Spice Up Your Life II

My sister makes the most amazing stuffing for Christmas, with gingerbread and bacon, which in itself sounds like something you'd dream of, whether in nightmare-, or day-dream form I'll leave for you to decide. It's a Nigella recipe, though, so you can imagine it's really pretty marvellous! (And it is!)

But you see, since discovering that gluten is not a friend of my internal workings, things like this are either put in the ‘No Can Do Any More' list, or relegated to the ‘Maybe On A Special Occasion If You're Lucky And The Planets Have Aligned In A Positive Manner' list, because GF gingerbread cake is impossible to find in the wilds of Morrisons, and the few recipes I had previously found looked faff-tastic to say the least. UNTIL (cue the lightbulb of discovery - ping) I stumbled across this recipe at Gluten-Free On A Shoestring. Oh me, oh my, oh just put it in my mouth already oh.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I made this before Christmas for the afore-mentioned gingerbread stuffing but I forgot to document it in the style in which you're now accustomed. So for you, yes that includes you lurking at the back there, seeing as it's been a while since I bombarded you with a GF recipe translated into my own inimitable language style of occasional criticising commentary and Fake Food Blogger™ WTFery, here's a little morsel to keep you going...

Gluten Free Gingerbread Cake from glutenfreeonashoestring.com

You need:

350g all-purpose gluten-free flour

1 ¼ tsps xantham gum (don't add if your flour already contains some)

1 ½ tsps baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

2 tsps ground cinnamon

2 tsps ground ginger

½ tsp salt

100g granulated sugar

109g light brown sugar

2 tbsps or 42g molasses (I used black treacle)

6 tbsps or 126g pure maple syrup

4 tbsps or 84g honey

112g unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1 egg (at room temp, beaten)

1 cup or 225ml warm water

2 tbsps or 28g vegetable oil

We ALL know how much I am not a fan of being asked to pre-heat an oven that will stay pre-heating while you let your dough rise for 18 hours/freeze-form your cookies overnight, and I am pleased to say that this was not the case here, as having made this before I knew it was a relatively quick make. Yes indeed, I pre-heated my oven to 175℃ like a boss.

Then getting out a large bowl (:: sobs quietly, remembering her trusty mixing bowls that were donated to charity back in NL ::) you fill it with the flour, xantham gum, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, salt and granulated sugar and give it a jolly good mix.

Once it's all jolly well mixed, add the brown sugar and mix it up again, making sure to break up any lumps.

Next you need to add the molasses (treacle), maple syrup, honey, butter and egg, “mixing to combine after each addition". Or, if you're like me, you'll measure out all the treacle, maple syrup and honey into one bowl before adding them to the dry ingredients in one sticky go, forgetting that the honey will layer at the bottom, the maple syrup will lie nonchalantly on top, and the treacle will refuse to have anything to do with either of them and keep itself to itself in the centre of the bowl. I think treacle may have issues.

After mixing all the ingredients up, do NOT do as it did, and add the mix as-is to the prepared loaf tin. It will look like this - a thick, dough-like consistency, that, yes, tastes amazing (don't judge - the spoon had to get washed anyway), but doesn't look quite right. 

It looks like this because it still needed the addition of warm water and vegetable oil. 

I suppose the only good thing about this mistake was that it came straight out of the papered tin in one glop, leaving nary a gingery skid-mark on the paper.

No, this is what it's supposed to look like. Probably.

Possibly. The directions say that the batter will be thick, but I think the emphasis should be on ‘batter' as opposed to ‘thick', because otherwise you'll be left with something like I had to begin with - thick, yes, batter, no.

Then you place the tin in the pre-heated oven and bake for forty minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. 

...

...

Now, when it says forty minutes, you may find that that's not enough time, because your tin might not have been big enough and your cake might look baked on top, but the rest has the wobble of Homer Simpson's belly after being poked by the doctor in ‘The Simpsons'. This is not a good look for a baked cake. I ended up de-Homer-fying it for a total of seventy minutes. Yup. 

