With Patience, Kids Can Learn to Bake GF Cupcakes

Always interested in frugal living, I checked out a slideshow article from Kiplinger’s on ways to save money. One that made my jaw drop down and say, “duh,” was the caption, “Learn to Cook.” Then again, I have known a few people over the years who lived on nothing but restaurants, carry-out and premade entrees. Unfortunately, for someone who has to live gluten free, this would be an extremely expensive option. While more and more restaurants and bakeries offer gluten free products, and there are a lot more frozen entrees available these days, you’ll pay a high price.
That’s why I’ve been teaching my sons how to cook, a valuable and money-saving life skill. This week, while learning about long division, the Louisiana Purchase and how to grammatically classify a sentence, my ten-year old has also been spending quite a bit of time in the kitchen.
He wanted to make cupcakes for a Halloween party, so I chose this One Bowl Chocolate Cake http://www.recipezaar.com/One-Bowl-Gluten-Free-Chocolate-Cake-209764 recipe for them. The recipe is simple enough for children and inexperienced cooks to make. It also has a great flavor, keeps moist and rises nicely. Even with all these great features, cooking this with a 10-year old still requires patience.
Since I was out of my all-purpose flour mix, we had to get out the flours and make more. My son, eager to help, measured out a cupful of rice flour, and as I was just saying, “Don’t tip the cup so high over the mixing bowl,” I head a thud and saw a cloud of white dust floating around the counter.
“Sorry, Mom!” he said.
He was careful with measuring after that. Then, it was time to blend the various flours with the pastry blender. Just as I was saying, “Don’t mix the flour so fast,” I saw another cloud of white dust floating around the counter.
“Sorry, Mom!” he said.
Then it was time to mix all the ingredients for the cake. He was so excited that he was doing this kind of happy dance around me as I was gathering all the ingredients.
“Ouch! Please stop stepping on my toes.”
“Sorry, Mom!” he said.
The rest of the measuring and mixing went without too many messy or painful incidents. He laid out the cupcake papers in the muffin tins. Because the cake batter is much thicker than normal, we had to drop it in with teaspoons like cookie dough, instead of pouring it in, as we would have before we went gluten free.
The cupcakes, after baking for 25 minutes (instead of the recipes called-for 30 to 35 minutes for a cake) were a little lumpy looking, but they rose nicely and tasted great, even several days later.
Despite the messes and the bruised toes, it was worth it. Encouraged with this success, my son wants to do a lot more baking. Today, he wants to make pumpkin fudge. I’ll be sure to have the “dogvacs” ready to clean up the messes on the floor (when aren’t they ready?), and I may borrow my husband’s steel-toe boots.

Enjoy Cheesecake with a Gluten Free Nut Crust

Today is my husband’s birthday, and what he really wants is an orange cheesecake. We all love cheesecakes in our family, but the trick is how to make a gluten free crust. The usual graham cracker crust would be difficult, since I still haven’t found any premade GF ones on the market yet. I have a recipe for making them, but it seems a lot of work to mix, bake and then crush them and still have to make a cheesecake crust. I don’t like all that work. I’m kind of lazy that way.
Fortunately, I found a tasty and easier solution in making nut crusts. I can buy the nuts already finely ground. Then it’s just a matter of mixing them with sugar and an oil. I usually use canola oil instead of butter (since the butter would have to be melted anyway) in the hopes of offsetting the saturated fat content of all the cream cheese and eggs. Although olive oil is heart healthy, I wouldn’t use it for baking a dessert because of it’s strong flavor.
What kind of nuts I use depends on the type of cheesecake. The stronger flavor of pecans complement pumpkin and chocolate nicely. However, for fruit or mint cheesecakes, I prefer the lighter flavor of almond.

Here’s the recipe for a nut crust:

1-1/2 cups ground nuts
4 Tbs. canola oil
3 Tbs. sugar

Combine nuts, sugar and oil. Pat into the bottom and part of the sides of a spring-form pan and pour in your favorite cheesecake filling. Bake according to your cheesecake filling recipe.

If you can’t find finely ground nuts, you can toast whole nuts and grind them yourself. However, an easier option would be to let your cheesecake go naked—that is, crustless. This works out well for many cheesecake recipes, and has become popular with the carb-cutting crowd. Either way, going gluten free doesn’t mean the end of cheesecake!

Cranfest in Wisconsin inspires a dairy-free fudge

Being a family of cranberry lovers, we took a jaunt a few weekends ago to Warrens, Wis., for the town’s annual Cranfest . Amid a town full of craft booths and funnel cake vendors, we found what we were looking for, a tour of a real cranberry bog. We learned a lot there about how they cultivate and harvest cranberries. (The cranberries don’t actually grow in the water, but are flooded in the fall to make harvesting easier, since they float.)

