Dairy-free cakes, or rather the lack of them

Food intolerances seem to be everywhere these days. Sometimes it feels like every other person you meet is avoiding something - usually wheat or gluten, it seems. Yet lactose intolerance is apparently much more common - affecting 5 in every 100 people in the UK, according to NHS Choices, compared to 1 in 100 who have gluten intolerance (coeliac disease). But living with it can be suprisingly difficult.

This fact was drawn to my attention at the weekend when trying to find tea and cake with a friend who is newly diagnosed with lactose intolerance. This means she can't eat dairy products, including milk, butter, or cheese. To cut a long story short, she ended up having chips while the rest of us had cake. We happened to be in Wimbledon, but I suspect the story would have been much the same everywhere. And yet these days it's fairly easy to get gluten-free cakes. I can think of a couple of dedicated bakeries in Brixton, one on the market in my old home town of Norwich, numerous cafes that offer one or two gluten-free options alongside regular cakes - and that's just off the top of my head without any research.

The thing is, it's not hard to make a lactose-free cake. Any cake made with oil instead of butter is likely to be lactose free (such as carrot cake). But then there's the icing - butter icing or cream cheese icing will be equally banned, as is the whipped cream filling I had with my Victoria sponge cake.

I think it is a matter of education. Quite a lot of places offer soya milk, for example, which is lactose-free. But when it comes to baking they don't seem to think about it. It can just be a case of checking the ingredients - apparently Stork margarine is lactose-free, so cakes made with that would be fine (I haven't checked this personally, so please make your own checks before eating it if you are lactose-intolerant!)

Anyway, the cakes at the cafe we went to in Wimbledon were otherwise excellent. This was the Light cafe, which does a busy trade in afternoon teas. From 3pm (or a little before) a table is loaded with a fine selection of cakes and freshly baked scones.

The most impressive-looking was the mocha cake, which was three layers of chocolate sponge layered with coffee buttercream. I concluded that three thick layers of buttercream might actually be too much of a good thing, though it was still a very enjoyable cake. I also sampled a fine Victoria sponge, lavishly filled with whipped cream, though it could have taken a touch more jam.

I didn't get to try the scones, though the temptation was enormous, but I was told they were excellent. They came with proper clotted cream (none of your whipped stuff, which is a poor substitute where scones are concerned) and rhubarb jam which was also deemed delicious.

And the chips were good too, I'm told. So it could have been worse. But what about a nice dairy-free cake among the selection next time?

Light Cafe
48 High Street,
Wimbledon, London SW19
020 8946 3031 ‎
lightcafewimbledon.com