We Made a Mary Berry Recipe Gluten & Dairy-Free

A lot of people are surprised to find out that the amazing world we currently live in has a TON of cup for cup substitutions for all sorts of dietary needs.

"Cup for cup" means the replacement behaves almost exactly like the original ingredient and so you can replace it in a recipe without changing the amount.

I teamed up with my beautiful equestrian friend Connie to pursue the delicious treats we see on The Great British Bake-Off.

Connie’s husband has a dairy allergy, so they are absolute pros when it comes to substitutes (I’ve had their homemade bread AND pasta… yeah that’s what their house is like). Y’all. You are gonna be so shocked at how easy this is. 

Here is Mary Berry’s Recipe:

Now all you gotta do is sub out Pamela’s Gluten-Free All Purpose Flour for the plain flour and sub Earth Balance Vegan Butter for the butter. That’s it. I’m serious. These products are that good. We trust our subs so much I documented a bake we had never done before, and other than some operator error it went really well.

This recipe is important to measure ingredients by weight, which is what most pros do nowadays. I always say cooking is an art and baking is a science.

Your measurements have to be much more precise for baking than they do for cooking. You can find pretty affordable baking scales on Amazon or even some local grocery stores. Connie weighed the ingredients for the crust while I got started on the jam.

If you don’t want to use processed sugar things like honey work great in its place. You just need to use ⅔ the amount (in this recipe it would be 6 oz of honey instead of 9 oz of jam sugar) and I don’t have a specific cook time. I cook the jam until the juices coat the back of the spoon I’m stirring with. Our baking assistant Nutmeg was very interested in what we were doing.

Connie mixed the ingredients together by hand but quickly remembered she wasn’t making pie crust and her hands became very sticky and very coated in dough, so we finished the job with a fork.

By the time we were rolling the dough the jam was looking positively scrummy and we took it off the heat to cool.

The next step will depend on what kind of tart tins you have, if they are NOT non-stick you’ll want to rub it down with some of the Earth Balance. We did have a non-stick pan but rubbed it down and the crust ended up a tiny bit greasy.

So if you do have a non-stick tart tin just go straight into pressing the dough into all those little crevasses and trimming the edges. Then chill the dough in the refrigerator and move onto the filling.

We creamed that butter and sugar until it was fluffy and we used almond meal instead of ground almonds.

I am assuming the difference is almond meal is more finely ground and *shrug* sometimes you just gotta use what you have.

We mixed all that stuff (eggs and almond extract and stuff) until it was a nice spreadable texture then we popped those tins in the oven to blind bake and enjoyed a cup of tea.

Once they came out we removed our pie weights (and by pie weights I definitely mean dry beans) and they looked pretty good! There was a little bubbling on a few parts but it wasn’t anything some jam couldn’t fix.

Mary’s instructions say to spread the filling on but we were worried about disrupting the jam so we piped our filling on. It also gave us the opportunity to do pretty things before we ultimately destroyed it to smooth and even the filling.

Those went back in the oven and we made our icing. The instructions don’t call for it but we added vanilla because vanilla is amazing and should go in everything and the texture needs to be “smooth and fairly thick” so we mixed it until it reached that consistency.

Instead of food coloring we used a little of our raspberry jam to color the pink icing, which the seeds made it a little more rustic. Which is what I call things that don’t look as neat and clean as I want them to.

And...these things came out looking BEAUTIFUL. STUNNING. I AM SO HAPPY WITH HOW THEY LOOK. 

See y’all? Allergy-friendly baking truly isn’t as daunting as it seems.

Next step was to let them cool and copy the GBBO by setting it on a mug to get it out of the tin.

The feathered icing is truly where we struggled. It set faster than we worked and the feathering didn’t go quite how we wanted to. But for a first try I’d have to say not bad at all!