Muffin Bread (GF)

These soft, moist, small breads are really tasty, and something I would recommend to everyone ! They are based on the recipe for English Muffins from Hey, That Tastes Good! I've made something like these before, but this batch turned out even better ! A real hit. I'm going to bake these for New Year's Eve, to go with the soup, for the whole family. Perhaps some sunflower seeds would be tasty too... Yes, I think that would be nice :-) I hope they will turn out as fine as these did. Always hard to predict, gluten-free bread-baking ;-)

Furthermore, I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year ! I hope 2009 was a fine year for everyone, and 2010 will be even better...

Now on to the recipe.


English Muffins

Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup buckweat flour
• 1/4 cup brown gluten-free bread mix (I used "Finax")
• 1/2 cup tapioca starch
• 1/4 cup corn starch
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 T sugar
• 2 t instant yeast
• 1 t olive oil
• 3/4 cup hot water

Blend the dry ingredients, then add the oil and water. Stir until blended, then beat about 2 minutes. Lightly oil your English muffin tins, sprinkle coarse cornmeal in the bottoms. Divide the batter between the tins. Let rise for about 20 minutes and preheat the oven to 190°C. Bake the muffins for 15 minutes.

Coconut Rocks (GF)

I've got a strange feeling about these. They taste great, that's true. But when I baked them for the first time, last Sunday, I got a phone call from my father to tell me my Grandfather had just died...

I'm still quite shaken.
And it feels strange to bake these again... But I still had some coconut left, and my boyfriend really liked them. (So did I, truth to be told.) There's nothing wrong with these cookies, but I know that every time I bake or eat one, I will think of last Sunday. Of November 8th, 2009. Of my Grandfather.

That's not a bad thing, I guess...


Coconut Rocks (Coco Rochers)

Ingredients:

• 2 egg whites
• 140g shredded, unsweetened coconut
• 130g white sugar (or powdered sugar)

Preheat the oven at 180°C.
Beat the egg whites until stiff. Add the sugar and beat again. Add the coconut and mix well.
Put small piles of dough on a baking plate. Bake them till golden brown, about 15min.

Pumpkin Pie (GF)

It's October, and the weather is horrible. Yes, it is autumn ! I saw pumpkins in the grocery store, and I remembered I have never baked a pumpkin pie. Actually, I have never eaten a pumpkin pie. You see, it's not that well-known or popular around here. So I decided to just go for it, and bake a pie. And make soup, perhaps. And maybe even bake pumpkin bread, if I can find a decent gluten-free recipe. Oh yeah, I'm full of pumpkin now !

This will also be my entry to this months "Go Ahead Honey, it 's Gluten Free!" (a monthly blog event, originated by Naomi Devlin.) Our host for October is Heather of Life Gluten Free, and she chose "Pumpkin Treats!" as a theme.

So, my Pumpkin Pie. This is a crustless pie, based on this recipe from Karine, the Gluten-free Goddess.

Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients:

• About 400g pumpkin puree
• 350ml milk
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 eggs
• 3/4c brown sugar
• 1/2c buckwheat flour
• 2 tablespoons tapioca starch
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• some vanilla
• a pinch of salt
• spices according to taste. I used cinnamon, ginger and some cayenne. I would have added ground cloves as well, but I didn't have any, so I left it out. You can, of course, just use pumpkin pie spices.

Preheat the oven at 175°C.
Mix all the ingredients. Make sure everything is well blended. I used a regular mixer, but a blender or food processor would be handy, I guess.
Pour the batter in a buttered pie plate of about 22-26cm. Put it in a preheated oven and bake for about an hour until ready. The pie should be firm but soft (not wet).

Let it cool on a pie rack and enjoy !

Mine is nicely soft and spicy, with a slight bite. And boy, does it taste good on a rainy monday afternoon !

French Bread (GF)

Goodness ! This bread is unbelievable ! Omygodomygodomygod ! I truly hope the next batch of these will turn out as well as these, they were yummy ! Soft, not dry, not sticky, very tasty, ... Succes !

French Bread

Ingredients
• 1 cup quinoa flour
• 1 1/2 cup potato starch
• 1/2 cup tapioca starch
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoon instant yeast
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3 large egg whites
• 1 teaspoon cider vinegar
• 1 cup warm water

Combine the dry ingredients. Add the olive oil and egg whites and mix. Add the vinegar and the water. Mix for 2 minutes, adding some water if needed to make a soft dough.

