12 Days of Gluten-Free Desserts: Day 2 Lemon Pound Cake

Lemon Pound Cake

 
   One thing I really missed being gluten-free was pound cake. So we set out to find a delicious recipe for pound cake. As I've mentioned before, it is all in the flour mix. Once we found the perfect gluten-free all-purpose flour mixture recipe, we could take any recipe and make it gluten-free. Hope you enjoy this recipe!

Lemon Pound Cake

1 c. salted butter, softened (2 sticks)
2 1/2 c all-purpose gluten-free flour 
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
3 c granulated sugar
1 Tbsp. lemon zest
6 large eggs, room temperature
4 1/2 Tbsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. vanilla
1 c. sour cream
1 c. confectioners' sugar

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease a bundt pan. Sift flour, baking soda, and baking powder into a separate bowl.

I use a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer. Beat butter for 1 min. Add sugar, vanilla, and zest and beat on medium-high until light and fluffy for 2-3 minutes. Add lemon juice. Mix in one egg at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Reduce mixer to low. Add half the flour mixture, then the yogurt, and then the rest of the flour mixture. Mix well but don't over mix.

Pour batter into your prepared pan and bake until toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean about 65 to 75 minutes. Cool the cake in the pan for 30 mins and then turn it out onto a wire rack to completely cool.

In a small bowl, whisk together confectioner's sugar and 1/2 Tbsp. of lemon juice. Add cold water If needed) a little at a time to create a thick but pourable glaze. Pour glaze over the top of the cake and ENJOY!

12 Days of Gluten-Free Desserts: Day 1- Gluten- Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

     When I was a kid, my Mom sometimes had Chocolate Chip Cookies or Rice Krispie treats waiting for us when we got home from school. To this day, those are two of my favorite desserts. My older brother served in Desert Storm in Bahrain. I knew how much he loved Rice Krispies treats so I made him some and sent them to him, but had to make like 6 batches because I kept eating them!

     With our all-purpose flour mix, we now can make homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies for the whole family. When we send these cookies in with our gluten-free daughter to a class party, none of her friends know they are eating a gluten-free cookie; they are that good!!

     So this classic cookie recipe is our first dessert recipe in our "12 Days of Gluten-Free Desserts" blog. Remember if you have an old recipe that was passed down to you, you can substitute our all-purpose gluten-free flour mix for the regular flour and it will taste just as good, but now it will be safe to eat!

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 sticks salted butter, softened

3/4 c. + 1 Tbsp. brown sugar

2/3 c. sugar

2 eggs

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

3/4 tsp. xanthan gum

3 c. all-purpose gluten-free flour mix

12 oz. bag chocolate chips

Preheat over to 375 degrees. Place parchment paper on a cookie sheet.

Mix butter and sugar together until creamy. Add eggs one at a time. Beat in vanilla. In a seperate bowl sift* together flour, baking soda, and xanthan gum. Add flour mixture to butter/sugar mixture one cup at a time. Blend in flour slowly. Add chips just incorporate. 

Drop a spoonful of cookie dough on the cookie sheet with the parchment paper on it. Bake 375 degrees for 10 mins or until light brown.

*It is very important to sift gluten-free flour to make sure baked good doesn't become lumpy.


Day 2: Gluten-Free Lemon Pound Cake

12 Days of Gluten-Free Dessrts

Welcome to the 12 Days of Gluten-Free Desserts

     Tomorrow December 9th, 2013 starts our First Annual 12 Days of Gluten-Free Desserts! My daughters and I are looking forward to baking and sharing with you 12 delicious gluten-free dessert recipes. When you bake these desserts and share them with your family and friends, they will never know that they are eating gluten-free! Our friends are always surprised, even though they know we ONLY bake gluten-free, that what they enjoying is actually gluten-free. THAT is what we like! We want ALL of our friends and family to enjoy our baked goods whether they are gluten-free or not.

MONDAY: December 9th

           Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Gluten-Free Biscuits

GLUTEN-FREE BISCUITS

Gluten-Free Formed Biscuits

     I admit I miss the ease of the pop-out of the can, pop into the oven biscuits. They are so convenient. But they are not gluten-free and they have all kinds of other ingredients in them.

