Mmmmm... Carrot Cupcake (Photo: Ditte Isager in The Telegraph Magazine)

I’ve just found another  reason to dream of a trip to New York City: BabyCakes NYC bakery. Featured in the Telegraph Magazine in April, BabyCakes is a New York bakery in the true Sex and the City tradition, with gorgeous-looking frosted cupcakes, cookies and brownies galore. However there’s one very important difference: all these mouth-watering tasty treats are completely wheat, dairy and gluten-free!

Erin McKenna at BabyCakes NYC (Photo: Ditte Isager, from The Telegraph Magazine)

Erin McKenna, the 33 year-old founder of BabyCakes NYC, was a self-confessed cake fiend who first got  interested in vegan and gluten-free baking after being declared wheat and dairy intolerant by a nutritionist in her late twenties. Rather than kicking her cake habit altogether, McKenna set herself a big challenge: reinventing all her favourite treats without their allergenic ingredients, yet ensuring they retained their delicious taste and texture. Through extensive experimentation in the kitchen of her tiny New York apartment, McKenna “achieved the culinary equivalent of splitting the atom” as Lucie Young, writing for the Telegraph, puts it: making vegan, gluten-free cakes that actually tasted great!

Leaving her job as a fashion assistant to pursue her dream of baking (“the only thing that made me happy”), McKenna held down three different waitressing jobs whilst she refined her recipes to perfection. A year later, she opened New York’s first healthy cake shop on the then-unfashionable Lower-East side: a tiny pink-painted emporium to all things delicious complete with retro fixtures and handwritten signs. Now, nearly four years on, BabyCakes NYC is the destination for health-conscious New Yorkers, and fans of her brownies, muffins, cookies and cupcakes include Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel and Sophie Dahl.

Until now, McKenna’s scrumptious recipes have been top-secret, but she will be revealing 50 of her favourites in the first BabyCakes cookbook, to be published later this month. The secret ingredients? Agave nectar, a replacement for sugar which has a low glycaemic index, meaning “it breaks down in your system at a slower rate and doesn’t shoot up your blood sugar” and coconut oil, which stands in for butter, and “engages your thyroid, strengthens your metabolism and helps you lose weight.” She also uses spelt flour in place of regular wheat flours. Sadly, McKenna’s book will only be available in the US, but in the meantime, you can find three of her yummy recipes on the Telegraph website: Ginger Snaps, Chocolate Brownies and Carrot Cupcakes. I can’t wait to try them!

You can find out more about BabyCakes NYC on their website and blog, or even follow them on twitter for updates on what yummy treats are fresh out of the oven. It will have to do until I can plan a trip to NYC and check out BabyCakes for myself!

image via we heart it

Spring is here at last: the sun is shining, skies are blue, and my thoughts are starting to turn towards the ultimate taste of summer… ice-cream. Whether it’s a bowl of melting vanilla ice-cream sprinkled with strawberries or raspberries, a sundae in a tall glass with chocolate sauce and sprinkles, or a “99” from the ice-cream van, there’s something about the taste of ice-cream that immediately evokes memories of endless sunny summer days and childhood holidays by the sea. Ice-cream is probably one of the things I’ve missed most since going dairy-free: as I pass by the freezer section in the supermarket, I can’t help yearning for everything from tubs of Ben and Jerry’s (Chocolate Fudge Brownie? Cherry Garcia? Yes please…) to a simple choc-ice. Thankfully there are some decent dairy-free ice-cream alternatives on offer. They might not be quite as hedonistic and spoiling as the real thing, but they come pretty darn close. These two are my essential standbys for ice-cream emergencies on spring and summer days:

Swedish Glace

This “luxury non-dairy ice-cream” is lactose-free, gluten-free, cholesterol-free, GM- free and kosher-approved. The texture is perhaps slightly softer than a conventional ice-cream, but it’s convincingly creamy, and satisfyingly self-indulgent. Swedish Glace also comes in a choice of four flavours: juicy raspberry, rich chocolate, smooth vanilla and wild blueberry. I haven’t managed to track down the blueberry yet, but the other three flavours are available in most large supermarkets and health-food shops. All are properly scrumptious, and the vanilla in particular makes the ideal companion to a whole variety of puddings, cakes and fruit salads. But why Swedish? I have no idea…

Belhaven Fruit Ice

This deliciously fruity “guily-free ice cream” is tricky to track down outside Edinburgh and the surrounding area, but if you should find yourself in that neck of the woods, it is well worth seeking out. Made on a fruit farm in the small seaside town of Dunbar, East Lothian, Belhaven Fruit Ice is entirely dairy, fat and gluten-free and has a 40% fruit content. Its creamy texture makes it feel much closer to a proper ice-cream than a sorbet. Raspberry and strawberry are my favourite flavours, but it also comes in apple and lemon varieties. If you’re in Edinburgh, you can track down Belhaven Fruit Ice at Valvona and Crolla or on the Saturday Farmer’s Market.

Stateside, there seems to be an enormous range of other dairy-free ice-creams available, in everything from cookie-dough to green tea flavour. Tofutti, Soy Dream, Rice Dream, So Delicious, Purely Decadent, WholeSoy Glace, Oatscream, Temptation and Chicago Soy Dairy are amongst the various brands out there. I haven’t managed to find any of these in the UK as yet, but I’ll be keeping my eyes open: after all, who could resist the chance of to sample a few extra ice-creams at this time of year?

More ice-cream ideas to come, but in the meantime… what are your favourite dairy-free summer treats?

Submission from the Free Encouragement project by BOOOOOOOM and Design for Mankind. Who could say better than that?