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" :-)