This cake was for a couple friends of mine that have just bought their first home and had a housewarming do. Home Sweet Home.
Dietary requirements: dairy free, soy free and nut free.
Nut free was easy to do nut free. Soy free was pretty simple too. But dairy free? This was new territory for me. But as it turned out, it was achievable with the following substitutes:
- Nutellex for butter
- coconut cream for cream
- Lindt 70% dark chocolate for cooking chocolate
- rice milk for milk
I decided I would do a 2-tier cake. So I did a chocolate mudcake for the bottom (extra support) and a rainbow “butter” cake for the top tier.
I admit I was pretty impressed with how white the frosting turned out using Nutellex. However, the flavour definitely missed something (butter flavour!). I contacted Nutellex and apparently you can buy the Buttery variety from certain Woolies stores, and they too are soy, nut and dairy free. So maybe next time I might try that one. Also, just to note, the Nutellex didn’t crust and set as firm as typical buttercream. So piping with it might be a bit of a challenge, but for the purposes of frosting the outside, it did well.
Putting the sprinkles on the cake resulted in sprinkles all over my kitchen. the result was worth it though. The chocolate ganache was coconut cream and the Lindt 70% chocolate (1:1 ratio). It turned out great, except that the ganache cracked in places after being cooled in the fridge (perhaps too cold?).
I made meringues as well for the cake (had spare egg whites from the Lapis Surabaya cake the other day) and coloured it to match the tone of the cake.
I am so pleased with how the cake turned out considering it was in unfamiliar territory with the ingredient substitutions. A lot of people agreed the flavours were great. This was such a fun cake to make and definitely would suit kids birthday parties š