. These simply won’t provide the energy for a long enough period for the benefit to outweigh the cost. What these bars are not, is a good, healthy, guilt-free snack food which you can feel virtuous about eating as often as you like. The sugar content will start to translate into body fat the moment your energy needs are lower than your sugar intake.
Remember, children have much higher carbohydrate (starchy stuff) needs than adults do. They are very active and they’re growing. You just have to decide where you’re going to draw a sensible line.
To help, I’ve collected the sugar details for the milk-free cereal bars, as I did for the mueslis and granolas. Then you can look at the figures and make up your own minds which you want to use.
OK
All these are Fairtrade, organic and vegan. They contain no wheat, no soya and no hydrogenated fat.
Chocolate and crispy rice bars
5 x 35g bars. These are 40.8% sugars by weight, with 14.3g per bar. Obviously there’s sugar in the chocolate. They are £1.99 a box, which works out as £11.40/kg.
Fruity oat cereal bars
5 x 40g bars. These are 42.3% sugars by weight, with 16.9g per bar. Isn’t it interesting that the chocolate one has less sugar? Just goes to show, you shouldn’t always go on what you think you already know. They are £1.99 a box, which works out as £9.95/kg.
Tropical fruit and nut cereal bars
5 x 40g bars. These are 38.7% sugars by weight, with 15.5g per bar. These look good, but my kids don’t like them at all. I’ve ended up using up the box myself. I think they’re OK, but they really aren’t as special as they look. They are £2.19 a box, which works out as £11/kg.
Canadian Maple Syrup Crunchy Granola Bars
These may be called “Nature Valley”, but there’s a lot of added sweet stuff in all of them.
6 x 2 bar packs. These are 25.2 % sugars, with 10.6g per 2 bar pack. They have added sugar, honey, maple syrup and molasses. They also have 0.3g salt per 2 bar pack. They are £2.30 a box, which works out as £9.13/kg.
Roasted Almonds Crunchy Granola Bars
6 x 2 bar packs. These are 25.1% sugars, with 10.5g per 2 bar pack. They have added sugar, honey and molasses. They also have 0.4g salt per 2 bar pack. Notice that as you lose 0.1g of sugar, (compared with the maple syrup ones) you gain 0.1g of salt to keep it as “tasty”. They are £2.30 a box, which works out as £9.13/kg.
Apple Crunch Crunchy Granola Bars
6 x 2 bar packs. These are 27.9% sugars, with 11.7g per 2 bar pack. They have added sugar, honey and molasses. They also have 0.1g salt per 2 bar pack. More sugar in these, so they’ve cut down the salt. They are £2.30 a box, which works out as £9.13/kg.
These have no wheat, no gm ingredients and are vegan. They contain peanuts. They have no added sugar or salt and my kids think they’re great. However, the figures are vague. The carbohydrate figure is not broken down into sugars and starches. It’s just 56% carbohydrate. Some of that will be from the oats in them, but you can’t tell how much. Given the bars are 49% fruit and 9% apple juice, most of the carb figure is probably sugar. Natural sugar, but still sugar. The box says they are “guilt-free goodness”. I would dispute that. Nothing which is full of fruit and nuts can ever be eaten without thinking sensibly about the amount of energy you’re taking in and how much you actually use in a day.
Cocoa loco
The bars are 49% fruit and 9% apple juice. 56% carbohydrate. They are £1.99 a box, which works out as £16.60/kg!
Berry cheeky
All the same figures as above, though the actual ingredients are slightly different. They are £1.99 a box, which works out as £16.60/kg!
MAYBE
Nature Valley Fruit and Nut Chewy Trail Mix Bars
These have the “may contain” label, which is surprising, given the granola bars don’t have it. It’s hard to know how seriously to take these things, since they’re often just the corporate lawyers covering themselves. However, if you’re seriously allergic it’s always safest to avoid them. When you look at the list of added sugars, you might not want to eat them in any case (glucose syrup, sugar, caramel syrup, honey, sugar, fructose, maltodextrin & caramelized sugar)!!
Jordans
This company makes a wide range of bars. I found the same variety of bar in two different styles of wrapper, one of which said “may contain…” and the other of which didn’t. Again, part of the range was clearly labelled with the usual disclaimer and part of it wasn’t. I have no idea what Jordans are up to. All their mueslis are labelled “may contain…”, so they obviously have zealous corporate lawyers. When the labelling settles one way or the other, I’ll let you know. Until then, safer to avoid these.
