Tag Archives: Xanthan gum

Ginger creams

Since our appointment at GOSH at the beginning of January, I have had to flex my baking muscles in an attempt to create some tasty treats for M. Some of our old favourites have had to be shelved due to the additional exclusion of potatoes and raisins from his diet and choices have become limited. I’ve chosen to work within the constraints of rice flour, despite how granular it can taste, as we are fortunate to receive this on prescription for M. This means that every new recipe has to not only be delicious, but also moist enough to incorporate the rice flour and disguise its texture. I can’t imagine that my baking and cooking adventures will continue at the current rate, but this week’s offering is a definite winner and one I’m delighted to be able to share.

Courtesy of thedailybalance.com

One of my all-time favourite treats has to be Fox’s Ginger Crunch Creams, which combine a deliciously crunchy ginger biscuit with a cream filling that has a hint of ginger too. I’m a big fan of ginger of any kind, always have been and, having been treated to one of those delicious biscuits recently, I decided it was about time I made a version M and G can eat. I have never made ginger biscuits before, so wanted a recipe that was relatively simple to adapt for M. I found. and rejected, a number of recipes that I felt had too many steps and ingredients to work in a M-friendly environment, before settling on this recipe by celebrity chef, Paul Hollywood, who is now perhaps best known for his role as a judge on the Great British Bake-off.

As this recipe for his Mum’s ginger biscuits contains just 5 ingredients, I felt up for the challenge and set about making my M-friendly adjustments. The whole process was quick and easy, and I was very impressed with the results. I decided to leave a handful of biscuits plain, but whipped up a delicious ginger “cream” filling to sandwich the remaining pairs together. I used a simple home-made buttercream icing that I flavoured with some ground ginger and created my home-made ginger creams.

Both G and M enjoyed the biscuits, although I may have added a little too much ginger to the filling for their taste, which was reflected in their scores of 7.5 out of 10. I have taken their comments on board and will try to remember to reduce the amount of ginger I use the next time I bake these treats. I am certain that it would be relatively easy to also adapt both the biscuit and cream filling recipes to mimic the others currently produced by Fox’s, or indeed any other flavour that might be enjoyed. The rest of the family loved them and I can highly recommend them dunked in a nice cup of tea!

A Duo of Birthday cakes

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As this year was a milestone birthday for G – her first in double figures – I wanted to bake her a cake she’d love and remember for a long time. Some time ago, I had seen this post by fellow allergy-friendly blogger, The Free From Fairy, and had duly filed away the information in the depths of my memory ready for the right occasion. I loved the idea of creating a cake for G that would be as unique as she is and would have that often elusive wow factor too.

The morning before her party dawned and having bought every colour of icing under the sun and ensuring I had enough supplies of all the key ingredients, I started to bake. In an attempt to make the cake extra-special, I decided to sandwich together layers of chocolate cake as well as plain sponge and used the tried and tested recipes I had developed earlier in the year. The chocolate cake was perfect, but I wasn’t happy with the plain sponge layers as they were too soft in the centre to allow me to successfully cut and stack the cake as I needed. I desperately searched for an alternative recipe and quickly found one that I tweaked according to the new principles of allergy-friendly baking that I have learnt this year. This second Victoria sponge worked brilliantly well and has now been added to my allergy-friendly repertoire.

With cakes baked, layers trimmed and stacked and my icing ready, I attempted to construct G’s rainbow pinata cake. I filled the hollow with a selection of G- and M-friendly sweets before struggling to cover the structure with icing, ready for the final decoration. I have to be honest and say that I wasn’t totally happy with the end result. I found it hard to create the stability needed using an “everything-free” sponge cake. With hindsight, I wish I had assembled the cake layers whole, rather than trying to create the arch of the rainbow as I think the outcome would have been even better. All that being said, G and her friends loved the cake and were thrilled to discover the pinata-effect of the sweets hidden away in the middle of each slice.

Of course, me being me, I wasn’t satisfied with just one cake to celebrate such an important occasion and once the party was over and done with, I set to finding the perfect creation for the big day itself. My inspiration for this second cake came from the amazing book, “Cupcakes, cookies & pie, oh my!“, which had been part of my recent leaving present from my job. G and M have spent hours drooling over the wondrous creations featured between those pages and I determined to create a cupcake piece of art just for G. I now have several great cake recipes to choose from, but stuck to our new favourites of Chocolate and Victoria sponges, though I ambitiously attempted to marble these together for the cupcakes.

The challenge this time round was that I needed to bake the cakes, ice and finish the decorations all in one day. Usually I bake the day before and then spend the evening before the party finalising my ambitious decorating plans, but with G’s birthday falling on a Friday, I had to do it all whilst the children were at school. Cupcakes and 8-inch cake baked, I started to prepare the icing, which needed carefully combining to ensure I had the final effect I wanted. Everything ready, I put all the component parts together and perused the final masterpiece. G had fallen in love with the cupcake peacock in the recipe book and I have to say, it has quickly become one of my favourite bakes too. Needless to say, the birthday girl was delighted and it tasted pretty good too!

The Battle for Breakfast (magnificent muffin recipes included!)

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Courtesy of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_to_work_on_an_egg

Who can forget this advice?

Over the past 12 months, there has been a lot in the national press about the numbers of children who are arriving at school without having eaten any breakfast. More schools have introduced breakfast clubs, in some cases financially supported by the teachers, to ensure that pupils get that all important start to their day. The benefits of a good breakfast to see us all through our day are well-documented and as a Mum, I’ve tried install those principles in my children.

