Gluten Free can be Fun!

We had a 'Martini and Cheese' party the other night.  Complete with gluten-free crackers.  There was no baking involved... but it was still a pretty amazing gluten-free meal.

Birthday Cakes :-)

It was my brother's birthday this past Friday and he wanted chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.  And I wanted to be able to eat the cake I made so: flour-less chocolate cake.  It was basically a super-chocolaty giant brownie - never a bad thing.  One of my aunt's refused to try it because she was afraid of the phrase 'gluten-free,' but the entire cake got eaten and everyone loved it!

This cake isn't gluten-free (so alas! I couldn't have any), but it came out so beautifully that I had to post it here.  I made it for a birthday at work and it's a Boston Cream Pie.  I even made the custard filling from scratch.  Which was not easy.  I've never even attempted to make custard before, but it was delicious (I totally ate a whole bunch of custard and frosting as I was baking...)  I'll have to make this cake again after Easter, anyone have a birthday coming up?

Pad Thai

Phil made Pad Thai, my favorite Thai dish the other night (and it just happens to be gluten free...)  It didn't taste like restaurant Pad Thai, but it wasn't too bad and he gets major bonus points for even trying!  It has some of the strangest ingredients ever (like fish cream... yuck!). 

Cookies!

Phil made awesome gluten-free cookies this week.  They fell apart really easily because he also didn't use any eggs... but they were delicious and the first cookies I've had in weeks!

Ingredients:
Cocoa Powder
Butter
Sugar
Almonds
White Cornmeal
Salt
Nutmeg
Baking Powder

He didn't use a recipe at all which I think is super impressive :-)

Parmesan Risotto and Biscuits

I went gluten-free flour shopping on Saturday and the trip was a complete failure.  All of the recipes I've found need two kinds of flour to replace wheat flour:
1. White Rice Flour
2. Sweet Rice Flour
Apparently sweet rice flour acts as a thickening agent (I didn't realize there would be quite so much chemistry involved in this endeavor).  I was only able to find white rice flour, so I couldn't make any of the recipes I had in mind.

I did, however, find a baking mix for gluten-free biscuits.  I figured a mix was pretty lame, but that it would be much safer than just leaving the sweet rice flour out of the from-scratch-recipes.  I made the biscuits for breakfast on Sunday and they came out looking and feeling exactly as biscuits should - slightly crispy and crumbly.  Unfortunately, even though they were exactly the right texture, the biscuits had the most horrible aftertaste.

Later that day after I got home from seeing Jane Eyre with my grandmother (the movie was ok, but it had exactly the same soundtrack as pride and prejudice) I was starving and searching my apartment for anything edible (and gluten-free of course).  I came across a box of risotto that I had bought several months prior and never made because the instructions seemed to difficult i.e. what the heck does saute mean??  I firmly believe that food that comes in a box should never have such a difficult step involved.  Fortunately I was able to figure it out and the risotto perfectly masked the taste of the biscuits.

I'm going to try to make a gluten-free cake for my brother's birthday on Saturday, but I need that darn sweet rice flour, does anyone know where I could find some?

This year I gave up wheat for lent.  It's possibly the hardest thing I've ever done.   I can't eat any of the food I love - pasta, bread, crackers, cookies, brownies, cake, soy sauce (yes, there's wheat in soy sauce!), most soups, etc.  I've been having a very hard time coming up with things to eat with the exception of salad, which I detest.  So I decided for the blog this month that I would attempt gluten-free baking.  We'll see how it goes...