It did come out looking like this, though,

and smelling absolutely scrumptious!

You can tell, however, that the baking wasn't one hundred percent efficient, as on slicing in to it you can clearly see the makings of an almost-crust around the edges, just drier than the rest due to it being in the oven for so long.

It does taste DIVINE, though. And the consistency is squidgy enough that it reminds me of bought gingerbread cake. Except this is better. No, really, it is! 

The next time I make this, once I've saved up enough pennies to afford the maple syrup (oy, that stuff is dear) I'll split the batter between two tins and see how much a difference that makes with the baking time and consistency, but until then I shall be content to treat myself to a slice of this delectably squidgy cake and slather it in butter, just how my Granny used to make it for us when we were wee!

Blondie Ambition

My sister sent me a link to a blondie recipe the other day, and I was intrigued enough about it to feel the need to put on my amateur food blogger's cap. (It's a bit like a chef's toque, but comes with a long feather plume splashed with toner ink, looks a bit rumpled as is befitting amateur status, and is, of course, completely imaginary. The Emperor's New Amateur Food Blogger's Cap.)

:: settles TENAFBC on head a là Sheldon and his thinking cap in TBBT ::

Why this blondie recipe, and not any of the other blondie recipes I've bookmarked to date? The main ingredient caught me: chickpeas. Or garbanzo beans for anyone of an Over-The-Pond persuasion. A staple of many main meals and savoury snacks, but not one I'd seen in anything sweet before. But what can I say, I had a can in my food cupboard and all the other necessary ingredients of the recipe just sitting there, so I thought I'd give it a go, knowing that even if it was a culinary disaster that I'd probably eat it anyway.

And I wonder why I haven't reached a size ten yet...

Flourless Chocolate Chip Chickpea Blondies with Sea-Salt from Ambition Kitchen.

You need: 

1 (425g or 15 oz.) can chickpeas, rinsed and drained (I used peas very close in consistency to chickies).

125g or 1/2 cup peanut butter, almond butter, or your favourite nut butter (I used peanut butter).

113g or 1/3 cup maple syrup, honey or agave nectar (I used honey).

2 tsps vanilla extract.

½ tsp salt.

¼ tsp baking powder.

¼ tsp baking soda.

60g or ⅓ cup semisweet chocolate chips + 2 tbs extra for topping.

sea salt for sprinkling on top.

This is a very quick batter to make up, so I recommend following the recipe and preheating your oven to 175C or 350F right from the get-go because there's not going to be much in the way of hanging around waiting for a too-warm cookie batter to cool, or shortbread logs to set, so finally (finally!) no being asked to waste electricity for a couple of hours keeping an oven at optimum toastiness while you go through a long and convoluted creative sequence involving multiple ingredients, using complicated ‘time-saving' appliances.

(Don't worry, if I ever get to a place in my life where I have access to a full-sized oven, I'm sure I won't be quite so blasé with pre-heating times, or the construction process, but at the moment I own a tiny table-top oven that heats up in the blink of an eye, and am loathed to waste money I don't have on keeping it suitably cosy for half an hour while I, for example, attempt to pummel chickpeas into sludgy submission!)

So, once you have stepped off your soap-box, you are asked to add all the ingredients except the chocolate chips to a food processor, or, in true El-Cheapo fashion, add them to a rather creaky but serviceable herb chopper/hand-processor, or whatever they're called, and buzz them for a few minutes until you get a smooth batter. (Although I have to say that a creaky but serviceable herb chopper whose only working speed is ‘low' is not the most perfect implement to completely mash up the chickpeas, so if you have a proper food processor I'd use that so you don't have to attack the batter with a wooden spoon after whizzing it to within an inch of its motor's life yet not getting the mix past the chunky stage.)

But after you've achieved Batter: Smooth(ish), fold in the 60 grams of chocolate chips, 

spread the mix evenly in a prepared pan (non-stick spray coating, or greaseproof paper, or whatever method you prefer...), sprinkle the remaining two tablespoons of chocolate chips over the top,

then bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean and the edges are a light brown.