G is a fantastic breakfast eater and always has been. I remember, at an early age, picking her up from nursery and being told by the astounded key-worker that she had eaten 3 whole weetabix for her breakfast that morning. What amazed me more, was that she had already eaten a full bowl of cereal (2 weetabix) at home before getting to nursery – where my tiny mite had put those 5 weetabix we will never know, She happily munches her way through an overflowing bowl of rice pops and cornflakes with raisins and milk and, if she has enough time, then another bowl will be consumed too.

Courtesy of controlengeurope.com

M is the complete polar opposite of his sister. He is much more like me and doesn’t like to eat as soon as he wakes up in the morning. The problem is that due to his sleep issues, I inevitably have to wake him for school and even showering and dressing before we attempt breakfast rarely achieves much success. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get M to eat even a scrap of breakfast, which simply reflects his current health and declining appetite.

Which is why I’m constantly and desperately searching for a tasty morsel that will entice him to eat first thing, whilst being relatively healthy. We’ve tried toast, bacon sandwiches, cereal, porridge, fresh fruit and yoghurts, all with relatively limited success. One day he’ll eat something like it’s going out of fashion, the next day it’s like getting blood from a stone. I was stuck for ideas until last weekend, when inspiration hit. We were up in London for an extended celebration of my Mum’s birthday and at breakfast on the Sunday morning, G disappeared off to the buffet and came back bearing a mini chocolate chip muffin for me as a thank you for taking them to London for the weekend.

As I munched my way through this tiny treat, it struck me that it was just the thing that might tantalise M’s tastebuds first thing in the morning. All I needed to do was find a muffin recipe and do some of my free-from jiggery-pokery to turn it into the perfect M-friendly nibble. We had a huge amount of rapidly-browning bananas in the fridge, so a recipe for banana muffins seemed the obvious choice. I found one, played around with the ingredients and ended up with this wonderful looking batch:

By the time I got round to photographing the end result, 3 had already been devoured by G&M – success!

Excited by the instant success, and with some left-over bacon and soya- and dairy- free cheese (yes such a thing really does exist) lurking in the bottom of the fridge, I found, adapted and baked a recipe for bacon and cheese muffins. These turned out a little more anaemic-looking and seem to be a recipe I’m going to need to tweak a little more to perfect:

Less golden than the banana ones, but still delicious

So, from one evening’s work, I’ve found 2 new recipes – banana muffins and bacon & cheese muffins – and have a pair of happy children. The only problem? As much as M loves the muffins, it appears they weren’t the weapons I was searching for and the battle to get him to eat breakfast rages on!

Pen-blwydd Hapus Mamgu!

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Or, for those of you not fluent in Welsh, “Happy Birthday Grandma!”.

This weekend we celebrated my Mum’s birthday with her and what better way to celebrate than to try out some new recipes, especially those for cake! All recipes have been adapted for a MEWS-diet and I have to say a special thanks to fellow blogger, lucysfriendlyfoods, for her egg-free meringue recipe and invaluable advice for an alternative to soya protein:

Pea protein – a new ingredient to me, but the key to a successful egg-free meringue

I made, and we all enjoyed, successful chocolate meringues and carrot cake. G and M gave both recipes a 10 in their taste tests and I finally feel as if I’m beginning to crack the M-friendly baking dilemma that’s been threatening to beat me for a couple of years. What better way to share than some photos from the day:

At this point, the mix tasted a little like that American delicacy, Marshmallow Fluff!

The final product – perfect and delicious egg-free chocolate meringues

And who’d have thought you could go from this…

…to this?

Happy birthday Mum!

Apples

The Best Chocolate cake in the World

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We’ve enjoyed a peaceful weekend away in South Wales. The weather hasn’t been the idyllic temperatures and sunshine of July, but we had a great time anyway. The odd rain shower or clap of thunder didn’t stop us celebrating my Uncle’s birthday in style. We had a BBQ and buffet feast, including my now infamous Lamb and mint burgers and G and M insisted that I made a birthday cake to mark the occasion.

Courtesy of fanpop.com

Last week’s Lemon drizzle cake was a big success, but I was still not satisfied with the granular nature of the sponge that comes from baking with rice flour. Since then I have been searching for a recipe to make the perfect rice flour cake and discovered this one that assured me that the granular texture would be a thing of the past. Having uncovered such a promising recipe, I just needed a reason to bake it and what could have been better timed than a family birthday?

For the first time I ventured into the mystical world of cooking with xanthum gum – a substance much mentioned in gluten-free cooking, but something I had yet to actually use.

We mixed together the xanthum gum, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda and once again watched the chemical reaction between that and the white wine vinegar that the recipe required. M was enchanted by listening to the ingredients fizz and watching the bubbles of carbon dioxide rise to the top of the mixing bowl – “just like the volcano we made with Daddy”.

I had erred on the side of caution given my previously chronicled inability to bake cakes thatrise and made up one and a half times the quantity of cake mix. I needn’t have worried. Perhaps xanthum gum is the answer to my baking issues, I just don’t know, but I had more than enough cake mix to make a double layer cake and a dozen cupcakes too, all of which had a lovely depth to them.

I decided to use the classic flavour combination of chocolate and raspberries and layered the cake with raspberry jam, vanilla butter icing and dried raspberries. I finished it with a garden-themed decorating scheme and was proud of, at very least, how the cake looked.

That evening, I nervously cut into the cake and served it to the assorted, gathered family members. The cake was beautifully moist, the chocolate sweet but not over-powering and, best of all, there was not one single sign of that granular texture I’ve come to loathe when baking with rice flour. G gave it a resounding 10 out of 10, M stated that it was the “best cake ever, cooked by the best Mummy ever” and even the harshest of critics complimented me on how delicious the cake was. So the conclusion I’ve reached is that this is a cake recipe to treasure and I’ve now just got to work out how to adapt it for as many different versions and occasions as possible.

7 years to diagnosis

Searching for an answer