'Twas Brillig

Birthday, birthday, birthday, Christmas, birthday. That's how it goes in this family and all quite close together. This time of year is a test of my sanity and my stamina in the kitchen. Sometimes I think I'm going to fail the test, but I usually manage a flukey pass. The most recent birthday was no exception.

I have been mentally planning this birthday for quite some time, buying bits and pieces when I saw them and gathering ideas. Although in keeping with my standard form, most of the actual work is left until the last minute.

This party was as much about the decorations and setting as it was about the food and since I'm a bit over the top I wanted everything to be fabulous; it was passable. I didn't have as much time to set up as was really needed and, well if I let them, these things can just get bigger and bigger.

The lolly table

 

Cups laid out on the adult table

Unfortunately, due to the nature of gluten free food, a lot of food needs to be prepared as close to the party as possible, so the afternoon tea setting was really quite perfect. It also meant that everything was finger food and nothing needed to be heated which was very handy. There was also a child with an egg allergy, so most of the food needed to be egg free. Some allowances were made on our intolerances in order to keep things eggless.

The favourite food item of the day was the toadstools. They were made a few days before and are very easy. I used a small amount of dairy in them, but if you are able to eat eggs please use royal icing instead of the white melts.

Toadstools
Ingredients

• Marshmallows - standard sized, cylindrical.
• Marshmallows - larger domed.
• White melts (or royal icing)
• natural food colours

Method

1. Gently melt the white chocolate melts using the microwave on short bursts or a double boiler.
2. Spread a small amount of melted chocolate on the end of a cylindrical marshmallow and stick it to the middle of the flat side of the larger ones. You can use an ice cube tray or an egg carton to help you keep them straight while they set.
3. Add a small amount of colouring to chocolate and use a skewer or toothpick to make spots on the cap. 
4. Leave to set.

There were a variety of biscuits mostly my standard recipes that were presented differently. The iced biscuits were used with fondant so I could could make egg free biscuits and use the same topping. The egg free version was from Kersten's book and the recipe for the fondant was found on the Domestic Diva's blog. The fondant was coloured with Hoppers Natural colours and stamped with a clean stamp. If you like this idea, I would suggest you have separate stamps for craft and food so you don't get any contamination.

The Diva's Marshmallow Fondant Icing
Ingredients

• 600g icing sugar
• 225g marshmallows 
• 1 ½ tablespoons water 
• Extra icing sugar for rolling 

Method

1.  Place marshmallows and water into a microwave bowl and nuke for 30seconds on high.
2. Stir until smooth (cook for another 30 seconds of necessary)
3. Add icing sugar and stir until combined (I did it by hand)
4. If necessary add extra sugar until no longer sticky, but not so stiff as to be unrollable.
5. Wrap very tightly with cling wrap and rest until needed.
6. Can be made several days in advance, put wrapped fondant into a ziplock bag or airtight container to prevent any drying.    

Make sure you use a lightly oiled surface to roll the fondant. I thought that rolling it between baking paper would be enough. It wasn't. The tiniest amount of oil sprayed onto the paper made it so much easier. Cut the fondant using the same cutter you used on the biscuit and then press the stamp firmly into it (without completely squashing it) before laying on your biscuit that has been lightly spread with Vienna cream frosting.

I tried to use sprinkles to make patterns. Don't bother trying that. Aside from it being ridiculously time consuming they don't stick to the fondant.

You could use any natural colour you want for these to match your theme or use none at all. The white is very pretty and you can get a great decoration from the stamp alone.


The other biscuits were made using the melting moment dough.





Chess Board Cookies
Method

1. Take a quantity of melting moment dough. Halve it and add a tablespoon of carob to a portion of the dough. 
2. Use a lined swiss roll tin (or similar) and pressed and rolled half of the dough into it (I didn't use the full length of the tin).
3. Repeat this with the other portion of dough (making sure to use the same portion of tin as the previous piece). Then lay one on top of the other and freeze until very firm.
4.  Cut the dough into four, lengthways and lay two on top of each other making sure your colours are alternated and press them together gently (you will have two logs with four layers each). Freeze again.
5. Now cut lengthways slices about 1cm thick and stack them with alternating colours, four layers thick. Freeze again.
6. Cut slices crossways from the end and lay on a lined baking tray and bake for about 12mins at 160°C.
7. Cool on racks.