My 10-year old son Dwight learned the hard way what a cranberry picked straight off the vine tastes like. They really do need to be sweetened!
Afterward, we browsed through the Wisconsin Cranberry Discovery Center, http://www.discovercranberries.com/, where we learned about how cranberry farming developed over the years. The farmers invented quite a few interesting tools.
Afterward, we hit some of those vendor booths, focusing on those that sold cranberry items. You name it, they make it with cranberries—chutneys, salsas, ice cream, candles, soaps, teas, candies, mustards, honey, barbecue sauces, cheese, sausage, dips and syrups. After looking around for the best prices and reading labels carefully, we bought cranberry wine, cranberry-flavored popcorn, cranberry honey (no actually berry in it, but the bees used cranberry flower pollen) and cranberry taffy. The boys really wanted the cranberry fudge, but I couldn’t find any that was dairy-free. So, of course I promised find a recipe and make some for them.
I finally got around to it this week, and after the results, I can tell you that GFCF fudge is possible! Most of the recipes I found call for cooking up fresh or dried cranberries into a sauce or reducing cranberry juice. Being a lazy cook, I found a recipe that uses cranberry juice concentrate. It’s cheaper than bottled juice, and less work, too.
Coconut cream turns out to be a great dairy-free substitute for evaporated milk. Instead of butter, I used a refined coconut oil that can tolerate higher temperatures. The cream and the oil may give the fudge a slight coconut flavor, but it works together well with the vanilla in the marshmallow cream and the cranberry juice.
For white chocolate chips, I used Eilien’s Candies, Inc. brand, which, while it doesn’t contain gluten or dairy, could still have some cross contamination from the equipment. The boys and I can tolerate some cross contamination. However, if that’s an issue for you, I found the Chocolate Emporium, which offers GFCF white chocolate chips for sale at http://www.choclat.com/GFCF/gfcf.php. It’s more expensive, but it makes this fudge possible for those who have to be extra careful about a GFCF diet.
(12 ounce) package GFCF white chocolate chips
1/2 teaspoon almond or orange extract
Seven ounces marshmallow cream
1/3 cup coconut cream
1/3 cup frozen cranberry juice concentrate, thawed
2 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup coconut oil
Spray or grease a 9x9 pan. Set aside the chips, extract and marshmallow cream in a large bowl. In a medium size sauce pan, bring coconut cream, sugar and cranberry concentrate to a boil, stirring constantly. Cook to 235°F on candy thermometer (about 9 minutes). When mixture reaches 235°F, take off the heat and add coconut oil. Stir and mix it well, and then pour over the white chips, extract and marshmallow cream. Stir this well until all the chips melt. Pour into the prepared pan. Let it cool and then refrigerate till firm. Cut in squares.

Going Dairy-free on a Budget

Often, people who have to go gluten-free also benefit from going dairy-free, whether it’s to treat celiac, an autism spectrum disorder or a double food allergy. With my two sons, I have had to cope with dairy free for a few years and have found workable substitutes.
When a recipe calls for milk, I usually use soy milk cup-for-cup. Soy milk has a slight bean flavor, but this gets lost when it’s cooked. I have had success with soy milk in baking and white sauces. My favorite white sauce recipe can be found at White Sauce (Gluten & Dairy free) - 12353 - Recipezaar. Coconut milk, if you like the flavor, also works. As with the gluten free flours, an Asian store will probably provide the best deal on coconut milk. Some people prefer the nutty flavor of almond milk. Your choice, of course, will depend on personal preference, as well as other food sensitivities or allergies.
For baking with butter, there are a number of possibilities. Shortening works well, especially Butter-flavored Crisco. Just make sure to follow the directions for adding water when you use it as a butter substitute. When a recipe calls for melted butter, I’ll often use canola oil instead. Coconut oil is another good substitute that seems to melt even more smoothly than butter.
For frosting, use pasteurized egg white to make a meringue frosting. Mori-Nu Tofu offers a non-dairy frosting (as well as other non-dairy recipes) at Welcome to Mori-Nu Tofu.
Finding butter substitutes for topping things like mashed potatoes and (gluten-free) bread is probably easiest of all. Blue Bonnet Lite, Smart Balance and a number of other “heart-healthy” products are dairy free.
When looking for dairy-free products, make sure you read the labels as carefully as you would for gluten-free. Whey, ghee, curds and ready sponge are some less obvious dairy ingredients.
If you’re doing dairy-free because of autism spectrum disorder, anything with the words casein or caseinate is off limits, since that is the substance in milk that causes the problems. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good whipped cream or cheese substitute, because the “dairy-free” ones contain casein.
Fortunately, for those avoiding gluten and casein, there is a way to cheat.* My sons take enzymes (such as Enzymedica’s GlutenEase and Enzymatic Therapy’s Gluten Defense). They can be a bit pricy, so I still have gluten- and dairy-free snacks available for them. However, the enzymes are great to have on hand so the boys may enjoy regular food. My older son keeps a key-ring pill holder we bought at the drug store in his pocket, so he can enjoy a few slices of a regular pizza when he’s out with friends.
So, if you’re already feeling overwhelmed with gluten-free cooking and facing having to tack on dairy-free as well, take heart. There are still a lot of reasonably-priced choices.