Spoon the dough onto a baking form. You can brush the top with some beaten egg white. Place the baking forms in a cold oven on a middle rack. Turn the oven on to 220°C and bake for 30 – 35 minutes. Cool the loaves on a wire wrack before slicing.

GF Chocolate Muffins

I had a pack gluten-free flour that was reaching it's expiry date - a perfect excuse to bake ;-) My boyfriend wasn't really in the mood for waffles, so I had to think of something else. I decided to try a recipe for chocolate muffins.

These are quite good. Not as good as regular chocolate muffins, I have to admit. But, well, I can't eat the regular ones, and I can eat these. My boyfriend thinks they're yummy, so I guess they're quite alright :-)

Gluten-free Chocolate Muffins

Ingredients:
• 210g gluten-free flour mix
• some baking powder
• 40g cocoa powder
• a pinch of salt
• 150g brown sugar
• 2,5dl milk
• 60g butter (good quality)
• 120g coarsly chopped chocolate

Preheat the oven at 180°C.
Mix the flour with the baking powder, cocoa, sugar and salt. Make a hole in the middle. Melt the butter (I add the butter to the milk, and heat the milk). Pour the milk and butter in the hole. Stir the mixture. Add the chopped chocolate and mix it through the dough. Fill your muffin-forms with the dough and bake in a preheated oven for about 20 minutes.

Chocolate Fudge Brownies - GF

Last weekend I wanted to make fudge, as a present. Unfortunatly, the fudge turned out a bit too sticky. It was firm, but I couldn't cut it in pieces and take them of the baking sheet.

So I had to make something else with it.... After some pondering, it came to me: Fudge Brownies ! These turned out great. And they taste even better after a day (or two).

Fudge

Ingredients:
• 125g sugar
• 50ml coffee milk
• 75g firm butter
• 175ml cream
• 225g sugar
• a pinch of salt
• some vanilla

Heat the first batch of sugar until it melts. Don't forget to stir ! Heat it a little more, it needs to get a nice lightbrown color. Then add the coffee milk and the cream. Keep stirring. Finally add the butter, the rest of the sugar, the vanilla and the salt. Stir frequently and heat the mixture to aprox. 120°C, when it's thick and liquid. Cool down the mixture, whilst stirring - that way you create the fudge-structure. Pour out the mix on a plate (lined with baking paper). Put some baking paper on top of it too, to prevent the fudge from drying out. Let it cool completely.

Now, that didn't really work out for me. I scooped out the fudge I needed for the brownies, and warmed it up a little to make it liquid.

Chocolade Fudge Brownies

Ingredients:
• Fudge (I didn't measure it. I think it was about one cup)
• 115g firm butter
• 180g chocolate (I used dark)
• 3 eggs
• 120g sugar
• 40g tapioca starch
• 50g glutinous rice flour (= Sweet rice flour)
• 50g rice flour

Melt the butter. Add the chocolate pieces and stir constantly over low heat until the chocolate is melted. Remove from heat and whisk until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, stir in the sugar, then the flours.

Scrape half of the batter into a prepared pan. Drop half of the fudge over the brownie batter, and drag a knife through to swirl it slightly. Spread the remaining brownie batter over, then drop the remaining fudge over the top of the brownie batter. Use a knife to swirl it slightly.

Bake in a preheated over (175°C) for 35 to 45 minutes. The brownies are done when the center feels slightly firm. Remove from the oven and cool completely before cutting.

Chocolate Crinkles - GF

Cookie-baking-time ! I used this recipe to make some chocolate cookies. They taste very good, you can't even tell they're gluten-free ! They are very sweet, so I might add less sugar next time I make them....


This is also my entry for Sugar High Friday this month: Sweet Without the Wheat. The challenge is to make a dessert without any wheat whatsoever. Great challenge for me, being coeliac ;-) Fact is, there are quite some desserts that are naturally gluten-free, for instance chocolate mousse, pudding, fudge, ... But I choose cookies this time.

Chocolate Crinkles

Ingredients:
• 125ml vegetable oil
• 115g dark chocolate
• 400g sugar
• 3 eggs, room temperature
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 250g rice flour mix
• 1/2 t xanthan gum
• 1/4 t salt
• 1 t baking powder

Melt chocolate, then mix with oil and sugar. Mix in eggs, one at a time. Stir in the vanilla, then add the rice flour mix, xanthan gum, salt and baking powder. Mix everything together, then stick the bowl in the fridge for a few hours.
Heat oven to 175°C. Form dough into small balls. Place them on a greased cookie sheet (about 3cm apart), and bake 10-12 minutes.

