Dairy free dessertly goodness
So, my friend Phil came around for dinner last night. He's allergic to a whole bunch of foods, most significantly for desserts is his dairy allergy.
So, he's never eaten a lemon tart, and hasn't been able to eat mint slices (a chocolate coated, mint-filled biscuit made by Arnott's in Australia) since they added milk powder to the recipe 15 years ago.
This made me Very Angry, and decided the menu for the evening (which began with a chicken ragu, cooked for 5 hours, which I will talk about soon maybe).
Incidentally, it wouldn't be super hard to do either of these recipes gluten free too. Making a gluten free tart case is pretty easy (rice flour), and chocolate biscuits probably likewise.
For the lemon tart we started with this recipe:
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/16046/lemon+tart
and made these changes:
The next recipe we concocted was mint slice biscuits. The commercial ones look like this:
It's a chocolate biscuit, topped with a fairly thick layer of peppermint cream, all covered in dark chocolate. Probably my favourite Australian biscuit.
So, we went searching, and found that Arnott's Chocolate Ripple biscuits have no dairy, which saved us the trouble of making them from scratch.
I concocted a mint cream, using:
Then we spread a thick layer on each chocolate ripple biscuit, dipped the top in melted 70% cocoa dark chocolate, put the whole tray in the freezer to set it, then pulled them out, dipped the other side, chilled again.
They turned out really well, sort of home-made-looking versions of the commercial ones.
And the obligatory half-eaten one.
For next time I might use chocolate with a lower cocoa content, and also need to learn how to temper chocolate to stop it melting over my fingers when I try to eat the biscuits.
So, he's never eaten a lemon tart, and hasn't been able to eat mint slices (a chocolate coated, mint-filled biscuit made by Arnott's in Australia) since they added milk powder to the recipe 15 years ago.
This made me Very Angry, and decided the menu for the evening (which began with a chicken ragu, cooked for 5 hours, which I will talk about soon maybe).
Incidentally, it wouldn't be super hard to do either of these recipes gluten free too. Making a gluten free tart case is pretty easy (rice flour), and chocolate biscuits probably likewise.
For the lemon tart we started with this recipe:
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/16046/lemon+tart
and made these changes:
- Arnott's Marie biscuits have milk powder, but Nice biscuits don't, so we used those
- We used Nutellex (dairy free margarine) instead of butter.
- Made a double recipe, as Mum wanted a second tart for a dinner party next week.
- Used 1/3 less sugar than the recipe calls for.
- Used 2/3 less butter in the filling than the recipe calls for (seriously, THAT much butter? ridiculous)
- Added lemon zest to the crust
The next recipe we concocted was mint slice biscuits. The commercial ones look like this:
It's a chocolate biscuit, topped with a fairly thick layer of peppermint cream, all covered in dark chocolate. Probably my favourite Australian biscuit.
So, we went searching, and found that Arnott's Chocolate Ripple biscuits have no dairy, which saved us the trouble of making them from scratch.
I concocted a mint cream, using:
- 1/8 cup butter
- 1 cup icing sugar mix
- around 2 teaspoons of peppermint essence
Then we spread a thick layer on each chocolate ripple biscuit, dipped the top in melted 70% cocoa dark chocolate, put the whole tray in the freezer to set it, then pulled them out, dipped the other side, chilled again.
They turned out really well, sort of home-made-looking versions of the commercial ones.
And the obligatory half-eaten one.
For next time I might use chocolate with a lower cocoa content, and also need to learn how to temper chocolate to stop it melting over my fingers when I try to eat the biscuits.