Almond Milk & Almond Cake

Since I can't have dairy at the moment, and don't like soya milk that much (small understatement) I've been looking for alternative milk substitutes. My favourite so far is Oatly Oat Milk. It is lovely and even comes is a very very yummy chocolate flavour. But it's not cheap.

And the other day I saw almond milk in a wholefoods shop, which was even less cheap, but the idea sounded nice. So after a bit of googling I decide to give making my own a shot, and I'm glad I did - it is so quick and easy, and definitely a fraction of the cost of buying it.

I just took 1/2 a cup of almonds (with the skin on) - i.e. a big handful, 5 dates - i.e. a small handful and a pint of water, put them in the liquidiser, and blended them. I then strained the liquid through muslin set in a sieve, and the resulting liquid is the almond milk. Job done! But left in the muslin was a kind of wet ground almondy daty pulp, that I couldn't bring myself to throw away.

So I made cake! Just a regular sponge recipe tweaked to include the almonds.

Almond Milk Left-Overs Cake

2 eggs

100g butter (or in this case dairy free sunflower margarine)

100g soft brown sugar

50g self raising flour

the almond/date pulp from the almond milk recipe above (about 100g)

Option 1) stick it all in the food processor and blitz.

Option 2) Cream butter and sugar, add eggs with a little bit of the flour and beat, then mix in the rest of the flour and ground almond mixture.

Pour into a greased 8in (20cm) cake tin and bake at about 180C for about 25 mins.

I covered mine with ready made chocolate icing, because I was in a hurry, it is dairy free, and tastes nicer than home made dairy-free 'butter' icing! But a proper butter icing with a hint of lemon would also be ace I think!