Panforte-the other fruitcake.

This is a fabulous mixture of chocolate, fruit, honey and nuts. This recipe is adapted from one in Martha Stewart Living, December 2000. Its ready to eat off the bat, and also contains no added fat (apart from what already is in the chocolate and nuts). You can increase the amount of nuts and fruit with no problem.

4 oz hazelnuts
3 oz dried cherries (I used the tart Montmorency, from Trader Joes)
2 tbsp spiced rum (original recipe called for brandy, which I don't have...I haven't figured out the intricacies of gluten-free drinking yet--all I know is NO BEER)
4 oz semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/4 cup chocolate chips
1 tsp cocoa powder
1/2 cup amaranth flour
1/2 cup rice flour
1 tsp cinnamon
2/3 cup of honey
2/3 cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 350, toast nuts and remove the skins. Reduce the heat to 300, grease a 9 inch springform pan, and 'flour' with cocoa powder.

Place nuts, cherries, chocolate, and cocoa powder in a heatproof bowl and add rum. Leave to soak. Mix flours and cinnamon in another small bowl.

Combine honey and sugar in saucepan, bring to a boil, reduce heat, simmer for about two to three minutes. Pour heated syrup over the fruit-nut mixture, stir until the chocolates are melted. Add flour mixture.

Put the goop in the springform pan, and bake for about 30 minutes, remove from oven and let cool. I've found it slices better when still slightly warm.

Mini-mincemeat tartlets...

After having gone to a British School for a number of years, I associate mincemeat with Christmas. Before going gluten-free, I had found a wonderful recipe in Bon Appetit, 1998 for little mincemeat tarts. I had been quite a baker in those days, mailing family members boxes of Christmas goodies...


And so, today, in honor of Christmas past, present, and future, I give you my variation on a stalwart British tradition:

Dough:
1/2 cup almond flour
1/4 cup potato flour
1/2 cup rice flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1/4 cup cornmeal (can substitute quinoa flour or cornstarch)
6 tbsp powdered sugar
2 tsp grated, fresh orange peel (or to taste)
scant 1/4 tsp salt
1/2 stick butter
1/2 pkg cream cheese
1 egg yolk
orange juice (prob will not need it)

Blend all flour ingredients, add orange peel, then fats, finally egg yolk. Add OJ if mixture isn't clumping. Chill dough for 1/2 hour.

Mincemeat filling:
3/4 cup mincemeat
3 tbsp minced crystallised ginger
1/4 tsp cinnamon
4 tbsp powdered sugar
1 tsp grated orange peel (or to taste)

Mix together all mincemeat ingredients.

Butter a mini-muffin tin. Preheat oven to 375. Line muffin cups with dough (can roll out and cut out circles, or roll into little balls and press into the sides to form a little cup) Fill cups with approx 1 tsp of mincemeat each. Bake for approx 10 minutes.

Edit: The dough does not roll out well. The pic shows both 'thumbprint' type: which didn't hold together well on the sides, and the little 'muffin' tin ones, which held up better. They need to cool before you can take them out, as the dough is very tender. We ended up pinching out a cup and placing it in the mini-muffin tin, which worked best.

A fabulous new cookbook! (Not gluten-free)

I'm reading a wonderful cookbook, which I discovered by accident, called Demolition Desserts. Its most emphatically not a gluten-free cookbook, but it has some wonderful ideas and recipes, a lot of which have very gluten-free components which can be easily adapted to new recipes.

I am quite impressed. She does do a lot of meringue, but she also makes some fabulous sorbets, puddings, fruit-based things.

A couple of complete gluten-free desserts she makes:

Cocoshok: a cool dessert with the flavors of German Chocolate Cake
Black on Black: chocolate, cherries, licorice icecream
Upside-Down Pineapple Parfait: pineapple, vanilla mochi cake (rice flour!), cocnut, gelato.
Concord Express..


Some that would be easily changed to g-f, either by subbing gf ingredients or products:

Warm Chocolate Cake Crottin uses breadcrumbs, just sub gf breadcrumbs.
S'More A Palooza uses crushed graham crackers, either leave out or use crushed gf gingersnaps, leave out the malt for the chocolate sauce.
Waking Up in a City That Never Sleeps uses 'graham cracker powder'. Easily left off or substituted.

I'm not going through the whole list, but suffice it to say, I think I'm buying this cookbook. Not only does she have fabulous titles, and fabulous desserts, a surprising number of which are gluten-free, she also goes through a nice description of various ingredients and how they work, including agar-agar and Xanthan Gum...

Most of the dessert combinations can be made gluten-free by leaving out a component, but its just wonderful that there are gluten-free combinations that she makes, including a gluten-free cake! And she has a good Resources list.

What I wish...

I wish that professional bakers and chefs would contribute to a book on gluten-free cooking. I love reading books by Nick Malgieri, Dorie Greenspan, Shirley Corriher, Alice Waters, Gale Gand, Jacques Torres, Mario Batali...

I just really, really would love to get a cookbook together that has real gluten-free food from different countries. Something different, something good. I want to be able to have a real approximation of a baguette, or be able to recreate the gluten-free bread I had in Paris...

(If anyone in Paris is reading this, email me and we'll talk about you supplying me with the gluten-free bread).

Even if the Queen Mary II chefs came out with a gluten-free cookbook. I wish I had gotten the recipe for their gluten-free bread.

I don't want any more recipes written by amateurs. I love creating my own recipes, but some of them need help... particularly with bread.

I have created a monster...I think...

So I was in Trader Joes, about two weeks ago. And I mentioned to the manager that Trader Joes really needs to do something to showcase some of the gluten-free items they have hidden away, like the brown rice tortillas, which are with the regular tortillas, and I only found by accident. They have a lot of gluten-free stuff in the freezer section, also hidden. I did state that those two sections were what they really needed to focus on, even if they just made a little label that 'popped' that had the gluten-free G on it.

I walked (hobbled, actually, which is a whole other story), into Trader Joes on Friday, to be greeted by gluten-free signs in the canned foods and snack sections. Little blue and yellow signs, popping up all over.

Very nice, but still none in the frozen/refrigerated section. At least as of then.

But it still is nice to see.

Now if they;d just stop discontinuing my favorite gluten-free things..... And maybe making a few more things gluten-free. It is so frustrating to read through the ingredients and find that it has a speck of something that isn't safe (usually the soy sauce). So many things there are almost safe, but not quite...why not go the extra mile and make them safe?

Sunflower surprises

So, you know there is a recipe for a peanut butter cookie out there that is gluten-free? Wonderful. Except for the fact that I really really dislike peanut butter. BLECH.

So I took the recipe and used sunflower seed butter instead. Yummy! Its just one egg, 1 cup of sunflower seed butter, one cup of brown sugar, a splash of vanilla, a 1/2 tsp of baking soda, and a 1/2 bag of chocolate chips.

Bake in a 350 oven.

This might even be safe for kids with nut allergies too!

Yay!

Gluten-free tea on the Queen Mary...

Yes, more pics from the Queen Mary II. They made a gluten-free tea for me! No scones (waaaah) but they did make cucumber sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, and ham sandwiches (it was a platter of them...my reaction was OMG!) and two kinds of cake.

I was so pampered there! I'm amazed that I lost weight.