NOT OK
Geobar
There are lots of these, but they all have skimmed milk powder in them.
Tracker
Several of these. All have condensed milk.
go ahead
All of these have milk ingredients too.
Apricot and Guava
This is a good one! I found it in my local health food shop this week and can honestly say it’s lovely. It isn’t cheap at 75p for a little 25g pot, but it does taste very good. The texture is slightly odd, in that it has tiny gritty bits in it. I assume they’re bits of fruit, but they’re so tiny that they don’t have recognisable flavour in themselves.
Raspberry and Passionfruit
The texture of this one is slightly better than the other one. There are still bits in it which don’t seem to be fruit. Tiny white bits. I can only assume that they are soya bits. The flavour is very good, just as it used to be so long ago when it appeared in little glass pots. The pots may now be plastic with cardboard covers, but are still too small. It’s still expensive. This one, in a different health food shop, was 59p for a pot. When I want a treat, I shall be buying it from Fairhaven Wholefoods in future!
This has been a mainstay of my family for more years than I can remember. It is easy to make and produces a reliably delicious, light and fluffy cake. The only thing which you must NEVER EVER do is open the oven before 20 minutes of the cooking time have passed. You can make a seriously impressive birthday cake with this.
To make this cake you will need an electric hand whisk, a large mixing bowl, two 8″/20cm cake tins, silicone baking paper/greaseproof paper, a sieve.
Recipe: Fantastic Chocolate Sponge Cake
Ingredients
- 5oz/150g self raising flour
- 1oz/25g cocoa powder (NOT drinking chocolate)
- 6oz/175g caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 3 tbsps hot but not boiling water
- 4floz/110ml flavourless vegetable oil
- 1 heaped tsp baking powder.
- a little oil/Tomor for greasing if using greaseproof paper to line the tins.
- For the icing.
- 12oz/350g sieved icing sugar
- 6oz/175g softened Tomor
- 1 tbsp sweetened soya milk, plus a little more if your icing gets too stiff when you add the cocoa powder.
- a couple of drops of vanilla extract
- about 1oz/40g sieved cocoa powder.
Instructions
- Pre-heat the oven to Gas Mark 6/200 C/400 F.
- Line the base of two 8″/20cm round cake tins with silicone baking paper and grease the sides. If you use ordinary greaseproof paper, grease the top surface of the paper on the bottom of the tin. A small dab of oil/grease on the base of the tin helps to keep the paper in place.
- Beat together the sugar, eggs and water for 2 minutes. They will go light and fluffy.
- Sieve in the flour and cocoa and beat for 2 minutes.
- Add the oil and beat for 3 minutes.
- Fold in the baking powder.
- Pour quickly into the tins, level gently and put in the oven. If possible, place both tins side by side on the middle shelf to get the same cooking time for both cakes.
- Bake for 20 minutes WITHOUT OPENING THE DOOR! This really is a must. If you open it sooner, your cake will fail: simple as that.
- Once 20 minutes have passed, carefully open the door just enough to get a hand in safely without burning yourself on the shelf or door edge. Test the cake to see whether it is ready by GENTLY pressing the top with your fingers. If there is some resistance and the surface springs back, it’s done. If the top still feels very soft, get your hand out and GENTLY close the door. If you slam it, you may still spoil your cake. Give it a little more time, just a couple of minutes or so at a time, until it is done.
- When the cake is cooked, remove it from the oven, put it on a cake rack and give it a couple of minutes to cool slightly.
- Remove the cakes from the tins by tipping them out onto the rack and peel off the greaseproof/baking paper, then turn the cakes CAREFULLY the right way up.
- Leave to cool completely.
- While the cakes cool, make the icing.
- Beat the softened Tomor in a large mixing bowl to loosen it off.
- Sieve in the icing sugar and add the soya milk.
- Beat GENTLY at first to avoid covering the kitchen with icing sugar.
- Add a couple of drops of vanilla extract to taste. If your soya milk is vanilla flavoured, you may not need much (if any) more vanilla to get a good flavour.
- Split each cake in half horizontally to give you four layers each about 1/2″/1cm thick.
- Cover the cut surface of the base layer with little dollops of icing and smooth it out GENTLY with a knife that has been dipped in boiling water. Don’t press hard or you’ll end up with a ploughed field effect!
