The April 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Evelyne of the blog Cheap Ethnic Eatz. Evelyne chose to challenge everyone to make a maple mousse in an edible container. Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 27th to May 27th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!

This wasn’t a stellar challenge for me.  Essentially, I tried making a vegan, soy-free mousse, and got yummy goop.  But it wasn’t firm enough to put into an edible container, so I didn’t end up doing that element.  I know, I know.  Next month!

What I did make:
1 cup macadamia nuts, raw
1 cup water
1 TBSP maple syrup (I ran out…)
1/4 cup agave
1 tsp agar agar powder
1/2 tsp vanilla powder

Blend really well in a vitamix, chill & serve!

The un-mousse sauce is yummy on fruit, vegan, sugar-free and delicious. If I had to do it again, I’d use more macadamias and more agar for a firmer consistency.

Please check out what the other DB’ers did for this month’s challenge and vote on your favorite!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

After missing last month’s DB challenge, I’m back with two!

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies

I’ve never made Panna Cotta or Florentine cookies, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. And I thought that out of two recipes, at least I should be able to eat one. Only fair, right?

I ended up making a sunshine Panna Cotta, using very rich cashew milk and agave rather than the traditional milk and cream and sugar. I went hunting for some fresh fruit that would work, although winter is just not a great time for that and I was burnt out on raspberries because of this chocolate raspberry pie. So I settled on nectarines, which were decent but not great. (hey, it’s Feb, what do we expect???)

Since I was off to a family get together, I figured a large one would work infinitely better than a tiny one, and I was right! And since one of my cousins was going Paleo, it worked well because there was something she could eat (not sure about the agave, but most of it fit)

The recipe was along these lines:

2.5 cups water, divided
1 2/3 cups of cashews, soaked overnight
1/2 cup agave
1/2 tsp vanilla
packet unflavored gelatin (about 2.5 tsp)

4 ripe nectarines or whatever fruit strikes your fancy.

Soak cashews in water overnight and drain. Blend cashews and 2 cups of water in a vitamix until absolutely smooth.
Heat the remaining 1/2 cup of water until simmering, add in gelatin, remove from heat and whisk very well. Let sit for a few minutes. Add in the blended cashew milk, return to heat and whisk for 3-4 minutes until much thicker.

Put cut up fruit in an 8X8 or glasses, add creamy mix and chill 4-5 hours.

I made the Florentine cookies per the recipe, just with GF all purpose flour, and they came out perfectly. Crispy, crunchy, just the right amount of sweet, and the topping worked beautifully.

I set them on our freezer to cool, left the room and when I returned, a few were covered in cat hair and the cat was sitting and ignoring me completely. Couldn’t have been him, right?

All in all, what a fun DB experience. Please do see the Daring Baker Blogroll for other adventures!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

I wasn’t terribly enchanted when I read the selection.  Deep frying?   Yuck.  (sorry!)  Now, since I’m gluten free, I couldn’t use the recipe given, and I started looking at recipes and realizing I could make BAKED doughnuts.  Then I got jazzed, and even bought a mini doughnut pan for the occasion. 

I used this recipe, substituted Better Batter GF flour and coconut yogurt instead of the buttermilk and yogurt.  I did a simple sugar/’cream’ glaze as well as just dipping in powdered sugar.

No joke, they went in record time.  And everyone enjoyed them so much I’m thinking of making them again this weekend.  I’m glad I went out on a limb and did this!

Please check out the other DB’ers for more and beautiful doughnuts!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

But to me, the best part of it was decorating to the theme of September. September means Fall, the change of seasons, harvest, back to school…but it also is the anniversary of when I started my nutrition private practice, Harris Whole Health.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was pretty much born to be a nutritionist. I was always fascinated by food, and enamored with tastes. I wanted to be a Public Health Nutritionist and help everyone enjoy great foods and eat well. And, indeed, I did. I worked for DC WIC running the breastfeeding promotion programs. And then I got sick. Lyme’s, mold poisoning, chronic fatigue, a surgery gone wrong, food allergies, Celiac, and more. What I was doing didn’t seem as relevant, and I felt so poorly that I wasn’t really up to working full-time anymore.

