Gluten Free Bread - and it tastes good ! :D

I am very excited today! I have finally found a recipe for gluten free bread that easy, fast and tastes good! If you have ever tried to eat gluten free bread from the store, you will understand my excitement ;-)    Let me explain how this all came about.... A little while ago a friend from church and I talked about german bread and how much we miss it (she is german as well). Then she told me that she has a great and easy recipe for baking bread at home, without a bread machine. Well, I wasn't too excited at first because I know about baking bread. When the kids where younger, I used to bake bread all the time - without the bread baker and from scratch. It was usually not too bad but rather messy, though the kneading process was surprisingly stress relieving, seeing that one could pound the dough and really work it through.... then you have to let it rise and wait and knead and let it rise and finally bake. And don't forget all the clean up. It was rather tedious to wash out all the fresh (very) sticky bread dough out of the wash cloth and get if of the work surface ...... hhmm, no I wasn't too eager to try baking again. It tasted good, but I just dreaded all the work. My friend assured me though, that the whole process is very quick, easy and painless. She must have seen the doubt in my face, because she invited me to her place to bake bread. Well, I was curious and I like spending time with her, so I agreed to come over a few weeks later. When baking day came, I went to my friends house with some other lovely ladies from our church, who were just as curious about baking bread in a 'painless' way.
Well, to make a long story short - it was great, easy, painless and delicious !
We mixed the dough in a stand mixer, put it in an ice cream bucket, let it rise for about one hour, took a chunk out and baked it - done! The rest of the dough stays in the bucket in the fridge and when you are ready to bake the next bread, you take out another chunk of dough, let it rise for about 90 minutes and bake it - done! It truly was easy and the clean up is done very fast and easy. Of course we baked regular bread at my friends house, but when I got home, I remembered that about a year ago I recipes from another friend and they were from the same book that my friend used when she baked the bread with us. So I set out to find the recipes and I found them! Sure enough, it was the same book! "Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes A Day".  Sooo, of course I tried the recipes and to my great surprise - it came out great and tastes great! I have tried a sweet bread for Easter - I don't have pictures of that. After that I made the the gluten free olive oil bread. Can you say awesome :D   So I mixed the dough one evening, it took about 20 minutes, including clean up. Put it in an ice cream bucket and put the lid loosely on it. Let it sit for 2 hours and then put it in the fridge. I wanted to bake bread the next day. Well, the next day we all had a craving for pizza. If you have been gluten free for a little while, you know that this can be a problem. Though Dominos has GF pizza but it is small and rather expensive ( $ 10 for a small pizza) and we would have had to buy at least two pizzas. I remembered though that somewhere in the recipe it talked about using the olive oil dough for pizza. So we stopped at the grocery store and got some pizza sauce, cheese, ham, pineapple and olives and went home. It took some of the dough out of the ice cream bucket and made two pizzas. I just had to flatten the dough and put all the stuff on it and put it in the oven - done! It was really, really good! The next day I used the rest of the dough to bake bread. You just have to let it rise for about 90 min and bake it - done! It is one of the best GF breads I ever had! It is hard not to eat too much! If this all made you curious, here is the website, it even has a short video on how it is done. Take a look, you will be amazed how easy it is to make bread - and cheap! I have ordered the book now, because there is one chapter of gluten free baking in it, seeing how much money I can save in buying bread it is well worth the investment :)
Now that I talked all about our yummy food, here are some pictures :)

It was supposed to be done on a pizza stone, I used a
pizza tray with foil, since I have only one pizza stone.

It turned out very well :)

Ham and Pineapple - yummy.....

Doesn't that look good ?

Same dough as the pizza.

It is a little bit chewy but not too dense and
crispy on the outside. Very delicious!

Friends and Cheesecake :)

After a look into the mirror this morning, right after I got out of bed, I was sure the day was ruined. God had a great way of lifting my spirit though. A friend called me on skype and we had a chance to connect again. Even though we didn't touch base with each other much, except the occasional hello on Facebook or through reading each others blogs, it seemed as though we sat together just yesterday. It was such a sweet surprise to talk to her and her children. It made my day, though come to think of it, I am not so sure I made their day. I was not the most pleasant sight ....

After we stopped talking, she had to go because her husband had made pancakes and everyone sat down to eat. That got me hungry and I ventured into the kitchen, only find that I was too lazy to make something for breakfast, so I ate a gluten-free Christmas cookie for breakfast. If you'd like a recipe, look here.     

The kids had fun decorating cookies :)

and they are very good as well :)

When I finally got done with my shower and looked much more presentable, I decided to make the cheesecake I had planned for yesterday. It turned out sooo good! I did make some changes though, because the original recipe calls for pumpkin puree - I made the cheesecake several time like that, but we didn't feel like pumpkin today. So I substituted sour cream for pumpkin puree and lemon for cinnamon and pumpkin spice.  If you would like the recipe, you can click here.

