After a year of recipes often involving large amounts of sugar and typically substantial quantities of butter, I am finally writing up my first savory recipe! There’s no chocolate, butter, or added sugar to be found here but instead a simple recipe for guacamole that’s got a distinctive taste, and courtesy of one of its key ingredients holds up well in the fridge without spoiling between when you make it and when you serve it.
A friend of mine passed along this recipe for Samoa Oreo Cookies from Chef in Training, which as-is look amazing and the trick of using a boxed cake mix simplifies making the cookies. After thinking about how I’d want to go about making these, the cookies reminded me of the Chocolate Brownie Cookies I made for the inaugural recipe on this website. My first attempt at these involved the Chocolate Brownie Cookies but without the pecans, and with a buttercream frosting made with a 1/2 cup of butterscotch ice cream topping and about a cup of toasted coconut flakes smooshed into the frosting in each cookie. This was the result, and they were fairly amazing:
In the process of eating these while sharing them with some friends, I decided that I definitely needed to bake these again but I wanted to try a maple frosting instead. The result was just slightly more amazing than the first attempt:
The inspiration for this recipe came from Amy-Lyn at Bushel & A Peck and her recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip Mini-Muffins. I had a vague idea of doing something with bananas and chocolate when I went searching for recipes and hers came up with the added bonus of already being specified as gluten-free. I noticed that coconut oil was mentioned as an alternative to butter, and it wasn’t a big step to swap out milk for almond milk, resulting in a recipe that’s not only gluten-free, but vegan. Since I keep on the lookout for vegan recipes I figured I’d give a vegan conversion of Amy-Lyn’s recipe a try.
A few weeks ago I was experimenting with making hot chocolate from scratch using a base of cream and chopped chocolate and then mixing in a variety of other ingredients to see what happened. The short version is: “wonderful things happened”, and a longer version is on it’s way here once I’ve settled on a trio of recipes that I like the most. One of those experiments involved unsweetened chocolate and molasses and after recovering from the resulting delirium I decided that I wanted to make a cookie sweetened with molasses. I settled on Shauna’s recipe at gluten-free-girl for Soft Molasses Cookies.
A quick warning for this recipe: you will need a kitchen scale. The major ingredients are all listed by weight in the original recipe and I held true to that. The explanation accompanying the original recipe is worth reading through and I agree that it gives you a more accurate and reliable result. My scale is also one of my favorite kitchen appliances, which would be one of several reasons this recipe appealed to me.
Enough words! Let’s see some of these amazing cookies!
I mentioned last time that I’d be back soon to baking something with chocolate, considering the string of chocolate-less recipes I’d been trying, and I promise that is still the plan. The first recipe for February does however involve a slight detour on that plan and another fruit-filled recipe. Many thanks to Ketty and Kristy over at Keepin’ it Kind for this recipe. I’ve had “jam-filled thumbprint cookies” on my to-bake list for a while and this recipe served nicely to check that item off.
The first recipe for 2014 comes to you courtesy of Leslie Hammond and Betsy Laakso’s book, “Gluten-Free Desserts“. I have a couple other recipes earmarked in their book on account of the great pictures and the convenience of the recipes being explicitly gluten-free to begin with. I chose this one on the appealing thought of making something heavily involving apples. That makes for three fruit-centric recipes in a row after December’s Blueberry Honey Oatmeal Squares and November’s Orange Spice Cookies, all notably lacking chocolate. Don’t worry though, we’ll soon be back to something that makes appropriate use of unhealthy amounts of chocolate.
This week’s recipe comes courtesy of Kristin Rosenau and her blog “Pastry Affair“, and is only a minor modification to her Strawberry Honey Oatmeal Bars. I chose to use blueberry jam instead of strawberry simply because I happened to have the former already on hand. My attempt and pictures don’t come close to how amazing her Strawberry bars look, but the end product is still satisfying and delicious.
As I’m typing this there is snow on the ground outside, but when I baked these cookies last week the weather still vaguely resembled autumn and that was my inspiration for choosing them. The recipe is courtesy of Laurie Sadowski and her recipe book “The Allergy-Free Cook Bakes Cakes and Cookies“. I picked up her book at “Canada’s Gluten-Free Market”, an expo on all things gluten-free back in June that was a riot of gluten-free-ness and a good deal of fun.
Thanks to Laurie’s allergy-free efforts the recipe didn’t call for any modifications on my part. These cookies are not only gluten-free but dairy-free, nut-free, and contain no refined sugar. This chalks them up alongside the Vegan Maple Nanaimo Bars for allergy-friendliness (though my current iteration of the nanaimo bars includes nuts) and I’m also happy to report that they’re right up there in the “delicious” and “don’t last very long once offered to people” categories as well.
I was fortunate last week to come across this recipe courtesy of the blog Front Burner when I was in a bit of a rush to bake something involving the word “mocha” that didn’t need a lot of preparation time. That these are “cute and delicious little muffins…so incredibly easy to make” is an understatement by the author of the original recipe.
If you’ve got enough advance warning to soften three tablespoons of butter you can make a full batch of these, from start to cooling racks and with everything else cleaned up, in less time then it takes to run a load of laundry through the dryer when you live in an apartment building when the laundry room is several floors down from you. That’s my version of The Bessman Family’s time measurement for these mini-muffins and yes, I’m now considering measuring all of my recipes by that scale.
You have to go back to March to find a recipe here that doesn’t in some way involve chocolate. I’m okay with that, it says I enjoy chocolate, which is very true. That being said, in the spirit of variety here is a recipe that stands on its own just fine without a hint of chocolate. The thanks this week go to Carol Clements’ “The Cook’s Encyclopedia of Baking“, which is a great all-purpose cookbook.
Regarding Recipes 