Walrus and Carpenter Oyster Biscuits

Method

1. Beat 2 Tablespoons of rice milk into one quantity of melting moment dough.
2. Fill a piping bag that has a large round tip fitted to it with the dough.
3. Roughly pipe the dough into tear drop/oyster shell shapes. Try not to make them too thick. Ridges, bumps and texture are desirable!
4. Bake at 160°C for about 12 mins or until cooked (this depends on the thickness of the dough)
5. Tinge some vienna cream icing pink with cochineal and pipe onto half of the biscuits. Place a Hoppers silver pearl on each and top with another biscuit.

Since this post is becoming a bit too long I'll split this between a few so that things don't get too hard to find.

See you in the next one!

Spring

So spring is here and nearly gone. I have been wanting to share this one for a while, but have had some really good recipes that I had to add first.

We celebrate a few extra holidays in our house. You may remember the pumpkin pie from our autumn feast or have seen pictures of our yule feast on my Facebook page. We celebrate the standard ones too, but really enjoy having the old school seasonal celebrations. They fit with the weather, with fresh food available at the time.

On the 22nd September it was the spring equinox, so we had our Ostara party. Or I guess you could call it easter or Eostre. So you get the theme - flowers, bunnies, eggs, butterflies - Spring things. And what better way to do it than a garden tea party. The table was set with all my china along with glass jars and cups with fresh flowers (these were the rather smelly kind, if you're smell sensitive use ones that are low fragrance).

 
No new recipes for this party, just reshaping some that I already have.

Flower and butterfly shaped biscuit wands made to the iced biscuit recipe or the gum free recipe.  These were decorated with white icing and natural sprinkles and coloured sugar. This is so basic to do, but something I forgot about for a long time. You know exactly what you are getting with these, and if you use homemade colours they can be completely failsafe.     

I used the gum free recipe for these biscuits

Coloured Sugar
Ingredients

• 3 Tbsp sugar
• A few drops natural colour of choice

Method

1. Place sugar and colour in a small container or ziplock bag.
2. Shake until the colour is evenly distributed through the sugar
3. Store in an airtight container.

Also made using the coloured sugar were rice crispy eggs. To shape them I use little plastic eggs, the kind you would normally put treats inside for Easter.

Rice crispy eggs

Rice Crispy Eggs  
Ingredients

• 4 cups crunchy puffed rice
• 200g white marshmallows
• 80g nuttelex
• Coloured sugar

Method

1. Place rice puffs into a large mixing bowl.
2. Slowly melt marshmallow and nuttelex in a saucepan over low heat. Stir continuously to stop it sticking and burning.
3. When it is relatively smooth pour over rice puffs and stir until well combined.
4. Lightly grease the inside of the eggs and pack the rice crispy mixture into both sides and squash them together.
5. When they have set gently ease them out of the eggs and dip one end in coloured sugar.

If you wanted to do these as something the  Easter bunny has left you can coat inside half the egg with the sugar and leave them in the egg to make it less messy.

My friend made vanilla cupcakes that had a split marshmallow on top to look like a flower and tea cup biscuits which were an Orgran thistle shortbread biscuit topped with a marshmallow, sprinkles and half a lifesaver (not failsafe, but similar could be made from royal icing) all stuck together with royal icing.

Meringue peeps, Teacup biscuits, quiche, scones and iced biscuits

Meringues were piped in the shape of peeps or little chicks. I tried adding a bit of saffron to them for colour, but the little that I used gave no real colour, but drastically changed the flavour... not something I would do again. You could also add little dots of icing or carob to make eyes.

There were also scones & jam, little chicken & mayonnaise wraps, mini quiches and pink vanilla milk (rice milk for mine, cow milk for the others) in teapots for the kids to drink. 

