Beyond baking: great desserts that don’t require flour
According to Kantar data, sales of flour were up 92% year on year, in the four weeks leading to 22 March. While flour mills are working seven days a week to try to meet demand, at the moment there is only enough available for15% of UK households to buy a bag of flour each week.
What that means for most of us is that the baking section of our local supermarket is utterly bare. But if you can’t get hold of flour, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make a dessert that is both delicious and highly instagrammable (#runningoutofcatpicstosharewithfriends). Here are some ideas to take you beyond batter.
Tiramisu
The great thing about making Tiramisu is that you don’t even have to switch on the oven. The other great thing about it is that you get to eat Tiramisu at the end of it all.
All of the ingredients are (hopefully) easy to get hold of at the moment. We checked around and most supermarkets seem to have sponge fingers (Savoiardi or lady fingers) in stock. You should be able to find them as a supermarket own-brand product. Here they are inTesco,Sainsbury’s,ASDAandWaitrose. (We’re not hating on Morrisons, by the way, but we were unable to get on the website to check stock.)
You’ll need:
Method:
Make the dessert at least a few hours before you want to serve it.
Cheesecake
This is the cakiest non-batter-cake of our chosen recipes and should hit the spot if you’re craving comfort food. You can use almost anything you have at home for a topping (nuts, berries, tinned fruit, chocolate shavings) or goau naturel. It is, after all, largely cheese and nothing goes better with cheese than a fork and your face.
For the base:
For the topping:
You can choose any topping but one of the best, and simplest, is a punnet of chopped strawberries. Puree half of the punnet with 250g of icing sugar, sieve and pour the sauce over the rest of the chopped strawberries on top of your cake.
Making the base:
Meringues
The best thing about a meringue is that you only really need two ingredients to make it. However, if you laugh in the face of two-ingredient desserts, you can also add (seed-free) jam to the meringue mix. If you mix it in roughly at the end, you can create a flavoured swirl. For a more vibrant hue, add a few drops of red food colouring to the mix.
You’ll need:
Method:
Try to avoid opening the oven door to check on your meringues. Instead, crouch sadly in front of your oven, staring in the window like a Victorian orphan on a Dickens Christmas special.
You can use these little meringues to make sandwiches with a chocolate ganache (by simply melting dark chocolate in a bowl over a pot of boiling water), whipped cream, jam or lemon curd filling.
Pavlova
Essentially, this is just a meringue-plus recipe. Some people add a teaspoon of cornflour and a teaspoon of vinegar to the mix to help it retain its texture but if you don’t have those ingredients, you can still make it.
For the meringue base:
Make the meringue according to the recipe above, but instead of separating it into dollops, make it into a large cake-sized disc that slopes down into the centre. After cooking it, open the oven door and let it cool slowly. If it gets too cold too quickly, it’ll crack. (You’ll usually get a few cracks but hopefully if you let it cool slowly, it won’t come apart completely. If it does, pretend that’s exactly how you meant it to turn out.)
For the topping:
There are a number of ways you can go at this.
You can serve the meringue with fruit alone; with cream and fruit; or with a mascarpone cream filling and berry sauce.
All you really need is 450g of your choice of berries (strawberries, blueberries and raspberries are all perfect). Wash and hull them, cut them up and add to the top of the meringue just before serving.
If you want to add a filling, you’ll need 350ml of double cream. Mix it up with a tablespoon of icing sugar (and 120g of mascarpone, if you have a sweet tooth, an iron stomach and are really going for it) and spread it over the meringue. Then add the prepared fruit.
If you have some extra berries, you can make a sauce by adding two tablespoons of icing sugar for every 100g of berries and putting the mixture in a blender. Sieve the mixture. Pour the resulting sauce over the Pavlova before serving.
If Pavlova comes out nicely, it looks – as well as tastes – amazing. You will be feted on social media and will probably get a knighthood. If it comes out badly, it will still taste pretty good and you can use all the camera angle trickery you have learned over the years to pretend it was a huge success.
Want to read more? You might enjoy these related articles.
Author: Emma Rowley, Group Home Tech Editor
Emma has been a journalist and copywriter for over 20 years and has been testing and writing about home tech and appliances for seven years. She tries out every appliance she writes about at home, and aims to recommend time- and energy-saving products that will last.