*This is not an option for celiac, but we can hope there will be something for us in the future.

GOING GLUTEN FREE ON A BUDGET

Some time ago, I learned that I had celiac sprue, an autoimmune condition that requires a gluten-free diet. Gluten is the protein found in wheat, barley, rye and a few other grains.
I’m in company with millions of others. Thousands of Americans have already been diagnosed with celiac sprue, although millions more may have a “silent” version that mimics a number of other diseases.
Wheat is in almost everything at the grocery store these days. Often labeled as “modified food starch,” it’s in meats, canned soups, frozen entrees, candies, and many other surprising places at the grocery store.
Meanwhile, you can pay a premium to pick up anything with a “gluten free” label. Gluten free cookies, cake mixes, frozen entrees, pasta and flours are can be considerably more than their traditional counterparts. The tightwad in me yelled, “Noooooo!”
Fortunately, I am blessed with a good friend, a busy home schooling mother who took herself and her four sons off gluten years ago while on a tight budget. I’ve learned a lot about saving money from her and from my own experiences.
Get recipes for free. Once you find out you have celiac (by a blood test or by eliminating gluten from your diet), don’t run out to the bookstore for recipe books. If you already know someone with celiac, borrow books to see if it’s worth buying. Of course, there’s always that generous lender of books, the library, which may have some gluten free cookbooks. Search the web for free recipes, such as recipezaar.com, allrecipes.com, casceliacs.org and numerous gluten free blogs.
Go naturally gluten free. Instead of pasta, eat more rice and potatoes. Fill up more on healthier fruits and vegetables. Get adventurous with ethnic dishes that traditionally don’t have gluten in them. Use corn tortillas in place of flour tortillas.
Instead of gluten free cakes, cookies and pies for desserts, whip up a batch of meringue cookies or a dish of creamy Pavlova. Those flourless chocolate cakes are easy to make and are all the rage with their rich, decadent taste.
Go ethnic. Asians have been cooking with gluten free flours for years. At the Korean grocers in my area, I can buy rice flour, potato starch, tapioca starch, mung bean flour and corn flour for much less than at Whole Foods. An Indian store in my area offers a high quality, inexpensive rice flour.
Ethnic convenience foods are often gluten free and less expensive than the “gluten free” counterparts in the health food aisle. Rice noodles are an Asian tradition that cost about a fraction of “gluten free spaghetti” noodles. Thai Kitchen offers an instant rice noodle soup similar to those famously cheap Ramen noodles. Asian rice crackers are also much less expensive.
At the Indian store I can buy some inexpensive, spicy entrees that are naturally gluten free. Flavor mamra, Indian puffed rice, with cinnamon and raisins for a breakfast cereal.
If, like my younger son, you love the Middle Eastern pasta couscous, a good (and healthy) substitute is a South American fruit called quinoa. While a bag of quinoa may seem expensive, a little goes a long way. Three quarters of a cup, once cooked with water or broth, makes an ample side dish for a family of four.

Make your own mixes ahead of time. Even a busy cook could make ahead those special flour mixes that are so expensive in the health food section. Many of those cookbooks you can borrow feature recipes for combining all those special flours to get a close taste and texture to wheat flour. There are recipes for all-purpose flour, pancakes, cakes and cookies. Mix ahead of time and keep on hand for those busy days.
Make gluten free sauces and soups to freeze and have available for future casseroles.
Get time-saving appliances. Bread machines and food processors make gluten free cooking easier. They are also the kinds of appliances that people receive as gifts and never use. When I told my friends I was planning to buy a bread machine, several offered to give me theirs, since they were just taking up space in their homes. I’ve also seen bread machines and food processors offered on freecycle.org.
A diagnosis of celiac sprue doesn’t have to break your food budget. And once you go gluten free, you or your family members may feel so much better that cooking from scratch won’t seem like such a chore.