Or... um... not quite burnt.

(I ended up covering the pan in tinfoil after 20 minutes and then putting it in for another ten, because although the edges were starting to bear the brunt of the little oven's heating bars, the cake tester wasn't coming out clean. In all, it stayed in the oven for thirty minutes, enough to bake the batter through, and fill my flat with the delicious smell of chocolate and peanut butter!)

You're advised to let it cool on a wire rack before cutting it up, but be careful as it's of quite a fragile consistency, and I lost a few edges on the way from the pan to the rack, (the blondie's loss is my gain, of course), and once it's completely cool and more stable, you can sprinkle it with sea-salt and slice it up.

Of course, doling out advice about texture and appearance is something I'm hardly qualified to do, considering my Extreme Amateur Food Blogger™ status, and the state of the photo directly above, but it's fair to say that this isn't your average blondie/brownie consistency, and I've seen the suggestion in a couple of similar recipes of adding an egg to the mixture to cake it up a little. That being said, it's rather delicious, if a little dense, and the only reason I know there are chickpeas in the make-up rather than flour is because I put them in myself. Taste-wise it's just a smooshy peanut-butter and chocolate chip extravaganza, with perhaps a little nod towards the original savouriness of the chickpeas by the addition of a sprinkling of sea-salt on top, but otherwise you can't tell they're there at all.

If you fancy something a little different it might be worth swapping the choc chips with caramel chips (if you can find them) for another yummy taste combination (my sister, the reason this post exists, is a sucker for anything of a salted-caramel persuasion), but whatever you choose to do, be warned: they are moreish, and you might just have to tell people that they're made with chickpeas just so you can keep some for yourself!

Man Does Not Live On Bread Alone

Or at all. I'm forever on the hunt for a decent bread substitute. Yes, yes, I know: don't waste my time trying to find GF substitutes for old favourites, because I'm just setting myself up for a disappointment of epic proportions. Certainly the “bread" I found in the bio/gluten-free section at the supermarket only really deserves the irony-quotes, because it certainly doesn't deserve the appellation bread. The bread mixes are okay if hell is freezing over, but I'm slowly, finally reaching that end stage of GF grief: acceptance that I'm never again going to enjoy another slice of thick, white, doughy bread that smells like childhood, and tastes of comfort. Preferably slathered in Lurpak by my Gran thirty years ago when all this was much simpler and my stomach upsets were treated with Milk of Magnesia and a lie down.

I did try my hand at 'dinner rolls', but they turned out so much more like dense cornmeal scones, that I'm not going to give you the recipe I used, out of respect to the author of said poor recipe that I no doubt mangled horribly. If I finally get the timing/mixing/petition the right baking gods and they finish up even a tiny semblance of the pictures on the recipe, then believe-you-me, that'll be written up faster than you can say “she really needs to invest in at least one more un-chipped plate if she's going to keep doing these weird recipe posts".

I've been playing with the sweet breads, but have gone wrong as many times as right. Partially, I'm sure, because I haven't yet accepted that they're not bread, they're really cake. IT'S ALL LIES! SWEET, CAKEY LIES!!

A wrong effort was a rustic-type carrot, banana and walnut bread that ended up the weirdest of textures. All entirely my fault, I'm sure. I still can't quite describe it. It was tasty enough, because you should know me by now, if I didn't throw out the monstrously bad Travesty To Cake-Dom, then something a little chewy. glutinous, compacted, just as weird as that walnut carrot thing was stands a very good chance of being finished off within a fortnight. My standards remain rather low in regards to things that don't make me ill. I can eat it without doubling up in toxic agony? Then it's fine by me. It tastes of rubber? Meh, worse things happen at sea.

