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Gluten Free Crullers and Choux Pastry

We are snowed in here in Southwestern Ontario, so what better thing to do then make donuts! (Actually, I can think of a few things, but this was a good option :)  ).

Mark and I's favourite Tim Horton's donut (doughnut?) is their Honey Cruller. At some of the other donut joints around, they are also called French Crullers. Since Mark's celiac diagnosis in December, we have both missed having these donuts. Okay, not me, since I eat them when I am at my place, but I do feel bad for him for not being able to eat them too.

This recipe comes from a great site called "The Art of Gluten Free Baking". Love this site!  All the recipes have been good so far, and this one is excellent. I didn't totally follow the choux pastry recipe on her site, but I did like the beautiful photographs and step by step instructions. Her advice to use aluminum foil to transfer the crullers to the oil is genius.

As far as the choux pastry recipe goes, I used my regular recipe but substituted Jeanne's flour mix for the wheat flour. I've modified my regular recipe to use more of her mix, and I think the crullers need to cook until they are fairly well browned. A candy thermometer would help! If you don't have one, drop a 1 inch cube of potato into the oil, and if it starts bubbling around it and is softened but not browned in about 60 seconds then that should be about right. A thermometer really helps, though.

Mark's favourite picture of the crullers:

Gluten Free Brownies

Hello again!

Here's another gluten-free recipe for you. I was at home the other night and had a chocolate craving, and I decided to make brownies. Of course, along with the craving was the thought that I should make something that Mark could eat as well and so began the quest for gluten free brownies!

Since I was baking these at my house, the only gluten-free flour I had on hand was cornstarch. Mark's mom had sent me a great looking recipe for gf brownies, but that recipe required potato starch as the main flour.  So -- off to the local grocery store I went.  The only -- and I *do* mean only -- gluten-free flour they had there was a small packet of Club House Rice flour. I brought it home and decided to see what I could come up with.

A little note about experimenting with gluten-free baking: sometimes it just doesn't turn out. In this case, the brownies turned out AWESOME, but some of my experiments lately haven't been so successful.  Gluten free bread has kicked my you-know-what, but I will keep working on that. In this case, I couldn't find a recipe that had only the ingredients I had on hand. There is no xanthan gum or guar gum here (there is now :) ), just rice flour, cornstarch, and eggs, which is why I had to make things up as I went. I think this would be a good recipe if you are new to GF Baking, simply because the ingredients aren't too 'out there' and should be easy to find. If you are new to gluten free, it's worthwhile to follow a recipe until you're comfortable baking with new flours and ingredients - there are lots and lots of great things to eat on the gfree diet! 

The Chia and/or Flax seed that I've included in the recipe might be unusual for you, and so they are completely optional!  I like adding Chia seed because it acts, I think, as a binder for the ingredients, and it's good for you. Not that I, or anyone, should eat brownies because they are good for you (no thank you, black bean brownies! Give me sugar). However, a little bit of something that might almost be considered healthy makes it easier to justify eating a pan of sugar. You can also substitute out the cornstarch for any other starch, like tapioca or potato starch, if you are sensitive to corn.

Gluten Free Dairy Free Banana Cream Pie

Happy Holidays!

The title should read "Gluten free, dairy free, refined sugar free, banana cream pie", but that just seemed a little over the top long.

It was a good Christmas, with a nice brunch at my mom's -- where she made some delicious gluten free goodies for Mark.  We skipped dinner here, but did have a great banana cream pie. 

All right. I'll be honest - we didn't actually skip skip dinner. We ate bacon. And then banana cream pie. In a roundabout sort of way, we got at least a few food groups in.

The banana cream pie was a trial run for a lunch on Monday, as one of my friends is wheat intolerant as well.  So between the three of us we have two people who can't have wheat (one with no gluten either), and one dairy free person.  This pie has a custard made from light coconut milk, corn starch as thickener, maple syrup as sweetener, and meringue for the topping.

The crumb base is made from a crumbled cake I made using a recipe from the book "Babycakes: Vegan, mostly gluten free, mostly sugar free recipes from New York's most talked about bakery". I really, really wanted to like this cookbook, but have not had much luck with the recipes.

The recipe is after the jump, along with a mini-review of the book.

Waffle Bread Pudding - Leftover Tuesdays 6

 

It's Leftover Tuesdays #6 and this month it's being hosted by Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity . More good news is that I finally (FINALLY) got to make my Leftover Waffle Bread Pudding. It took some sly, spy-like moves to keep the family from eating the homemade belgian waffles, but I did it. 

