Food Forum #1: Gluten Free Baking

This is a story about a birthday party and the pursuit for the perfect alternative to birthday cake for celiacs.  At the beginning of this story is Langston, age 6, celebrating his birthday with a few dozen of his closest friends, a balloons and swordfighting party that's sure to pop all afternoon.

My first job was to look through the free food from the Supermarket Guru and find something I could eat at the birthday party!  Cake is one of my favorite treats and finding wheat and gluten-free desserts has been a challenge.  Time to make my own treats.

I started with a gluten free pancake mix with a good Irish Soda Bread recipe on the back.  The original recipe called for butter and milk, raisins and caraway seed but I had other ideas in mind.

After a firm mixing with hemp oil, hemp seed, almond extract, soy flour and vanilla soymilk, I cut and squeezed a blood orange into the mix.  The ingredients went into an oiled baking dish and dark chocolate was grated for the top.  A bit of confectioners sugar and blood orange essence topped our version of Irish Soda Bread before it went into a 350degree oven for 35 minutes. 

As I pulled it out of the oven the whole kitchen and downstairs smelled like fresh baked bread.  No yeast, no gluten, no wheat, no dairy.  Almost vegan!


Our next challenge will be to make gluten-free baked goods that last more than an afternoon.  Once Ngaio brought out the strawberries and we melted the rest of the dark chocolate the soda bread went very, very fast! 

Special thanks to Langston for inviting us for his sixth birthday party, and to the Supermarket Guru for letting us test out new gluten-free products!  I would highly recommend the bread mixes and everything we tried out for this cooking test.  Great texture, no problems with burning during baking and a flavor that kept me going back for more!