What do you do with three overripe bananas? You make banana bread, that’s what. But this is a banana bread that has no milk, no gluten and no eggs. A food free quickbread: a gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free. You can even leave out the sugar, if you want to. Best of all, it’s quick and easy to make.
Like any butter cake, this is a highly recommended cake for people who like normal, sweet butter cakes with that rich and oh-so-sweet buttery icing. So we added coffee, but you could just as easily add lemon, lavender or even chocolate.
Cooking for people who can’t eat grains, including wheat, can be a challenge when it comes to snacks and finger foods. It’s all very well to keep putting out those celery and carrot sticks on the table, but sometimes, you just want to do more for people. These linseed crisps do just that.
This cake—a cake with no sugar, a little honey, and lots of zucchini and cocoa—is a sugar-free mud cake. Sure its still cake, but it’s a healthy cake on the cake scale of things.
Sometimes you just want homemade biscuits to go with cheese, dips, tomatoes, or whatever else it is you’re having that day. These sesame biscuits fit the bill perfectly. They’re also good all by themselves.
This cake is such a last-minute throw-it-together affair. It’s quick, easy, doesn’t need any icing, and it tastes great.
The choclatey chocolatedness of this cake has to be tasted to be believed. It’s amazing. Its rich, just-crumbly-yet-muddy texture has knocked another long-term family favourite chocolate cake off its perch. That’s how good this is.
This one is for those who love muffins. It’s a simple mixture of almond, apple, egg and a few other ingredients to give a really delicious and moist muffin. As a bonus, it’s perfectly suited to those can’t tolerate gluten or any starch at all.
This sponge cake is billed as a basic whisked sponge that’s easy to make, especially with an electric mixer. It’s true. It is easy, and it worked. if you have trouble with sponges, why not give this one last try? At least you can make trifle if it doesn’t work.
My grandmother had a vast orchard, filled with dark plums. I’m sure there was more than one variety of tree, but it’s the dark blood plums I remember. And her dark plum jam, and her jam drops. This probably isn’t exactly the recipe my grandma used (the jam is rose petal jam for a start), but these jam drops match my memory of them perfectly: the shape, the size, the colour.
This polenta cake fits all the demands of our extended family and friends: it’s healthy, interesting, and not too sweet. Wherever I take it, people love the unusual, savoury crunch of the polenta and rosemary coating the outside.
Salt free, sugar-free, gluten-free biscuits for a morning tea? It’s easier than you think with these almond unsweet biscuits. With just two ingredients, they’re so easy to make they’ve instantly become part of our emergency morning-tea repertoire.
Here’s a new take on an old cake: a coconut ring cake cooked in a bundt cake tin. It’s also a really delicious cake with less sugar than you’d expect for a 2-cups-of-flour cake. The topping is a mixture of chocolate chips and coconut oil, soaked into the cake and dripping down the sides into the plate to create a delicious chocolate and coconut treat.
‘Food free’ is a label we invented for a very restricted diet one of our relatives was forced to endure for a few months: no gluten, no egg, no dairy, no legumes, no nuts, no spices. It’s pretty limiting, especially if there’s a demand for, oh, a birthday cake for a child. We still have food…
This cake is so easy to make: just toss everything into the bowl, mix and bake. No fuss, no problems, and a perfect cake every time.
It’s the dead easy version of our almost-easy-mix spicy-topped apple cake from a few weeks ago.
Halva is one of those love-it-or-hate it things. I’ve never met anyone who’s just so-so about this middle-eastern sugar and tahini treat. Add in the flavour of minced ginger and carrot, and you have a delicious little sweet with just a touch of zing.
This cake has a wonderful taste and texture. The ginger adds zing, the carrot and ginger pulp lends a substantialness to the cake without making it chewy or heavy. We took it to a morning tea on the weekend, and it was all gone within minutes. I’ve never seen a cake disappear so quickly.
We call this the original banana bread because it’s the one I’ve been making for years and years. It’s still popular everywhere we take it: parties, church teas, work morning teas, anywhere with lots of people. It’s at its softest and most crumbly while it’s still warm. It’s denser but still delicious the next day, and better suited to feeding a cast of thousands.
The search for healthy snacks has been part of our quest to avoid refined sugar. Malar’s healthy cookies—biscuits without egg, oil, butter or sugar—are an excellent and delicious energy biscuit that would be ideal for a mid-morning school snack, or they might be great for extra energy on the bushwalking trail. I’ve even been known to sneak a few for a pre-breakfast (followed up with fruit, of course), and they are indeed delicious.
The lemon in this cake lemon gives it a delicious tang that goes oh so well with a good cup of tea or coffee. The cake also rises fairly evenly, so it’s very easy to make a layer cake just by making two and sandwiching them together with whatever takes your fancy. But we usually just make a single cake, decorate it with dark chocolate chips, and cut the cake into 1-inch squares round each chip to give delicious little bit-sized serves.
Mermaid's tresses 