- Place the top half of that cake onto the icing, making sure that it is straight and level.
- Cover the top surface of the cake with icing and smooth it out as before.
- Add the bottom half of the second cake to the stack, levelling as before, and cover it with icing as before.
- Place the last piece of cake on the very top and check that the stack is straight and level.
- Now you need to turn the rest of your icing chocolate by adding the cocoa powder through a sieve. You may need a small splash of soya milk at this stage if your icing starts to go very dry.
- The precise amount of cocoa will depend on just how dark you like your chocolate icing. Remember that the icing will go paler and paler the more you beat it, so only beat it as much as is necessary to combine the cocoa evenly.
- Spread the chocolate icing over the top of the impressive stack you have made.
Quick Notes
This is where you get arty and add any decoration you like, or use a fork dipped in boiling water and swirled through the icing to make patterns.
Variations
This recipe is very adaptable.
For a coffee sponge, replace the cocoa powder with an extra 1oz/25g of self-raising flour. Dissolve 1 rounded dsp of instant coffee in the hot water. Make the plain icing as before, then instead of adding cocoa for the top layer, add a little more icing sugar and 1 tsp of very strong dissolved instant coffee.
For a vanilla sponge, replace the cocoa powder with another 1oz/25g self-raising flour and replace 2 tsps of the hot water with vanilla extract. When filling the cake, you can press chopped strawberries or raspberries into each layer of icing and decorate the top with more sliced or whole berries.
For a luxurious variation, you could make a vanilla sponge and use passion fruit pulp in place of berries.
For a moccha version, you could leave in the cocoa powder, but replace 2 tsps of the hot water with very strong, dissolved coffee. The icing between the layers can become coffee, with a chocolate top.
For an impressive cake for a party, use two 11″/18cm flan tins. The resulting cakes won’t be thick enough to split, but they make much more manageable slices if you are doing a buffet where people are going to be eating standing up. Simply stick them together with your chosen flavour icing and decorate.
Preparation time (duration): about 40 minutes
Cooking time (duration): 20 minutes
Diet type: Dairy-free
Number of servings (yield): 12
Meal type: dessert
Culinary tradition: English
Microformatting by hRecipe.
Somehow or other I seem to have missed this essential part of family pudding time off the site. Major oversight! I shall put this right over the next few posts.
There are some dairy-free ice creams out there and some of them are good, but they can be hard to find. Some are also very expensive. I’ll start with the ones you stand most chance of finding!
This is the only brand generally available in supermarkets. The pots make quite good freezer containers for food when you’ve finished the ice cream, though they are hexagonal which has its drawbacks. These days it comes in several flavours, but the main ones you will find are:-
Smooth Vanilla
I don’t think it’s quite as good as it used to be. The flavour isn’t as real (if you know what I mean). The vanilla is no longer as good and there is an odd, slightly chemical aftertaste. I tend to avoid this now as it’s no longer a pleasure to eat. Which is a shame, as it used to be so good!
Where to get it: some Waitrose/Ocado, some Sainsbury’s, some larger Tesco, most health food shops.
Rich Chocolate
This is now our flavour of choice. It has a good chocolatey taste and a smooth texture. It feels good in the mouth which is always key with ice cream.
Where to get it: some Waitrose/Ocado, some Sainsbury’s, some larger Tesco, most health food shops.
Juicy Raspberry
This is good. Not exciting and a bit pink, but perfectly acceptable for raspberry ice cream. Again, has a good texture.
Where to get it: some Waitrose/Ocado, some larger Sainsbury’s, some larger Tesco, most health food shops.
Wild Blueberry
A pleasant ice cream, but not exactly to die for. The flavour is fairly delicate and, in this family, is not felt to go very well with fruit. The flavours seem to clash, particularly with strawberries. Since that’s how we tend to eat ice cream, that limits its usefulness. It’s OK on its own, but I never have enough room in the freezer for a hexagonal box of something which won’t go with other things.
Neapolitan
This is relatively new to the range and has been hard to find. I’ve been busy putting in requests for it in Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury, you name it I’ve asked for it. It is in larger boxes than the usual flavours and is a huge hit with my children. They love the excitement of having three flavours in one box. The peculiar thing is that the vanilla stripe of the box seems to taste much better than the vanilla on its own. This may be an illusion caused by the mixture of flavours, I don’t know for sure.
