Gluten, Dairy & Egg Free Chocolate Custard

When my son Alex was first diagnosed with food allergies we had to take a lot of major food groups out of his diet. Like many of you reading this, we had to learn to cope with what you have and just get on with it.

Then about a year later when he was diagnosed with Eosinophilic Oesophagitis (EoE) we lost a whole heap more, and this meant I had to cook without wheat, dairy, soy, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, rice, sesame, barley, rye and beef. It was pretty tricky (damn hard actually), but once he got well we were able to start introducing foods to see what he could tolerate.

We had quite a few fails in the beginning but then we hit gold.....almonds were a pass which gave us almond meal to bake with!! We passed a few more tree nuts and then his allergist did a baked egg challenge in her rooms and that was successful for no anaphylaxis - hooray!! We trialed baked egg then for a month before passing it for EoE and what a difference that made to my baking - to have egg and almond meal! Those of you who have been through something similar will understand what a difference it made.

 
About 9 months later Alex had a hospital challenge for cooked egg, and he passed this which was great. Trouble was he wasn't used to eating egg and he didn't like it. We persisted with trying to get him to eat it and he would in tiny amounts. I put egg in the chocolate custard he was fond of to keep it in his diet.

A few months ago I managed to convince Alex to try a bacon and egg sandwich one night and that was it, he was hooked! This was an easy way to keep the egg in his diet (he was having one bacon and egg sandwich a week). The trouble was that with this higher quantity of more than one egg a week symptoms of EoE started appearing. Now it took me a while to work this out because he had passed egg some time ago and had I moved on thinking egg was fine but now I've worked out egg is the culprit it's pretty obvious. His EoE symptoms are not completely resolved still so I needed to come up with a new recipe for the chocolate custard he loves to see if taking out the egg in that will make a difference. 

 
This recipe can be modified for almost any dietary restrictions, and it's pretty yummy. I find that the combination of two milks gives it a 'normal' taste and it's not too coconutty (which my son doesn't like). I used organic oat milk which is not gluten free but you can use any dairy free milk you like.

That's it! Enjoy. Lisa x