Christmas Stocking Fillers

The following are worth looking into if you are looking for stocking filler treats that are dairy and soya free. You might even choose to share some of them with children!

• Iceland Kuchenmeister Stollen – one of the best brands of stollen happens to be suitable and if you go to Iceland you can pick up one of the big ones for the price of the same brand’s tiny ones available at other supermarkets! £2.00 for 500g; so good you could justify buying two! I should point out this is clearly labelled as “may contain” milk on their website
• Hotel Chocolat are not particularly good for soya-free options but they have recently launched a vegan “supermilk” option which is dairy, soya and even refined sugar free! It’s not a direct chocolate replacement if you’re not used to tucking into a huge bar of Fruit and Nut but it’s nice if you miss that ‘milk’ chocolate taste… Again, may contain milk.
• Hot off the press! Not even available yet, but Montezuma have launched a dairy-free milk chocolate range called (ingeniously) “like no udder”. The advent calendar is available here, but the bars are yet to be launched. Watch. This. Space.
• Asda Free From Gingerbread Santa – free from dairy, soya and gluten. These are a great Christmas treat where a lot of free-from stuff is non-seasonal.
• Montezuma Ginger & Orange Drinking Chocolate – I challenge anyone to tell me that they don’t need this in their life?! Subtly spiced and not overly sweet – this can be made with a range of dairy-free milks with delicious outcomes. Also the tub contains capsules of single-portion chocolate tokens so you don’t even need to measure out or estimate how strong you want it. If buying as a gift make sure to buy one for yourself; otherwise you might just not end up gifting the one you’ve bought!

That short window between having not gifted them and not just eaten them ourselves…

• On the other side – something to potentially look out for are lip balms. We’ve been caught out with this previously. Several lip balms contain soya oil which isn’t actually a registered allergen (the extraction process means that the protein shouldn’t be retained) but for those particularly sensitive it can still cause reactions. If you’re used to reacting to soya lecithin (which is also meant to be minimal for the protein) this is something to look out for.