Jell-O Jigglers

 

Who doesn't love Jello Jigglers? I think I eat more of these than my kids do. This is a little embarrassing to admit but I generally have to look up the recipe to remember how to make these jell-o goodies. I just can't seem to remember how to make them. This is a very, very easy recipe. If you use juice instead of water, it could almost be considered healthy. Add alcohol and it could be considered fun as well. I just noticed on the Kraft site that there is a comment that says: "Do not swallow jello jigglers whole". Not sure what's with that, but I'm sure thousands (maybe hundreds) of college students are trying it right now. Nothing better than a party trick involving Jello! Good fun. Now I have to make some more of these just to see what happens when you DO swallow jigglers whole.

Strawberry Cake

 

I find strawberry picking a very Zen activity. Which is fine, really, that I can do something in this crazy life of mine that brings me such peace. Except that I've now become the strawberry version of the zucchini neighbour. You know the type - plants an ENTIRE package of zucchini seeds in the spring, brings it over by the bushel load and eventually becomes the most feared person in the neighbourhood. That's me, with strawberries instead of zucchini. I get caught up in picking them and have to give most of them away. You wouldn't think that people could actually hate strawberries, but given enough of them they do. This brings us to Strawberry Cake. Strawberry season is almost here in southern Ontario and I still have a freezer full of last year's berries. Well, not full exactly, but I still have many strawberries. Mr. Chef usually uses them to make a fruit sauce for our waffles but even he has been a little challenged by the sheer mass of all that fruit. Strawberry Cake is something I had heard of but never tried. A little panic, a bit of internet searching, and plain old cheapness brought me to this cake recipe. It calls for frozen strawberries, some jello, and a boxed cake mix. Peasant food at its best.

Dutch Baby - Oven pancake

I have to admit that this is the first time I've ever eaten one of these. I was looking for a 'yummy' breakfast recipe, as per the request from my hyperactive 5 year old, and came across these Dutch Babies. It occurred to me, while the 5 year old bounced around my kitchen talking non-stop, that I could see why the Dutch would actually eat their babies. Then I read the recipe and decided it was an oven baked pancake, or an oven baked crepe. This dutch-baby recipe has no leavening in it other than eggs; this seemed to be the usual recipe, although I did find some that had some baking soda or powder in them. I decided simple was better (and cheaper). The recipe originally calls for 4 eggs but I've changed this to 3 or 4 eggs. We have our own chickens here on the farm, and our eggs are REALLY large - so I use 3 eggs. But if you are using grocery store eggs, you'll probably need 4 of them. I guess there's a 'method' to making these, which believe it or not I followed, so my suggestion is to actually read the instructions for guidance. I'm not sure what would happen if you didn't follow 'the method', but I wouldn't want to be responsible for any breakfast disasters.

Pineapple Pie

 

Pineapple Pie is a light, fluffy dessert that I had at my mother's house last week. Our family still gets together every other Sunday for Sunday dinner, and my mom likes to use us as guinea pigs and try out new recipes at these gatherings. This cream cheese based pie is one of those experiments. It's a delicious combination, very summer-y tasting, and not too heavy after a good supper. Pineapple Pie uses a graham cracker crust, which you can make yourself (the recipe for the crust is included), or you can buy a store bought graham crust. This recipe is very easy and tastes great, and it's a pie! Three things that make a keeper in my book.

Leftover Tuesdays - Chocolate chocolate chip Oatmeal Cake

 

Squeaking in my own Leftover Tuesdays entry just under the wire, here is Chocolate Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cake. Are you saying "huh"? Me too. My sister once mentioned that she should find a recipe for leftover Oatmeal, and four years later I've finally decided to post one for her. I personally don't like oatmeal, but add some chocolate, turn it into a cake, and it's edible. My sister's oatmeal is cooked plain, two parts boiling water to one part oatmeal, and her family adds cream and sugar as they like it, so that's the cooked oatmeal I've used in my recipe. 

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cake is kind of based on an Amish recipe I found many years ago. I've altered some things, added others, and finally decided I like this recipe. I've used leftover oatmeal here, but the original called for cooking the oatmeal right before you make the cake. I have to admit though, I've seen the other entries for Leftover Tuesdays, and to be honest - leftover oatmeal seems a little pedestrian compared to the other dishes! My mother always told me I was a peasant at heart, and I suppose it's definitely true when it comes to food. And I suppose I should admit that I eat this cake for breakfast (we call it the breakfast cake, which Mr. Chef says is just wrong).

Apple Oatmeal Squares

 

This is actually a combination of two old apple square recipes - one came from the Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyzyn and the other part of it is from an old church ladies cookbook I found lying around. I wanted this square to be like a date square without the dates. The Tightwad recipe (I think it was from the depression or something like that) does not call for sugar in the crumb topping, but the other recipe - an actual apple-date square recipe - did call for it. So like always, I improvised. And then I forgot half the ingredients as I was mixing it - so the picture may not be exactly what it will look like in its finished form. (I kept wondering why there was so little crumb mixture - once I added the oatmeal in, it seemed to work much better.)