Biscuits

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about baking, or even at all, except for the weekly links. I apologize for my absence but my head was all jumbled with everything that happened in my life last month. But now I am better, and ready to spend time in the kitchen and baking again. And, of course, sharing that baking with you. I have baked some things; I made cinnamon rolls with peanuts, and I made chocolate chip-banana-oatmeal cookies, and even some bread. However, was just not in the blogging mood last month. If those items sound good to you, I have the recipes on their own pages, just no blog post about them.

Anyway, this post is not about anything in the past (sorta). This is about the biscuits that I made. Which, of course, are from today, but the recipe I adapted is from long ago (at least according to the article). I adapted the recipe just slightly, adding some gluten-free flour blend (pre-packaged) and some water, simply because I ran out of milk. They just came out of the oven and the warm piece that I had was really buttery and good!

Gluten-free cookies

I’ve only baked with gluten-free flour a couple of other times, and the products tasted good; you wouldn’t even know they were gluten-free if I didn’t tell you. Well, this time, I used a pre-mixed all-purpose flour that contains tapioca flour, two different types of bean flour, and potato flour. This is similar to the flour blend recommended in the Gluten-Free Baking book (from the CIA) which contains potato starch, and white rice four. Now, the bag that I bought said to use xanthum gum with the flour, which I did not do. I am no expert, so I am not sure how much of a difference it would make, but I am willing to try adding some next, since these cookies turned out a bit flat. These are supposed to be chocolate crinkle cookies. You know, the cookies that are balled up and rolled in powdered sugar before baking? Well, they looked okay before going into the oven, even like regular cookies, but after baking for 10 minutes, they looked quite different from ordinary cookies. I have yet to try them, as I am bringing them with me to Passover (which is why I went to gluten-free baking in the first place) so, upon return, I will update with the taste factor. In the meantime, if you wish to try the cookies with the original (recommended) flour blend, follow the jump for the recipe.

January: the month of newbies…Daring Bakers Challenge #1

So, I wanted to join this group for a while after reading about their challenges on other food blogs. So I thought, what better time to start something new than in the new year. So here goes:

“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.”

I have worked with gluten-free flours before, and with all of the rain, I just didn’t feel like trekking all the way down to the Mission to get what I needed, so I used wheat flour. It was a simple change to the challenge recipe, just replace the gluten-free flours with wheat flour.

The graham cracker dough was sticky, and I ended up adding a little extra flour while I kneaded and rolled it out. Since I don’t really like plain graham crackers (or s’mores) and I knew I would have extras, I didn’t really pay that much attention to the shapes of the crackers themselves, and just baked them for the crumbs. Oh, of course I tried one or three before smashing them to bits, and they are good on their own. But I will surely make a tart or pie crust of some sort with the leftover crumbs.

The Nanaimo Bars were pretty easy to make, and all of the layers make a tasty treat. I only have half of them left and I only made them on Monday.

I do have a lot of leftover ingredients that will have to be used some how, so look for recipes featuring these ingredients again (such as the graham cracker crumbs).

I hope this post gets the Daring Baker’s stamp of approval. Take the jump for the recipes.

they’re not the prettiest that I’ve seen, but they were tasty.