Things have gone well, though, like banana bread, and zucchini bread. Okay, peanut butter banana  bread - you NEED to make this. It's one of my favourite things I've made to date. And now I'm looking for it online, I can't find it any more. I think it was on asweetsimplelife.com but the site has been down for a few weeks now. If it's not up soon, then I'm posting this recipe as is, because it is pretty wonderful.  The photo isn't pretty wonderful, but it shows the first one I made and I was so pleased it came out looking bread-like that once it had cooled I took a quick pic to show my sis, before I finished carving it up, scarfing down a slice or two in culinary ecstasy, and storing the rest in the freezer. So good. SO GOOD!  But you'll just have to take my word for it until I either find the recipe online, or truly suffer for my art and work up a post with another loaf. The things I do for you.

The zucchini bread (I'd call it courgette bread, but although I never usually use the Americanism/Italianism normally, it feels right when it's a bread, somehow. Yeah, okay. Cake.) was something unexpected. Of course, I didn't just make any old zucchini bread, I made Double Chocolate Zucchini Bread. :: cough double chocolate courgette cake cough ::

Tasty, tasty bread/cake. Yes, I may have used fifty per cent white choc chips in with the dark. Because I could. 

But then I came across this: Savo(u)ry Gluten Free Zucchini Bread from Gluten Free on a Shoestring. It is a thing of wonder, delight, and if I can't have wheat bread ever again, this'll help ease the pain!

You need:

280 grams basic gluten-free flour

3/4 teaspoon xanthan gum

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt (kosher or otherwise)

75 grams (80mls) vegetable oil

2 eggs at room temperature, beaten

75 grams (70 mls) plain whole milk yogurt

170 grams grated zucchini (courgette)

75 grams Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, finely grated

60 grams sharp white cheddar cheese, grated (I left a few small chunks in the mix, not for aesthetic reasons, just because I couldn't grate it all without adding a little human flesh to the batter.)

I don't have a blow-by-blow photo-story for you, so here's a quick run-down of the procedure:

Dry stuff in a bowl and mixed together, wet stuff in another bowl and combined 'very well'. You then have to add half the dry stuff in with the wet stuff, followed by the grated courgette and the cheeses, and mix all that up together, and once that's all nicely combined, you mix in the rest of the dry ingredients. You then scrape the (thick) mixture into a prepared pan (I use a basic bread/cake tin), place it in the centre of the preheated oven (oh, yes, you need to preheat your oven to 175C) and bake it until it's lightly golden brown on top, and a toothpick has been prodded and come out clean. Around 35 to 40 minutes.

I took heed of the warning not to slice it until it was cool. I learn. Slowly. But I learn!

Chocolate Cake For Dummies

"Nic made her first real cake from scratch yesterday. (There's never been any cause to learn before, really, because cake-eating is not a daily occurrence, or even weekly, but the GF thing happened and suddenly shop-bought cakes and mixes were out of the question, when they were in question at all.)

So. This fudgey chocolate cake was made. And she saw that it was good. And so did the others. (Fingerprints on the plate are testament to that - it was made for a friend's birthday and appears to have been a success!).

It is called (wait for it, wait for it) 'Chocolate Idiot Cake'. 'Nuff said...

(We are not, however, discussing the cake made before this one. Because it was a travesty to cake-dom, a shameful parody of spongey goodness, an embarrassment to everything baked that came before.)"

Of course, I'm not counting the times when I was wee where I 'helped' my Mum in the kitchen making sponges, Eve's Puddings, or Mrs Laidler's American Devil's Food Cake (and if I can find that recipe ever again, I'll give it everything I've got to turn it gluten-free), but apart from a failed attempt at baking in first year home-economics class (it may have even just been an apple crumble), everything else has been either shop-bought already, or made out of a packet. Don't judge. I chose to do woodwork and metalwork at school, and even though I say so myself, I turned a mean lathe.

