Comfort Food

I debated calling this post “experiments with almond milk”, but really the theme with both of these recipes is just “comfort food”.

My ultimate comfort food is chocolate cake. At one stage in my life, it was chocolate cake with a glass of milk, but really, it’s just chocolate cake. It doesn’t need to have icing, just needs to be cake. And chocolate.

Now the whole question of chocolate is one that can strike fear and resentment into many Crohnie hearts. A lot of Crohnies find their tummies very troubled by chocolate. When I was at my worst, it did hit that point for me, but I’ve been able to gradually put a small amount of chocolate back into my diet in recent weeks provided that I don’t go overboard.

In my attempts to find more interesting foods that are dairy free, I came across this recipe for chocolate cake - http://silk.com/recipes/chocolate-snack-cake

What appealed right away is that there are no eggs in it! There is very little fat in it (for cake), as most of that is replaced with applesauce. So I made a big batch of applesauce on Sunday, and used some of it for this recipe.

Here’s what I did -

1 cup flour
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1/4 cup sunflower oil
½ cup unsweetened applesauce
1 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup of almond milk

Cake mix

 Preheat oven to 180C/350F. I gave an 8-inch square pan a light covering of oil to grease it.

I mixed the dry ingredients together in one bowl, and the wet ingredients together in the other. Then I added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients until well combined.

About to go in the oven

 I baked it for 25 minutes and let it cool.

Finished cake

 Bloody hell, are these every nice! They are so moist! And completely hit the “comfort food” spot.


In my attempts to learn to like new things, I had a go at making rice pudding today. I never really developed a taste for rice pudding growing up. Canadian kids grow up on Jell-O instant pudding, not rice pudding. But loads of people in the UK grew up on rice pudding and there are many Crohnies who swear by it during a flare up. One of the IBD blogs I follow posted a recipe for rice pudding which they described as their ultimate comfort food. It cooks in the oven for several hours, so I made this this afternoon while multi-tasking and indulging my guilty pleasure for costume dramas and catching up on Winter Olympics Highlights.

This is their recipe - http://courageouswithcolitis.com/low-residue-simple-rice-pudding-desser/

And this is what I did -

1/3 cup short grain ‘pudding’ rice
3 tbs brown sugar
Dash of salt
2 cups water
2 cups almond milk
Good dash of cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
Small dash ground nutmeg
Small dash ground cloves

Rice pudding ingredients

I mixed in a deep casserole dish and put the lid on it. I put it in an oven at 150C/300F and pretty much ignored it for the next two hours. About every 30 minutes I would give it a stir.

Is this what rice pudding is supposed to look like?

I’m not sure this turned out the way it’s supposed to. I know the recipe said that it wouldn’t have a “creamy texture” if I used Almond Milk, but it’s really watery.

But it certainly made the kitchen smell good! I’m still not sure if I’m sold on rice pudding yet or not, but it wasn’t bad. It made a massive amount, so I’m going to have to eat for the next few days, so I’m going to need to learn to like it!





On a slightly related note, I defrosted the freezer the other day and had a good clear out of the fridge. Guess what I found on the so-high-I-can't-really-reach-it-never-mind-see-what's-up-there shelf on the door?

I really need to clean out my fridge more often

Yes, that's butter. See the expiry date? 20/07/2013. That's how long it's been since I've had butter and almost how long this "flare" has been going on. Needless to say, that got chucked out with the rubbish yesterday.