Wraps, quiche and flower cupcakes

The activities were loads of fun, the kids made birdfeeders by sticking birdseed to toilet rolls using flour  and water glue and took them home to hang in the garden.

My friend brought blank animal masks and the children decorated them with glitter, sequins, pompoms and textas.

Making masks

The grand finale was an egg hunt in the yard for plastic eggs with treats.

They all took home seedlings to plant; a bean, a purple cabbage and a decorative one. A great non-food idea for easter too, just make sure your seedlings are right for the season.

Now to prepare for the Summer Solstice!

Take Two

This elimination road has been a very long a windy one and baseline has been very hard to hang on to. What started with me telling my boy that we would cut out food for a few weeks and slowly add things back has actually been over two years and nothing new has been added, but more has been taken away. Because baseline has been hard to come by it has been really difficult to pin point exactly what causes these reactions even when we were being super strict.

The sudden realisation that citric acid was looking like the culprit sent me into a spin. It seems that the way it is made means that it is contains glutamates which lead me to some more research which bands them into a group called excitotoxins. And now we seem to have our missing link. A few weeks of reduced excitotoxins and we have a new found baseline that has actually been sustained for more than a couple of days. For our family this is brilliant, for my cooking adventures it has been quite traumatic. Now we are trying to minimise citric acid, gelatin, corn, extracted pectin, anything with malt in the name and all vegetable gums.

So now I am relearning to cook gluten free and without gums. There are quite a few recipes floating around the internet for this type of cooking, but trying to find things that are failsafe is nigh impossible. People use ground chia or flax - Not failsafe, but there is also a few that use psyllium which is failsafe. So now the conversions begin. I apologise to those who avoid eggs as I am going to be using them a bit more now.

The first conversion is the iced biscuits recipe. I just made this a triple batch straight up as the dough still freezes well, so this makes a good quantity of biscuits.

Iced Biscuits - Take two

• 300g nuttelex
• 1 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 3 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/2 tsp vanilla (optional)
• 2 1/2 cups white rice flour 
• 2 cups tapioca flour
• 3/4 cup sorghum flour (if you can't find this brown rice would work fine too)
• 2 Tbsp psyllium husks
• natural sprinkles (optional)
• bamboo skewers (soaked for half an hour and with the sharp end cut off if you prefer)

Royal Icing

• 1 egg white, lightly whisked
• 1 1/2 cups pure icing sugar, sifted

Methid

1. Cream nuttelex and sugar together. Add eggs and Vanilla. Beat to combine. Sift flour over mixture. Stir to combine (or if you have a stand mixer use a slow speed until dough comes together) Place dough onto plastic wrap. Knead gently. Shape into a disc. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in fridge for a couple of hours or until firm. If after this time your dough is still to sticky add flour one tablespoon at a time until it is less sticky (this is still a little softer than the other ones) little things like the size of your eggs can make this adjustment needed.
2. Preheat oven to 170°C. Line baking trays with baking paper. Roll dough out between 2 sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick (don't get carried away and roll it too thin as the biscuits will be too hard). Use whatever shaped cookie cutter you have to cut shapes form the dough. Press remaining dough together and repeat.  Place on baking trays leaving a little space around them. If you are putting them on stick, carefully slide the skewer at least halfway into the dough. Bake for approx 12 mins (depending on the size of you shapes) or until slightly golden on the bottom edge. Stand for 3 minutes. Cool on a rack (biscuits firm up when they are cooling, so don't think they are not done because they are soft straight away).
3. Make icing. Place egg white in a bowl. Gradually add icing sugar, whisking until smooth. Spread over cookies. Top with sprinkles. Set aside for 20 minutes or until set.

These taste good! The texture is slightly different, but I've finally had a gumless baking success. The next thing I need to get my head around is bread, just when I had finally got a good handle on making Kersten's recipe...

Breakfast Biscuits

Breakfast can be tricky when you are gluten free and dairy free, especially if you don't really like milk substitutes and have trouble reconciling the "white brick" with being bread.