It actually looks a bit darker than it is.

very moist and yummy :)

After all the baking and warming up the left overs from yesterday I cleaned the kitchen, dropped off one of my daughters at the mall - insert rolling eyes - took my little guy to Target to buy Lego Batman 2 for the Wii. It was sold out and so we went to Walmart where he found his long desired game, which he bought from his Christmas money from Oma and Opa. Thank you both, you made him very happy :) Then I dropped him off at home and went to pick up my child and two of her friends from the mall, brought them all to our house and tried to ignore loud laughing of three teenagers. Then I started working on my goals and organization for 2013. I think I deserved that piece of cheesecake. It was a good day :)

Yummy treats....

This week we have spend a little of our time watching "The West Ladies" aka Homestead Blessings. We watched the Dairy Delights, Crafts, Cooking and Herbs. It was really fun to see how easy these wonderful ladies make the work look like. Even my little guy had fun watching it and he learned about herbs and such as well. It was pretty cool. Since we were drooling over the cooking dvd and got really hungry, we decided to try some things. Of course we have to adapt some of recipes because we need them to be gluten-free. I have been buying Jules flour for a little while now and really, really like it. It doesn't taste gluten-free at all. We really enjoy it. Anyway, I searched her recipes for peach cobbler and found it. I haven't had peach cobbler since I lived in the south, about 16 years ago. It took me about 10 min to prep it and put it in the oven. It came out very nicely and tasted so delicious! I had a hard time to defend it from certain children (who got up in the middle of the night to steal another piece of peach cobbler). In the morning we had only two pieces left - I guess I have to make some more  :D

A quick picture before it was all gone. Unfortunately GF flour doesn't brown like regular flour.

Yesterday we treated ourselves to homemade ice cream. No we don't use the hand-crank the West Ladies use ;-)  We have a little electric one, which works very nicely and produces about 1 1/2 quarts of ice cream. We tried it last night for the first time and boy, was it good ! The recipe is very easy.

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
3/4 cup sugar
pinch of salt
2 teaspoons vanilla

Though I must say that the 2 cups heavy cream was a little too rich. We had some of the cream stuck to the roof of our gums. So next time I will try it with only 1 cup of heavy cream and 2 cups of whole milk. I think that might be just a little less rich. I use vanilla without alcohol, which I think makes it so much better tasting. I will write an update on the reduced fat ice cream. It was too late last night to make chocolate sauce, which I really enjoy, so we used the sprinkles we have on hand.

I liked mine without anything, just pure :)

New Gluten Free Recipe

In my last post I talked about my new stand mixer. This time I would like to share a recipe for a gluten free cake. Of course I really just wanted to use the new mixer ;-)  It works really good and I am happy with my purchase.

Aside from the fact that I wanted to try out the mixer, we all had a real craving for something  citrus-y. For Dinner we had Rice with Broccoli with Orange and sausage with Mango chutney and a salad with Mangos, Romaine lettuce and Sunflower seeds. It was very good but I think that is where our craving for something citrus-y started.... Probably because we are all sick and our bodies just need vitamin C.

So anyway, I had some Oranges that need to be eaten so I decided to make an Orange cake with orange cream frosting. (I would suggest to use the zest of oranges only if they are organic)

Orange Cake

2 1/2 cups of flour mix ( see the bottom for what I used)

3 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup coconut oil

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 1/4 cups sugar

zest of 2 oranges

2 oranges, whirled around in the food processor

4 large eggs

1 tbs vanilla 

I started by grating the orange peel into a bowl. Next I peeled the oranges out of the remaining peel and put them into the food processor. I processed it until it was like a sort of orange juice, I have some kids who don't like " pieces" in their cake :-)

Then I beat the oils, orange peel, and sugar until smooth and added the eggs. Then I poured the oranges from the food processor into it. It gets very liquid-y so be sure to turn the speed down on the mixer.

Now I added the flour, after that was worked in, I added the baking powder, salt and vanilla.

Pour into a large loaf pan and bake at 350 for about 40 min. You may want to check before that, depending how hot your oven gets.

Cool for 20 min and then put the glaze on. 

Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

1 Orange

a few tablespoons of heavy whipping cream

Again, grate the peel of the orange. When you are done add the powdered sugar and the juice from the orange. While mixing it add a little heavy whipping cream until you have the desired consistency. You can also you milk, half and half or water instead of the whipping cream. That is just what I happened to have on hand.

It was very delicious! The light taste of coconut complements the orange taste. The cake has semi- dense texture. I think that is due to the coconut flour. It didn't last long in our house. It was almost half gone before it was even cold :D

 Guten Appetit :D