     My husband is an excellent cook. I never liked biscuits and gravy until my husband made it homemade. Yeah, it is so much better than the stuff from the can. So since being gluten-free I couldn't use my pop-out of the can biscuits anymore. We needed to come up with a gluten-free biscuit recipe. Albeit it takes longer to make these, but it is worth the time to make it homemade and my daughter and I can eat them! 

     These can be made as a drop biscuit or a formed biscuit. I like mine to look like the regular biscuits and it makes a flatter surface for gravy. I use the English muffin rings I purchased online. They are very inexpensive and very helpful to make formed biscuits.

English Muffin Rings

     You can use this basic recipe and add cheese and garlic powder to it and spread melted butter with fresh garlic on top and you have gluten-free Red Lobster biscuits! ENJOY!!

Gluten-Free Biscuits

2 c. gluten-free flour 

2 c. corn starch*

2 tsp. baking powder

2 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. salt

2 tsp xanthan gum

1 stick butter (chilled in freezer)

1 1/4 c milk

1 1/4 c water

1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar 

1 egg, beaten 

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Cover baking sheet with parchment paper to insure biscuits come off the sheet. Grease biscuits rings.

In a mixing bowl combine flours, baking powder, salt, baking powder and xanthan gum. (Gluten-Free flours do best when sifted.) Grate butter into the flour with a fine cheese grater. Mix the butter into the flour so not large ball of butter are left. 

Add apple cider vinegar with the milk before added the milk to the mix. Then add milk, water, and beaten egg to the flour mixture and mix.

Place enough batter in to fill the ring half way. Wet fingers with some water and lightly flatten the top of the batter to make a flat top which will create the formed biscuit. OR drop a large spoonful of dough on the parchment paper to make drop biscuits.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15-20 mins until the biscuits don't look shiny anymore. They won't get that golden brown look like wheat biscuits do. Refer to the picture above to see the color of the finished biscuit.

*If you can do corn starch, you can substitute potato starch

Chocolate Chip Cookie Crunch

We make gluten-free treats and bring them with us to events. Everyone tells us how good they are. Many people ask us for the recipes. So we decided that we would start collecting our recipes into a cookbook. But I wanted to start sharing our recipes with you all and you can try them and see how they work out for you. 

With that being said, my 12 year old, almost 13 year old, daughter is the best baker I know. I give her a recipe and how to doctor it and she is able to make some delicious goodies. One day she wants to open her own bakery. Maybe even a gluten-free bakery!

This has got to be one of the best cookies we have eaten. We took a recipe from a book I am reading and doctored it for gluten-free and it turned out wonderfully. I am addicted.

                 

Chocolate Chip Cookie Crunches

1 cup salted butter (2 sticks, melted)
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt (omit if you use salted butter like us)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 eggs, beaten
2 1/2 cups gluten-free flour mix, sifted
2 cups crush corn chex (crush them with your hands, crumbles not dust)
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips or milk chocolate chips
1 cup white chocolate chips

     Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Melt butter, add the sugars and stir. Beat in eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl mix together, baking soda and flour and sift. Add flour and stir in. Crush corn chex in a bowl with your hands. Add crushed chex and chocolate chips and stir. Form dough into walnut size balls with your fingers and place on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Bake at 375 for 8-10 minutes on the middle rack.

     Cool on baking sheet for 2 minutes. Then remove to a wire rack until they are completely cool. The wire rack is important it makes the cookies crispier. If the cookies spread out too much in the oven reduce to 350 degrees. Do not flatten cookies before baking. They will flatten themselves.

Gluten-Free All Purpose Flour Mixture Recipe

It's all in the mixture!

     Successful gluten-free baking and cooking starts with the right flour mixture. Gluten-free flour is not the same as "flour." Most people think of "flour" as the all-purpose flour that you pick up at the grocery store. If a recipe calls for 1 cup of flour, you scoop usually scoop it out of the bag and then you have your flour for the recipe. Well gluten-free baking requires more than just "flour." 

