| You might literally not believe how well this recipe came out in the end. It’s flaky, it holds together beautifully, it lasts until the last slice of pie (even when that takes a week!).
Pie crust is one of the first things my mother took a serious crack at back in the day, just a few months after my sister and I (and by extension my father) were diagnosed with celiac, since Thanksgiving was coming up soon. She probably ran through every pie crust recipe she could find anywhere on the internet; the results were . . . well, a little hard on the jaw. 🙂 Which isn’t her fault, of course, pie crust is hard to make when youdon’t have to do it gluten-free, let alone when you do! For a solid year, her attempts failed, my attempts failed (though they made nice Frisbees, once you scooped the pie filling back out), and we’d basically written off pie as, well, pie-in-the-sky. . . |
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This particular recipe is one of my better efforts in recreating pretty much exactly what Sean missed (and, for that matter, what I expect out of a good cinnamon roll!). They are not so syrupy as what you’ll get from the cinnamon roll place in your local mall, but quite frankly, having good fresh sweetbread makes it unnecessary to drown the roll in syrup. All that extra sweet is to hide how dry the roll is from being reheated so much. These are sweet and satisfying, and the cream cheese topping positively indulgent :-).
| This recipe started from one of Jocelyn’s, but it’s been transformed many times since such an auspicious beginning. The procedure for rolling them out is a little unusual, but it works well as long as you’re attentive to detail. From start to finish, it’ll take about 2 1/2 hours to make a whole batch of this dough. I highly recommend making a full batch even if you aren’t planning to eat more than a little of it right away, since you can just parbake the remaining crusts, freeze them, then thaw them out to use later. |  |
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Banana bread is one of the other things I reinvented pretty early on–there are always a few bananas that no one wants to eat that you have to do something with! In addition, Sean really likes to eat it for breakfast :-). Unfortunately, though Sean liked some of the versions I produced from recipes found on the internet, I didn’t. My tongue was accustomed to something sweeter and lighter. This isn’t quite identical to the “add two cups of sugar” version from my childhood, but I find it a very good compromise, since the whole wheat flour and natural sugars are much better for me! It is still moist, bouncy and banana-y, and really, what more could you ask for?
No, this does not contain any actual butter! I believe the name comes from the fact that you can spread it on toast just like butter–buttering with apples, as it were :-). More accurately, it is somewhere between apple sauce and jam or marmalade; you use it like jam (up to and including in a PB&J, if you like the flavors that way!), but it’s made of very very cooked apples, like applesauce. As a matter of fact, I will mark where you can stop in this recipe and have wonderfully tasty homemade applesauce.
| When I made my final test batch of bread sticks, there were plenty of people over at my apartment, including an old friend who’d been out of the country for most of the past few years and so had mostly been out of touch. He was obeying our “no gluten in the apartment” rule, of course, but hadn’t stopped to think through how that meant every bit of food in sight was gluten-free. So when I handed him his share of the freshly buttered breadsticks, then came back five minutes later to ask how they were, he said, “Yeah, they’re good.” I asked him, “So they don’t taste fake? or weird? or anything like that? You wouldn’t think they were gluten-free?” He blinked at me several times, then asked as it sank in, “Wait, these are gluten-free? Really?”
That’s always how I know a recipe is done. 🙂 |
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| I don’t know if there’s really a story behind these muffins in particular; the first muffins I made, I was still in the habit of sticking to the exact amounts of the glutinous recipe I was adapting from, and using truly generous amounts of xanthan gum out of some sort of fear that if I didn’t provide enough superglue, the end result would fall apart in my hands, in keeping with its true nature as a desperately fabricated objection to the laws of physics. I was still making imitations of food, not food itself. But anyway . . . |  |
| Nothing fancy about this bread; it’s not trying to be extra-light, or extra-sweet, or extra-yeasty. It’s just basic and delicious. (It reminds some people of bread-machine bread.) I’ll eat it straight up with a little butter, or (my favorite) in a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. I don’t cook for a lot of people, so more often than not I go through half a loaf or so in the first couple days, use up a little more by making toast, then turn the rest into bread crumbs and chuck it in the chest freezer. Alternatively, you can get good use out of this bread for nearly a week if you take the time to chuck slices in the broiler and toast them really thoroughly! |  |
This was one of the first sugar-free things I ever came up with. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was lamenting how he can never have apple pie, because the filling is nearly always mostly congealed sugar with apple bits in it. I went to the kitchen and created this, and he has loved it since the first bite! I figure that apples are plenty sweet enough to be tasty without all that sugar, so why add it? I think that this pie has a particularly spiced-cider kind of taste, which I really enjoy.