Strawberry Mozzarella Salad

I wanted something light for lunch. Something different. So I had this traditional Mozzarella dish, "Insalata Caprese", but with strawberries. Yumm.

Mozzarella-Strawberry-Basil Salad

• Mozzarella - the high quality stuff
• Several strawberries - I think I used 6
• Fresh basil
• Olive oil

It couldn't be more easy. You just slice the mozzarella and strawberries. Then you compose the salad: Alternate slices of mozzarella with sliced strawberry. Sprinkle pieces of fresh basil over the salad. Add freshly ground peper to taste, and finally drizzle on some good olive oil. Serve straigh away.

Belgian Waffles (GF)

Not quite a snack for Easter, but I wanted to bake waffles for some time. Today I found time to do so, and yummy they were !


Belgian Waffles - GF

Ingredients:
• 300g rice flour mix

(I used 200g rice flour + 75g tapioca starch + 25g potato starch, but the more common mix is 200g rice flour + 35 tapioca starch + 65g potato starch)

• 75g white sugar
• 2 packs vanilla sugar (8g each)
• a pinch of salt
• 10g baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 eggs
• 75g good quality butter
• 300ml soured milk (add 2 teaspoons of vinegar)


Melt the butter. (You can melt it in the milk. That's how I do it, it's safer and easy.)
Mix the flour and the baking powder with the sugar, vanilla sugar and salt. Make a little hole in the middle, and add the eggs.
Slowly add the milk and melted butter. Keep stirring till you get a nice even dough, without lumps.
Let the dough rest for about 15 min. Warm your waffle iron in the mean time. Add some dough and let it bake for a couple of minutes (depends on your waffle iron. For me, 3 minutes is excellent).

Speculaas (Sugar High Friday #53)

I got a message from Scrumptious, directing me to the next round of Sugar High Friday. For those who don't understand what I am talking about: Sugar High Friday is a blog event started by Jennifer of The Domestic Goddess, with a new theme and host each month. It's all about desserts ! The theme this month is very original: The Test of Time - Desserts over a century old.

At first, I didn't have any inspiration. But then lightning struck me! Speculaas! It's a cookie, traditionaly baked for St Nicolas' Eve but nowadays available all year round, that is mostly eaten in Belgium and the Nederlands. It's very popular here. Wikipedia told me that speculaas is also known as "Dutch Windmill Cookies", if that rings a bell to you.

That traditional cookie must be over a century old. And a little research told me I was right. A baker from Hasselt (Belgium), Antonie Deplée, acquired a license for "Hasseltse Speculaas" on January 13th, 1870! He called it:

« une espèce de pain d'amandes connu sous le nom de spéculation » - A kind of almond 'bread' known under the name spéculation.

The cookies are thin, slightly browned and very crispy, but what makes them special, is the mixed spices that are used. It's a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white peper. Real speculaas have images or figures stamped on the front side. However, I have no such stamp, so my cookies are very plain.

I like speculaas very, very much. So you can imagine my relief when I found a relatively good recipe for a gluten-free version. It's not the same, but it tastes quite like it, and it's good and yummy too.


So, now on the recipe:
Gluten-free Speculaas

Ingrediënts:
• 100g buckweat flour
• 100g rice flour
• 100g good quality butter
• 125g brown sugar
• 8g vanilla sugar
• a pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 Tbsp mixed speculaas spices

(to mix your own spices: 30g ground cinnamon, 10g ground cloves, 10g ground nutmeg, 5g ground white pepper, 5g ground anise seed, 5g ground coriander seed)

Simply mix all the ingrediënts and knead them into a ball. Put it away in the fridge for at least an hour.
Take a bit of the dough and form a small ball (rolling between your hands). Put the ball on a baking plate (covered with baking paper) and press it flat. You can also make figures, or basically anything you want.
Put the plate with the cookies in a preheated oven (175°C) and bake them for about 10min. They'll be soft when you take them out of the oven, but they'll get hard when they cool. So don't worry. Let the cookies cool until they are firm enough to handle. Put them on a cooling rack and let cool completely.

It's strange to bake these on the First Day of Spring, it's more of an "Autumn-cookie" :-)

Cornmeal Pancakes (Gluten-Free)

I still have quite a lot of cornmeal left, so I decided to try some cornmeal pancakes (Next on my baking-list: cornbread :-P). I used this recipe as a base, but I altered it for sweet pancakes.
And O My God, Success ! This are by far the best pancakes I had since I'm eating gluten-free. I am so going to make these again, and try out different variations.