     Have you heard gluten-free can be gritty or have no flavor or is plain "yucky?" That is usually because someone tried to bake with one gluten-free flour, usually just rice flour. Many companies are making gluten-free all-purpose flour and pre-mixes. These can be very expensive and have flours in it that you may not want. Some have bean flours in them, which upsets many people's stomachs. You can make your own and make it for a lot cheaper.

     To make a good tasting all-purpose gluten-free flour you need several different flours that you may not know even existed until you started your gluten-free journey. I am going to share with you the gluten-free flour mixture recipe that we successfully use to bake with everyday. When you make this mixture you can store it in an air-tight container in your cabinet. Since we used to use a lot of flour to run our bake shop, we purchased a food-grade 20-gallon storage bucket with a lid. You don't need such a big container. Something like the picture below will work fine. It doesn't need to be stored in the refrigerator.

      We use this flour mix 1:1 in any recipe we make; except for bread. 1:1 meaning if you have a well-loved regular wheat flour based recipe, you will replace this flour with the exact same amount of flour that the recipe calls for.This recipe is very simple.

Gluten-Free All-Purpose Flour

    

Single recipe:

    

3- (24oz) bag Bob's Red Mill Brown Rice Flour

1- (24oz) bag Bob's Red Mill Potato Starch (NOT potato flour)

1/2-(20oz) bag Bob's Red Mill Tapioca Flour (NOT tapioca starch)

1 tbsp. xanthan gum

Double recipe:

6- (24oz) bags Bob's Red Mill Brown Rice flour

2-(24oz) bag Bob's Red Mill Potato Starch (NOT potato flour)

1-(20oz) bag Bob's Red Mill Tapioca Flour (NOT tapioca starch)

2 tbsp. Bob's Red Mill xanthan gum

  

Mix together in the container. Store in air-tight container. (We do store the extra xanthan gum in the fridge in a plastic ziploc bag.)

     We have always used Bob's Red Mill flours. I can not speak for other brands of these same flours. We know that these flours work and that no one has reactions to them, so we have always stuck with them. You can buy them at most local grocery stores these days. You can even order them online. If you plan on using this flour a lot, you can ask a local health food store to order you these flours in bulk. But for the average amount of cooking and baking, the single recipe is usually good enough. We have a family of 9, so we usually make the double recipe. 

     SOME recipes we bake, call for a little extra xanthan gum to make the baked goods not crumble. Since there is no gluten to hold things together, the xanthan gum is the binder. Some recipes need a little extra binder.

Introduction to my blog!

Welcome to this gluten-free journey!

     When I started on my gluten-free journey 7 years ago, people

had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned gluten. They would look at me like I was speaking a foreign language. Now most people have heard of it, but still don't exactly know what gluten is. People have been mislead into thinking gluten-free is the new fade diet. And yes, for some people it is. As for the rest of us, we eat gluten-free because we have to NOT because we want to. Being on a gluten-free diet can be challenging. Not impossible, but challenging. With all good challenges, comes growth. I missed my gluten-FULL (that is what one of my best friends calls anything with wheat flours in it and you have to insert her Chilean accident!) goodies. I had dreams of being able to walk into a gluten-free bakery and not worry about what I could eat, what was in the food, or if it cross-contaminated. 

     I wanted to make that dream come true. Well with seven children and all the other things going on in my life, opening a dedicated gluten-free bakery just wasn't an option. So we did the next best thing, we made a dedicated kitchen in our basement for making gluten-free baked goods. The birth of Deliciously Gluten-Free, LLC. We supplied our local health food stores and a local coffee shop. 

     Life got too busy and challenging so we had to stop baking for stores. I hope to revisit that idea sometime in the future. Timing is everything in life. 

     

     For now, people know that I am gluten-free and so is my youngest daughter. I post on Facebook and talk to people about it all the time.When someone is finding their path through this gluten-free journey, they often ask me questions about going gluten-free, where to find recipes, what products to buy, etc. I am honored that people turn to me to help them through this journey. 