An acupuncturist I was working with encouraged me to dream, to think of what I truly, deeply, wanted to do. Now this sounded completely insane. Start a business while feeling so sick? It seemed impossible And yet here I am, thanks to many people who have supported me along the way. I’ve gotten to take what I’ve learned in my travels, and use it to make other people’s journeys easier (cool stuff!) It’s been a process that’s taken years in healing physically and growing into this new direction of being, but I delight in the challenges and triumphs of working with my clients. While many of my clients have Celiac or food sensitivities, I see such a range, and it keeps to process fun.

So the theme of these cookies is the 3 year anniversary of my practice. And making the cookies was a bit of a challenge. Since mine are GF, I used the Better Batter recipe, which was just too soft to make the cookies cut well (although they were tasty.) I used the royal icing as given in the recipe, which was a fun and messy process. Since I was new to it, I can’t say it went quite as planned, especially with the drawing with the icing.  I was hoping to make a sunshine cookie, and yet this one is a dead ringer for a fried egg…

Please do check out the creations of all the other Daring Bakers…they’re always amazing eye candy.

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

Can I just start by saying I was NOT baking when I was 17??? Or even 18. I would never have dreamed of something so elaborate, either! So kudos for Elissa for this great challenge.

Since mine was to be gluten-free, as usual, I ran into a few snags. First…my ice cream just wasn’t. In retrospect, that’s what happens when you skimp and use lite coconut milk, yes? Lesson learned, no further comment. Ugh.

Since I was ice cream less, I used homemade chocolate hazelnut spread and homemade raspberry jam.

And I used Carol Fenster’s Brown Butter Cake from her new book, 100 Best Gluten-free Recipes. It was lovely, fluffy, yummy and all things a cake should be, but not a good cake for petit fours. It was quite crumbly when I was cutting, and the edges weren’t at all smooth.

So this was a mixed success. I ended up with ONE petit four, which was a cutie, and was DH’s birthday cake (yay!). I also wasn’t able to complete this the way I wanted to, so I am resolved to make this again with another recipe and see how it goes.

Please see the other DB’s and their creations!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

I am very glad to be getting back to making DB challenges. The last few haven’t been possible for a variety of reasons, and I missed the fun of it.

So…wow. What a beautiful treat, and it paired well with gobs of raspberries that have been growing here. I decided to make my own mascrapone, since I’ve got it down by now. I sprinkled the zest ontop because…errr…I forgot to add it to the mousse and I figured I’d improvise. I made half the amount of mousse, and it STILL seemed like an excessive amount. But DH LOVED these babies and the premade treats kept well in the fridge despite the pavlovas getting a little soft.

Many thanks for a naturally GF recipe. I made it as directed–just using orange zest for lemon. My only complaint was the brown on brown is just not an attractive combo, or I couldn’t find a way to disguise it. But hey, the taste more than made up for it!

Please do check out what all the rest of the Daring Bakers put together for this challenge.

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Ah, time for the monthly Daring Baker indulgent delight. Whew, what a lot of work.  We made ladyfingers, mascarpone, zabaglione, pastry cream, whipped cream, and then assemble and decorate, too!      It looked lovely and was gobbled down.  Largely by my DH, and he kept trying to justify it, too.  I haven’t made a tiramsu in 10 years or so, I guess I (he) was due! Obviously I made it GF, just using GF flour instead of cake flour, but I followed everything else as written, except I dipped the lady fingers in a strong chocolate concoction rather than espresso (DH hates coffee).  My major gripe was with the mascrapone-you can’t get it up to 190.  You just can’t.  Or I couldn’t, and I stirred and stirred for 45 minutes each time.  So if you do opt to give a go, do ignore the temparature part of those directions.  I confess, it is so unusual for me to follow directions that to follow them verbatim (3X) and have them not work as anticipated was frustrating.  It DOES work, just the temps don’t jive.

I used some of the extra filling to make little tiramisu-lettes, which were well appreciated. I did it over 5 days which worked just fine.   And as directed, the original recipes are on the DB site.

