Just follow the recipe...

We make a spice cake with a caramel fudge frosting. The frosting is called
Buttermilk Icing and is from an old old cookbook that forms the basic of many
of our recipes.

Matisse knows how to adapt most baked goods so I can eat them (replace
milk with oat milk, buttermilk with oat milk plus cider vinegar, butter
with Spectrum shortening or lard, eggs with 1/4 cup applesauce, etc.)
as well as substituting raw sugar for white sugar, whole wheat flour for
white flour, etc.

So she wanted to make this cake and asked what she needed to do to
adapt the frosting recipe.

"Oh, no big deal," I assured her, "Just follow the recipe."

"Okay," she said, "the recipe calls for buttermilk, white sugar, butter,
corn syrup, and baking soda. How exactly do you want me to follow it?"

"Replace the buttermilk with oat milk and vinegar, the white sugar with
raw sugar, and the butter with coconut oil."

"What about the corn syrup?"

"You can omit that."

"So basically, the only thing I keep from the original recipe is the baking soda?"

"Yeah, and you cook it to soft ball stage and then beat just like the recipe says."

I guess I'd gotten so used to making substitutions on the fly that I didn't notice
I was replacing almost every single ingredient.

I found a recipe for a (no-bake) egg-free, dairy-free, soy-free, corn-free
pumpkin pie (thickened with gelatin and with coconut milk to stand in
for the dairy) and I'm trying to write my own recipe for an egg-free,
dairy-free, soy-free, corn-free chocolate cream pie.