     So I am excited to start blogging regularly again. I will post recipes, tips, FAQs, and much more. We are going to start composing our recipes for a gluten-free cookbook. We have people ask us all the time for the recipe when we bring our baked goods places. When we tell them that it is gluten-free they are pleasantly shocked. They tell us they would never have known they were eating gluten-free! We LOVE that!! I was always my hope that people didn't know the difference. Sometimes gluten-free foods can taste yucky, and I didn't want people to ever think that gluten-free had to taste bad. 

     I do not bake alone. My husband and two oldest daughters do most of the baking.

I come up with the recipes. Often I take a recipe I like that is "gluten-FULL" and make my substitutions. We are almost always pleased with the results. 

     I am happy to share these recipes with you all. I hope to be of help to those who are newbie gluten-freers or long time gluten-freers. Also most of our recipes can be made with regular flour too. Please enjoy this blog and share it with your friends! Let me know what I can do to help you. Ask questions! I am ALWAYS willing and excited to learn new things, so please share what you learn and know with me!

Sunnie Stonelake

deliciouslyglutenfree@gmail.com

My favorite gluten-free restaurants

*Disclaimer*

This is based on my opinion and my own personal experiences. I am not being paid to share this.

     I have been on a gluten-free diet since January of 2007. When I started this diet no one had a clue what gluten was. It made going out to eat VERY difficult. I spent many hours explaining just how I needed my food to be prepared. One time I went to a restaurant and asked for no croutons and instructed that they make the Caesar salad in a clean, new bowl. When I got the salad it looked fine. I started eating it and got down to the bottom. EEK! There were croutons on the bottom on the salad. UGH. REALLY?? Since then I have always carried the enzymes called Gluten-Ease with me in my purse. It doesn't stop all the ill-effects I get from the cross contamination, but it does mitigate the effects. Once it pulled me out of a what looked like a "drunken" fog. I hadn't had a drink, but the gluten messed up my brain. I couldn't even remember what money was or how to drive. My sister-in-law was with me and drive us home. She said if I didn't know what was wrong with you, I would have thought you were totally wasted. Scary!

     From years of experimenting and either failing or succeeding, I have learned where I can and can not eat at. My all-time favorite sit-down restaurant is Outback Steakhouse. 

     Whenever I go out to dinner, we go to Outback. It is a running joke amongst my friends, "So... where are we going this time?" LOL! Everyone knows that it where I go out 99% of the time. I prefer Outback because I can order the Outback Special. It is $9.99 for a 6oz sirloin steak and two sides. I usually get a baked potato and a Caesar Salad, unless I am eating really healthy and than I get the steamed broccoli. I have ordered the Aussie Cheese Fries for years and never have reacted. Outback doesn't say they are gluten-free but from my experience I have always been ok. That is NOT to say they are "healthy" but they sure do taste good! 

     I am a hot-foods person. I feel much better when I eat a hot meal. Plus I have learned that I need to eat animal protein at every meal. I have tried so many different diets and have come to know what works for me. Outback provides an expensive, protein-based, healthier meal (especially if you get the salad and broccoli.) 

     The next best thing about Outback is it is the only restaurant that i have been to that has a gluten-free dessert that isn't just ice cream or fruit. The Chocolate Thunder From Down Under is a flour-less, gluten-free brownie with nuts. It has a huge scoop of ice cream, fresh whipped cream, and chocolate shavings on it. It is definitely too much to eat alone. So I only get it when I have people to share it with.

     Outback has a specific Gluten-Free menu if you ask for it. I get the same thing every time because I LOVE it. So my motto is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"There are other gluten-free products they made

     Whenever you go out to eat, always make sure you inform the server that you have a gluten allergy. Restaurants are getting much better at knowing about gluten issues. Not all, but many. 

     I was told by our local Outback Manager that the Outback staff is trained on allergies and how to handle them. It doesn't guarantee anything, but it sure puts my mind more at east knowing everyone is trained about gluten-free procedures.

Gluten-Free Menu

Outback Steakhouse Website