Gluten-Free Cornmeal Pancakes

Ingredients:
• 250g cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon salt (but I'll add less next time)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder (GF)
• 10g vanilla sugar
• 190ml milk
• 2 Tablespoons melted butter
• 1 egg

Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl: cornmeal, salt, baking powder and sugar. Add the milk and butter, and mix the batter until it's well combined. Add the egg and whisk.
Melt some butter in a saucepan. Pour some batter in the pan and bake on both sides, until ready. You can make the pancakes any size you want. The batter is quite firm, so you can even make figures if you like ;-)

Gluten-Free Chocolate Cake

We got a bunch of eggs from my 'father-in-law'. And I've got a pack of cornmeal that I have to use, because it's about to expire. So I thought I'd bake something... I asked T. what he would like. Oh, a chocolate cake, you haven't baked that in a while. Well, indeed I haven't. In fact, I haven't baked one since I'm gluten-free. So it was decided: I had to try baking a gluten-free chocolate cake. I searched for a recipe, found too much delicious-looking-cakes and couldn't chose. In the end, I picked a recipe for a regular chocolate cake that I had marked a long time ago.

It's good. It's chocolate cake, yet gluten-free. But there's room for improvement; the cake still is a bit dry, and I like a chocolate cake that really tastes a lot like gooey chocolate... But hey, it's good and I can eat it, I'm not complaining :-)


Gluten-Free Dark Chocolate Cake

Ingredients:
• 90g coarsly chopped dark chocolate
• 115g unsalted butter
• 90g dark brown sugar
• 1 Tablespoon dark syrup
• 175g flour / I used 145g cornflour and 30g potato starch
• 25g cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking powder (GF)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 large eggs (beaten)
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 90ml milk

Preheat the oven to 170°C.
Melt the chocolate, butter, sugar and syrup in a heavy pan (with a thick bottom) on low heat. Make sure you stir frequently. Let it cool slightly.
Sift the flours, cocoa, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl. Make a pit in the middle, and pour the mixture into it. Mix it carefully. Then add the eggs, vanilla and milk. Mix it with a wooden spoon, until everything is combined well.
Pour the mixture in a buttered cake mould. Put it in the oven and bake it for 40 minutes or until ready. Make sure you check it frequently.
Let it cool before taking it out of the mould.


Extra note: The cake is still very good after 2 days (kept in the fridge). I find it still very tasty. Also, the cake isn't too heavy. I had a bit for breakfast, and my stomach wasn't upset, even though I normally don't eat such things in the morning.

Gluten free Oreo Cookies (Home made, ofcourse !)

Today is my birthday, so I figured I could give myself a treat.

Inspired by this month's theme of "Sugar High Friday", which is "Copycat", chosen and hosted by Palachinka, I made Oreos. Since being gluten-free, I'm in the need of a good chocolate cookie, and this cookie certainly is !















I based myself on this recipe for gluten-free Oreos, but had to adapt it a bit, because I didn't have the right kind of flours...
So here goes my version:

Gluten Free Homemade Oreos

Ingredients:
• 115g butter, room temperature
• 200g sugar
• 1 egg
• 64g potato starch
• 34g buckwheat flour
• 64g rice flour
• 64g dark cocoa powder (unsweetened)
• 1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder (GF)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 175°C.
Beat butter until creamy and smooth.
Add sugar. Cream together.
Add the egg. Beat together again.
In a separate bowl, combine the remaining ingredients (the flours, cocoa powder, xanthan gum, baking soda, baking powder, and salt).
Add dry ingredients to sugar/egg/butter mixture. Mix together until the dough comes together. This takes a while, but don't worry, just keep mixing.
Cover a baking plate with baking paper.
Pinch the dough off in small bits (teaspoon size) and roll in to a ball. Place them on the parchment paper. Place another (small) piece of parchment paper on top of the ball and press with a flat-bottomed glass to aprox. 5mm thickness. Continue placing balls and flattening them but be sure that the flattened cookies have enough space between them.
Bake the cookies for 8 - 9 minutes. Allow to cool a couple minutes before sliding on to a cooling rack and cooling completely.
Cookies can be eaten as is, stored in an airtight container for up to 10 days or so. Or you can fill them. Which I didn't really do...














Actually I like my chocolate cookies as they are, without cream. But especially for Sugar High Friday, an event created by Jennifer, The Domestic Goddess, I made a couple with a sugary filling. It isn't as butter-y as the real Oreos, but hey, these are my cookies ;-)