So, I have to admit to being a little nervous making this cake. When I say the first effort was a travesty to cake-dom, I think I'm being unfair to travesties to cake-dom in general. Thankfully for the author, I can't remember what the recipe was, but it included a list of interchangeable flours. The author lied. You CANNOT change almond flour with coconut flour gram for gram. It is known. (Now it is known, anyway.) Coconut flour LOVES the liquid, so it does. That, coupled with the suggestion of using 3/4 of a cup of caster sugar and 1 tablespoon of water instead of half a cup of agave syrup, was just asking for Trouble. With a capital T.

I called it my Learning Cake.

I also called it other things. Unprintable things. It did, after the addition of a cup of water (I started to wing it after realising that coconut flour, cocoa, caster sugar and a tablespoon of water will not make anything remotely resembling cake batter) change consistency from cocoa-coconut dust to something that could be coaxed in to a cake tin, but in all my years of watching cakes being made on telly I've never seen something come out of the oven that drips water on to the cooling rack. A soggy bottom that would have made Paul Hollywood run for the hills. It was, once it had dried out a little, surprisingly edible, although I do admit to not really wanting to finish it all before it went mouldy. (Cake-making for one: you either need an enormous freezer for your amazing and delicious creations, or be enormously bad at baking so that you don't want to keep it for longer than necessary. There is another option, but that entails putting back every pound that I've lost over the last three years, and as much as I'm an advocate of Life Without Cake Is No Life™, a line has to be drawn somewhere...)

But the Chocolate Idiot Cake was a dream come true. Squidgey in the middle, with a chocolatey crust on the edges, even consistency throughout, rich, sumptuous, and meltalicious on the tongue.

I need to make another one to see if it freezes okay.  

For science.  

It's My Birthday And I'll Eat What I Want To

"16,000 steps must surely equal 1 slice of birthday chocolate berry mint cake?"

And a cup of ginger coffee, made with real stem ginger. So very good and tasty, and worthy of my :: coughty-cough :: years on this earth!  

What a wonderful day - I walked to and around the Japanese Garden at Clingendael in the early afternoon, walked back to town to partake of home-made (by the baking geniuses at Swags Central, not by me!) chocolate berry cake (real name 'Halle Berry Cake') and a cup of ginger coffee, then went on to cocktails (oh my, happy hour every Wednesday night). A really lovely day, spent with really lovely people.

But yes, I ended up with over 18,000 steps recorded on my pedometer band, so I think that should have covered at least a portion of that cake, which was sheer chocolate heaven, and had I only only managed two thousand steps instead of nearly twenty thousand it would still have ended up being enjoyed by your author.  Because birthday.

(It's like a cross between a torte and a cake, with the 'healthy' components (which I considered one of my five-a-day) of raspberries and fresh mint to add a little bit of bite. So very good. I recommend it. And the carrot and orange cake, the apple pie, and, well, pretty much everything.)

I'm pretty thankful for those cocktails, though, because I think my calves may be too inebriated this evening to berate me for over-use. We'll see how annoyed they are tomorrow, once recovery (read: the hangover) sets in...

A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good

"This beauteous marvel of confectionery is a Salted Caramel Brownie Slice from M&S. But, dear reader, it's more than *just* a Salted Caramel Brownie Slice from M&S... It's a promise made to the author many months ago, an enticement to divest herself of unnecessary poundage, a reward for perseverance (and, perhaps, for reading too many novels by Jane Austen).

Today there is 90 pounds (or 40.82kgs) less of our heroine. Huzzah!

And soon, very soon, there will be considerably less Salted Caramel Brownie Slice from M&S... om nom nom!"

My Love Is Like A Red, Red... Cupcake

"Due to the unforeseen Great Albert Heijn Malteser Shortage of '14, we are, sadly, forced to postpone celebrating our 72 poundiversary loss with the designated Malteser Tray Bake. But we must thank the galant and vibrant Red Velvet Cupcake for stepping in at the last moment. (Red was due to celebrate the 59 poundiversary, but was inexplicably forgotten in the run-up to Christmas.)

Further poundiversaries are now designated as: 79 - Malteser Tray Bake (presuming the Shortage doesn't continue); 88 - something decadent from M&S (to be decided); 95 - tray of maple-pecan brownies; 103 - possibly an entire carrot cake. With frosting."