As always, do check out the other DB creations–they are always works of art.  And I can’t wait to find out what’s next in store!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

Nanaimos=Canadian for bliss

No one was more delighted than me to see this month’s DB pick!

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

A dear friend kicked off my Nanaimo obsession during my Berkeley days. They were uber addictive, and the joke with my roommates was that one of us would creep to the freezer in the middle of the night, grab one and scurry away…and then creep back 30 seconds later and grab another. So Michelle, Adrien and Hayley–these babies are for you! Come raid my freezer.

Good thing for me that these were pretty easily gluten-freeable, but I’m also menos dairy, eggs, corn, soy and most importantly, sugar. I made a version last year and they were good–I like these even better.

So this is my grain and sugar free, vegan and massively delicious new and improved version. They do not taste just like nanaimos, but they are luscious.

One word of warning–they’re dense. As in like, very, very rich. And so a small piece does wonderfully, or at least it would if I didn’t go back for the 2nd small piece…and the 3rd…

Base:
2 cups almonds
¾ cup walnuts
½ tsp stevia powder
¼ cup agave
2 T water
1 tablespoon whole chia seeds
1 cup unsweetened coconut
½ tsp salt

Filling:
2 cups raw cashews and macadamias
2 teaspoons whole chia seeds
pinch stevia
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract (or more
1.5 cups water
.5 cup agave nectar

Top
8 oz chocolate mass (unsweetened)
¼ cup cashew mac butter
1 cup agave
2 tsp stevia powder
2 Tablespoons mesquite or carob powder
½ tsp vanilla powder

For the base: soak chia in the agave. pulse nuts in the food processor, add in the wet and pulse until combined. Press down into 2 lined 8X8 pans (or a 9X11). Bake at 350 until starting to brown. Allow to cool or put in the freezer

For filling: I put all in the vitamix and throughly blitzed. With a normal blender, you’d absolutely have to soak the nuts. Pour on top of the base, and freeze until hard

For the topping: melt the chocolate, add in other ingredients and whisk very thoroughly until well blended. Pour mix quickly onto of frozen filling, and smooth down with out making a mess.

Store in the freezer, chop with a very sharp knife once hard. Enjoy! I’ve only had them straight from the freezer, I do think they’d ooze at room temp.

Please do check out the other DB Nanaimo masterpieces!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

The 2009 October Daring Baker’s challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe. You can visit Ami at her blog, Baking Without Fear.

Obviously I was excited. I mean, they were already GF! I thought I could quite simply swap out the confectioner’s sugar for finely ground coconut sugar. Silly me. It was much less sweet, and much more sticky, leading to very flat cookies that were nonetheless yummy. I filled them with a nutella inspired cocoa/agave/hazelnut butter mix that was quite delish (no, I didn’t measure, and I ate too much along the way to give any kind of accurate representation of quantity.

I sorta kinda wanted to redo them–I was totally impressed by David Lebovitz’ lyrical descriptions–but alas, reality hits and collides with my baking fantasies and it was so darned crazy ’round these parts that there was just no way.

So please do check out the amazing creations of other DB’ers on the web.for luscious inspiration.

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.

The September 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.

Now, I’d never heard of Vols-au-Vent before, and couldn’t find a GF recipe out there. But Alt DB’ers to the rescue, and the general suggestion was to try a puff pastry or croissant recipe, and go from there. I used the Better Batter croissant recipe.

It was much easier than I expected, although I made my life much harder than necessary by doing 3 turns and rolling out 4 times (moral of the story: read the darn directions!!!) Not only that, but I suspect that 2 turns would have given a better product. The smell was heavenly, and the short ones came out beautifully, but the big cups just didn’t cook through very well, and I didn’t realize until they’d cooled a lot.

I was jazzed to know that indeed, pastries are possible and easier than I thought (note: not easy, just easier) and I will do this again as a croissant. And, of course, flour went everywhere. I mean, everywhere. But it was awesome to have the house smelling so beautifully, and what a treat to have GF puff pastry!

Please see the other DB’ers for their delicious works of wonder, and I can’t wait for our next challenge!

©2012 Gluten Free Goodness. All Rights Reserved.