Where to get it: some Waitrose/Ocado, some Sainsbury’s, some larger Tesco, some health food shops.
Your key to finding this stuff is to keep pestering the supermarkets. Keep asking for it. Keep filling in the product request forms. Ask your friends to request it too. That way there are other names than just yours on the forms. Keep checking the freezers when you shop, as the window for buying it when it does appear before it vanishes again can be quite small.
My local health food shop has managed to produce a pot of the blueberry version of Sojade’s soya yoghurt. I can now report that it’s good, but not quite as good as I’d hoped. The flavour is fairly well rounded, but it’s not as much better than Alpro’s stuff as the plain version is. There is still a slight back-taste of soya, which I had hoped the Sojade boffins would have overcome. The texture’s good, just as it is in the plain one. It’s fine, really, but I’d been hoping that it would be sensational, given how far ahead the plain version is of anything else I’ve found in this country. Maybe that was unreasonable.
I shall try another flavour next time… and of course, I’ll report back! See the reviews pages for other yoghurts.
In many areas these days, the choice of source for food shopping can be limited to whichever of the big supermarkets has been allowed to dominate your particular patch. We live 15-20 minutes’ drive from any of the big supermarkets, so I use several of them at different times and for different things. The result of this is that I’m trawling each one in turn for the things I’m reviewing. I hope that this will eventually cover whichever supermarket you have near you. Our local medium-sized supermarket is a Morrison’s and this latest batch of mueslis is from there.
As usual these reviews will be added to the reviews page with all of the others so that you can compare them properly. For the edible ones I’ve included the sugar content as usual. There’s a big range in the sugar content of these ones: from 12% to 31%! Just try to visualise almost one third of your cereal portion as a heap of sugar! No wonder we’re all addicted to sugar. I think I shall be trying the Dorset Cereals’ Jumbo Raisins next.
NOT OK
No Added Sugar Muesli
Swiss Style Muesli
Organic Fruit & Nut Muesli
These all have milk listed in the ingredients.
MAYBE
Organic Fruit Crunchy
This is made in a factory which handles milk, so for highly allergics there is always a risk of contamination. Best avoided.
OK
Really Nutty Muesli. 22.3% sugars. 26.6p/100g. (This was a special offer. Didn’t give any indication of what they normally charge.)
Super High Fibre. 27.5% sugars. 26.6p/100g. (As above for the price)
Jumbo Raisins. 12% sugars. 23.5p/100g.
Classic Oat Crunchy: Raisin, Honey and Almond. Added sugar and honey. 26.8% sugars. 25.8p/100g.
Hawaiian Oat Crunchy: Raisin, Banana and Pineapple. Added sugar and sweetened dried fruit. 24.5% sugars. 25.8p/100g.
Special Recipe Wholewheat Muesli. Sugar on banana chips. 22.3% sugars. 17.6p/100g.
Wholwheat Muesli. Sugar on banana chips. 22.3% sugars. 16.6p/100g.
Maple and Pecan Crispy Clusters. Added sugar. 26.5% sugars. 25.6p/100g.
Strawberry Crispy Clusters. Added sugar. 31.2% sugars. 25.6p/100g.
As usual, all of these are also on our reviews pages.
This is our favourite recipe for a traditional Simnel Cake. It’s based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe with tweaks to make it work dairy free. The marzipan balls on top are great fun for the children to make. There are supposed to be eleven (for the disciples of Christ minus Judas, of course) but, when you have help making them, this can sometimes vary! Still, preparing special food together is what celebration times are all about.
For this recipe you will need an electric hand held mixer, two mixing bowls, an 8″ / 20cm spring form tin, some silicone baking paper, a couple of sheets of newspaper (or more baking paper: more expensive, but just as effective), real string (NOT plastic string as it may well melt in the oven) and a cake rack.
Recipe: Traditional Simnel Cake
Ingredients
- 6oz / 175g softened Tomor
- 6oz / 175g caster sugar
- 8oz / 225g plain flour
- zest of 1 lemon
- 1tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp ground cinnamon
- ¼ tsp ground ginger
- 1oz / 25g ground almonds
- 3 large, free-range eggs, plus 1 egg white all lightly beaten together
- 2 tbsps soya milk
- 1lb 2oz / 5oog mixed dried fruit
- 3 ½oz / 100g glace cherries, finely chopped/minced
- 12½oz / 400g golden marzipan
- a little icing sugar for rolling out the marzipan
- 1 tbsp melted and sieved apricot jam
- 1lb 3½oz / 6oog golden marzipan for decorating
- 1 egg white for bronzing the decorations
Instructions
- Pre-heat the oven to 180C/ Gas mark 4
- Grease and line the bottom and sides of an 8 inch / 20cm springform cake tin with two layers of silicone paper.
