What do you do when you can’t find dairy free ladyfingers in store?

You make your own!

Hypothesis 1: Making dairy free ladyfingers will be complicated.

Hypothesis 2: Dairy free ladyfingers will be delicious, light, and spongy, pairing beautifully cup of coffee (or serving as the base of something else… stay tuned!).

Method

Recipe Source:

Gemma’s Bigger Bolder Baking Homemade Ladyfingers

Dairy-Free Modifications:

Surprisingly, none! This recipe is meringue based and actually does not contain any dairy ingredients at all.

Allergen Warning

This recipe does contain egg- in fact it is entirely based on eggs- so if you have an egg allergy too I’d suggest you try something else for now. If there’s interest, I’ll work on it! In the meantime, check out these Pumpkin Snickerdoodles, Pumpkin Muffins with Crumble Topping, this amazing chocolate cake with raspberry jam and chocolate buttercream, and vegan meringues (see, egg-free meringue is possible, so who knows?!). Or, you can try the recipe author’s own egg-free version for yourself!

Procedure:

This recipe does involve whipping egg whites and egg yolks separately. The only change I made was reversing the order, first whipping the egg whites, cleaning out the bowl, and then beating the egg yolks. Egg whites won’t whip properly if you even have the smallest amount of fat in your bowl (from the egg yolks), so I didn’t want to take any chances.

This started as 4 egg whites, now whipped to stiff peaks. Talk about volume.

This is egg whites and yolks each beaten separately, plus a little sugar. Pretty amazing that you can get all of this from a few eggs, and what separating them and bringing them back together can do.

After whipping the egg whites and the yolks separately, each with sugar, you fold in the flour, pipe, and bake.

I didn’t have quite the right piping tip to make the most beautiful ladyfingers, but I can tell you how they tasted…

Results

After baking and cooling, these delicate little cookies were slightly crisp on the outside, but light and spongy on the inside. They’re not overly sweet or strongly flavored on their own, but tasted absolutely delicious dipped into a cup of hot coffee.

Discussion

Our hypotheses were - mostly - supported. Baking my own ladyfingers made me feel like I was in a Great British Bake Off technical, when they have to bake something people would normally buy in a package. That being said, though these are not the simplest cookies, but they weren’t as complicated as I had anticipated, and they worked on my first try!

Of course, if you are interested in some simple and deliciously dairy-free cookies, I recommend these honey cookies, chocolate crinkle cookies, almond flour cookies, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, whole wheat chocolate chip cookies, and the snickerdoodle.

So I wouldn’t describe these cookies as simple, but they also were not super complicated. I could also attribute that to the excellent directions in the recipe!

What I can say with more confidence is that hypothesis 2 was definitely supported. I’m no ladyfingers connoisseur, but these were delicious, with a texture exactly as described, and which paired beautifully with a cup of coffee. Who could resist? Not this coffee-loving lady.

While there are more and more allergen-friendly products on the market, sometimes, going dairy free or avoiding other allergens means DIYing more than you might expect. But, that doesn’t have to be as daunting as one might think, and can even be viewed as an opportunity to develop more skills and confidence in baking. But you don’t have to take my word for it!

Freezing Instructions: Also included in the original recipe, but these are freezable! Then, defrost at room temperature for 30 minutes and use as desired.

Dairy Free Ladyfingers