Yes, our noble heroine Bettie Crocker steps into the breach again, with her box mix cupcakes. The whole concept of bright red cake is such an alien thing to this Scot who was brought up with either brown chocolate cake or cream-coloured sponge that of course it had to be on the poundiversary list. Dear America, you are useful for so many strange things that we would never have thought of doing ourselves. Huzzah for your over-the-top, weird and wonderful baking practises.  

And frosting. Thank you for frosting. Icing is lovely, don't get me wrong, and the fairy cakes of my youth slathered in runny white (or blue or pink or yellow, should the village shop stock such exotic food colouring) icing, and hundreds and thousands, are fond, fond memories, but frosting? They say everything is bigger in the US and they don't appear to be wrong, at least when taking cake garnishing into consideration.

I wonder what it was that nudged some baker or other towards making a blood-red coloured chocolate cake, though?  I wondered enough, in fact, to ask Professor Google, and it appears it could be blood-red because some bloke in 40's America wanted to sell his red food colouring! Well, whatever the truth, the rise of the importance of the red velvet cake was enough for good old Bettie Crocker to package it up in ready-to-bake form, and for that me and my minus seventy-two pounds thank her.

In Cake We Trust

"Cheesecake cupcakes: the traditional way to celebrate an *arbitrary*-numbered pound loss. (Little know 'fact': Much like anniversaries, pound loss has items connected to them. For example, 51 is cheesecake cupcakes, 59 is red velvet cupcakes, 65 is a tray-ful of brownies.)"

Fifty-one pounds gone. So much work and patience and blood, sweat and tears. But yes, it's worth it, just for the cupcakes alone!  

I'm totally in it for the long haul and am of the mind that these milestones, arbitrary though they are, should be celebrated in a way I enjoy! So thank goodness for Bettie Crocker and her cupcake mixes, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't manage to bake this plate of gorgeousness on my own!   

I hope there's room in the freezer...

A Scone In The Hand Is Worth Two On The Plate

"Nic has just worked off 3 scones-worth of calories and is wondering, after actually only having eaten one this afternoon, whether it's too late to have the other two now...?"

Ah, Green's of Brighton. Your scone mix is a thing of legend, an inspiration, the carrot AND the stick of my weight loss! Thankfully, though, I'm aware that après-workout snacking kind of defeats the purpose of the workout in the first place, if you eat more than you've worked-off! Which I probably would, 'cos those scones be tasty, tasty things!

And let's face it, one is oh-so much better than none at all!

A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good

"Nic has sampled, thanks to the fine introductory services of Kevin 'The Enabler' D___, possibly the finest apple pie in Amsterdam. If not the world!"

What a way to celebrate nine pounds down! It feels like this is the way forward, with no holds barred on the congratulatory foodstuffs (up to a point, anyway!!) Any why not? I am not the type of person that agrees with the need to withhold certain things for the sake of betterment, when said betterment is made worse when you spend all your time pining for the things you're withholding from yourself in the first place.  

I'm pretty sure that's why diets don't work in the long term for a lot of people. Our heads get in the way. I'm also pretty sure the brain is there to torment us, and in our hour of need it strips us of will-power and instead shows us pictures of cake, flickering against the projection screen of our sugar-craving imagination.

So I say YAY to cake, in moderation. Well, truth be told, I'd prefer to say YAY to cake in massive quantities, all day and every day, but taking it to those extremes one really would have to decide between cake or death. (The plagiarising of Eddy Izzard being an added bonus.) So a little cake goes a long way, and to continue a motion metaphor, this is a marathon and not a sprint, so I'm rather happy to have cake along for the journey. I'm a great believer that a happy head makes a healthy body in the long run. 

And I can't end this post without using a sticky finger to point out the wonders that is Winkel 43 in Amsterdam. Their apple pie truly is of an exemplary nature.~

from Winkel43's facebook page