- Make sure that the top edge of the side pieces is about 2 inches / 5cm higher than the edge of the tin.
- Wrap a double layer of newspaper around the outside of the tin and tie it with string.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until they are very soft, fluffy and pale.
- Stir in the lemon zest.
- Put the flour into a mixing bowl and add the baking powder, the cinnamon the ginger and the ground almonds. Make sure that your additions are fairly evenly distributed.
- Add about one third of your eggs to the creamed Tomor and sugar with a heaped tbsp of the flour mixture and beat it in.
- Repeat for the rest of the eggs. If the mixture starts to curdle, sprinkle in a little more of the flour and spice mix to stop it. Don’t panic, it’s usually salvageable this way.
- Beat in the remaining flour and spice mix until smooth.
- Add the soya milk and beat again.
- Fold in the dried and glacé fruit.
- Dust your clean work surface with a little icing sugar and roll out the 12½ oz / 400g lump of marzipan into an 8 inch / 20cm diameter circle.
- Spoon half your cake mix into the tin and smooth it out with the back of the spoon.
- Lay the marzipan circle on top of it.
- Spoon the rest of the cake mix on top and smooth it out as before.
- Put it in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.
- Turn the oven down to 150C/Gas mark 2 and bake for another 1½ hours until the cake is just firm to the finger tips when you test the top.
- Allow the cake to cool completely ona cake rack before opening the tin.
- To decorate, roll out another 12½ oz / 400g of the golden marzipan into another 8 inch / 20cm circle as before.
- Paint the top of the cake with the melted, sieved apricot jam.
- Stick on the marzipan.
- Make your 11 apostles out of the remaining 7 oz / 2oog of golden marzipan.
- Beat the extra egg white until it is softly frothy.
- Use the egg white to stick on the apostle balls and then brush it all over the marzipan decoration.
- Using a blow-torch, bronze it gently for that glowing look.
Quick Notes
This makes a beautiful centre-piece for a tea table or a party spread.
Total preparation time : 1 hour
Cooking time : 2 hours
Diet type: Dairy free
Number of servings (yield): 12
Meal type: dessert
Culinary tradition: English
Microformatting by hRecipe.
I am always on the look-out for a plausible alternative to cream cheese.
Original Creamy Scheese
Having tried this on my sandwiches today, I’m sad to say this isn’t it! There’s nothing wrong with it as a food substance, it just doesn’t taste anything like cream cheese. The texture is quite good (not as firm as some substitutes I’ve tried), but if you ate it with your eyes shut you wouldn’t guess it was cream cheese as the taste is all wrong. It smells of soya, which is a bit off-putting, and it has the usual slightly flat taste associated with that smell. The really odd bit, however, is the slight cheddary flavour which has been added. The lid describes it as “A delicious alternative to cream cheese”. It’s not. It’s not actively unpleasant, but neither is it cream cheese.
It is dairy free, gluten free, lactose free, cholesterol free, vegan etc. etc. Sadly it’s going in the food free category. I’m not in the market for martyrdom. If something doesn’t taste good, I don’t care how ethically it’s made I’m not eating it.
where to get it: health food shops only. Not cheap at £2.29 for 255g/9oz.
gotchas: just doesn’t taste right. Haven’t the people who make these substitutes ever tasted the real thing?
Pure soft and creamy spread
The Pure website promotes this as the perfect solution to making cheesecakes. I have yet to try this, though it’s high on my list of experiments for very soon. It’s possible that the spread will be good for this, but I’m afraid it’s not good on bread. It’s MUCH too sweet for cream cheese and has the flatness that seems to go with soya far too often. Another disappointment. This one I actively disliked. The sweetness is just all wrong for anything pretending to be cream cheese.
Where to get it: most health food shops and large supermarkets. Morrison’s, Waitrose and larger Tesco’s all carry it.
Gotchas:doesn’t taste anything like cream cheese.
For more reviews of cheeses and cream cheeses, see our review pages.
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