Dairy Free at Christmas: The Sweet End Is the Hard Part

By Jodie Smith, Product & Hamper Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

Dairy free Christmas desserts come from the fruit and sugar aisle, not the chocolate one. Fruit jellies, uncoated Turkish delight, sorbet and a bowl of iced cherries all work. Butter, cream and milk chocolate account for nearly everything else at the sweet end.

So plan the ending first. Every other course already has a dairy free version sitting on it: prawns, potatoes roasted in oil, salads, cold meat. Dessert is the course with no default, which is why it gets solved badly at 4pm on Christmas Eve. Start in the dairy free range.

Why the sweet end is where dairy free breaks

Count what survives on a standard dessert table. Pudding is suet and butter, and the custard beside it is worse. Pavlova is fine until the cream goes on. Trifle is custard and cream in layers. Shortbread is butter by definition. Rocky road and chocolate almonds are milk chocolate, and ice cream is milk. The whole table, and none of it a surprise, which is why it catches people. It is too obvious to check.

What is less obvious is where the dairy hides, and it is usually the coating rather than the centre. One maker sells a plain rose Turkish delight chest and a chocolate coated twin pack of the same rose Turkish delight. The sweet did not change. The outside did, and the outside is the whole answer. Marshmallows sit the same way, plain and toasted coconut next to chocolate coated, and dried fruit is fine until somebody yoghurt coats it.

The second trap is assuming one free-from label covers another. Our gluten free pure butter shortbread is exactly what it says: gluten free, and made with butter.

Dairy free and vegan are not the same claim

Worth getting right once, because it decides how you shop for the rest of December. A vegan label is a statement about the recipe: no milk, cream, butter, whey or milk solids. That makes vegan options the fastest shortcut a dairy free shopper has.

It works in that direction only. Dairy free is the wider list, because honey, egg white and gelatine are all fine for someone avoiding dairy and none of them are vegan. Nutworks Manuka honey macadamias at $7.95 for 75g are hand coated in Australian Manuka honey, which rules them out for a vegan guest and not for a dairy free one. The two guests are not one problem with one plate.

A vegan label also describes the recipe, not the factory. If you are dealing with a milk allergy rather than lactose intolerance, the may contain milk line on the back is what decides it, and that line can appear on a product with no dairy in the recipe. Nobody should take a dietary call from a blog post, ours included.

What to serve instead

Swaps rather than substitutes. A substitute invites comparison with the thing it replaced, and loses.

One note on the pudding row: we do not range Christmas puddings, so I am not steering you to ours. Roasted stone fruit is better on a 32°C day anyway.

The shelf stable half you can buy in October

Everything at the sweet end that suits a dairy free table is dry goods, so it is the part of Christmas you can order early and then stop thinking about.

• Pimlico vegan fruit jellies, $13.50 for a 350g box. Labelled vegan, made on natural flavours, and boxed like a gift rather than bagged like a servo lolly, which is why this one goes on the table rather than in a bowl in the kitchen. More of the style sits under fruit jellies.
• Real Turkish Delight rose chest, $12.95 for 250g. Uncoated, and the sweet here least bothered by a warm room. Check the pack rather than the range: the chocolate coated boxes sit alongside it.
• Plain roasted macadamias and mixed nuts, from around $7.95 for 75g. Salted rather than honey coated if the bowl also has to suit a vegan guest.
• Fruit paste and dried fruit pyramids, around $6.95, for the board that replaces the cheese course.
• Fruit juice gummies from the wider confectionery range, for the children's end of the table.

All of it keeps for months in a cupboard. Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday are dispatched the same day from our Corio, VIC warehouse, tracked with Australia Post. That is dispatch and not delivery, so December orders interstate want a week or two of slack. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100.

If the whole table is going plant based rather than just the sweet end, our vegan Christmas food guide covers the savoury half. For when to buy the rest of the meal, see Christmas food in Australia.

Sending it rather than serving it

Plenty of the people who ask us this are not cooking. They are posting a box to a parent, and lactose intolerance becomes more common with age, which makes it one to plan around in a gift going to a retirement village.

The reliable move is to send a box built without dairy in the first place rather than a standard hamper with the chocolate picked out. Vegan hampers do that job for a dairy free recipient with no interest in being vegan, because the constraint that built the box is stricter than the one you need. Ask first, and ask the specific question: lactose intolerance or a milk allergy. If it is going to a village or an aged care home, our guide to sending hampers to elderly parents covers who to address it to and what opens easily. Seasonal builds sit under Christmas hampers.

Common questions

What Christmas desserts are dairy free?

The ones built on fruit and sugar rather than butter and cream. Roasted or poached stone fruit, cherries kept over ice, sorbet, fruit jellies, uncoated Turkish delight, and a pavlova base topped with fruit instead of cream. Anything baked as a biscuit or set as a custard is the hard road.

Is Turkish delight dairy free?

Traditional Turkish delight is sugar, starch, water and a flavouring such as rosewater, so dairy is not part of the classic recipe. What changes the answer is what has been done to it: chocolate coated versions are not, and some ranges use cream or milk based fillings. Uncoated is the one to look at, and the ingredients panel is what confirms it.

What can I serve someone who is lactose intolerant at Christmas?

Most of the savoury table already suits them: cold seafood, potatoes roasted in oil, salads, cold meat, olives and bread. Watch the vegetables for a knob of butter, the gravy for cream, and the crackers on the board for milk powder. Then give dessert its own plan, because that is where the gap is.

Are fruit jellies dairy free?

Fruit jellies are a sugar, fruit and setting agent sweet, so dairy is not usually in the recipe. Check the setting agent, if that matters to you, and the may contain statement on the back. A vegan label on the box, as on the Pimlico jellies, settles the dairy question for the recipe itself.

Sort the sweet end in one sitting. A box of jellies, a chest of Turkish delight and a bag of nuts covers a dairy free guest for the afternoon, and all of it keeps until December. Start in the dairy free range, then read the pack before it goes on the table.