I saw a new product in the supermarket the other day - Breakfast Biscuits. Really? Biscuits for breakfast? I knew they would never be an option here, but checked the ingredients out of curiosity. Except for the sugar content they looked reasonably healthy. Surely I could make something like this that my son could eat. I made a batch and he was really happy to eat them. I thought them to be less than stellar. Batch two was tweaked a bit and now I'd be happy to eat them too. The boy likes them as they are easy to get himself and since he has recently come around to drinking rice milk he likes to have a glass for dunking them in.

Healthy Breakfast Biscuits
Ingredients

• 125g Nuttelex
• 1/3 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 cup of brown rice flour
• 1/2 cup white rice flour
• 1/3 cup millet flour
• 1/4 cup puffed amaranth
• 1/4 cup buckwheat flakes
• 2 Tbsp quinoa flakes
• 1 Tbsp psyllium husks
• Small handful of freeze dried pears, broken up (optional)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160˚C
2. Beat nuttelex and maple syrup together in a large bowl until well combined.
3. Beat in the flours and psyllium.
4. Stir in the remaining ingredients
5. Take about a tablespoon and roughly shape into a short log. Place on a lined baking tray and flatten with fingers.
6. Repeat for the remaining mixture (mine made about 24)
7. Bake for 10-12 mins. They are ready when you can see them starting to brown on the bottom edge.
8. Cool on the trays for 5 minutes before moving to wire racks.

Variations

• These would work well with any tolerated flour. It does affect the taste.
• Rice malt syrup would also work instead of maple syrup.
• I'm also sure that other things could be substituted for the buckwheat, amaranth and quinoa. Just keep the quantities similar. You'll know when you try to shape them if they are too dry and need more syrup or are too sticky and need a little more dry stuff.

A Gingerbread House

Without the ginger... Which seemed to go down pretty well with everyone at Christmas as not many people in the family seem to like ginger.

I was completely unsure if this would work, gluten free baking can tend towards brittle and crumbly and there was a chance it would lack the structural integrity needed to hold its own weight. But it did work. It possibly needs a little tweaking as it was slightly dry, but it was pretty.

It was adapted from a recipe on Taste that was recommended to me. How many it makes depends on how big you make them. I made three smaller ones. You will need a template for cutting your house. There are quite a few of varying complexity to be found via google. The one I chose was quite simple as I really didn't have time to waste and still didn't know if it would work. I enlarged and shrunk it before it was printed so there were a few different sizes to work with. If you do the same, don't get the pieces mixed up or your houses may not go together.

Gingerbread House
Ingredients

• 4 1/2 cups (600g) plain GF flour (I used whitewings this time)
• 7 tsp baking powder
• 1 cup (280g) firmly packed brown sugar
• 185g nuttelex
• 1/2 cup (100g) golden syrup
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• Icing sugar (for dusting)
• Allowed lollies (eg. marshmallows, pear drops, musk sticks, sprinkles)

Royal Icing

• 2 egg whites, lightly beaten
• 3 cups pure icing sugar

Method

1. Put the flour, baking powder, sugar and nuttelex into a food processor. Process until it looks like breadcrumbs.
2.  Mix eggs and syrup together and slowly add to food processor while it is running. When it is starting to come together, remove and knead on a floured surface until smooth. Divide into portions, wrap with cling wrap and refrigerate for at least 4hrs
3. Roll the dough between 2 sheets baking paper until 5mm thick. Remove top layer baking paper. Place your templates onto the dough and cut shapes. Place gingerbread on lined baking trays. Freeze for 15 minutes or until firm. 
4. Heat oven to 180°C and bake for approximately 15 minutes or until cooked and firm. Cool on the tray.
5. To make icing, beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Gradually add sifted icing sugar while still beating until it is all incorporated
6. Build your house on a flat, solid plate. Use the icing as mortar to join the walls together. You can use food cans or other containers to prop the walls up until the icing sets. Attach the roof in the same way. (I was unsure if it would hold, so I used two dressmakers pins on the top corners to make sure).
7. Place the rest of the icing into a zip-lock bag and snip off the tip. Make patterns and decorate your house. Use the icing to stick any lollies to the house- the kids love helping with this. (I also cut little people and a tree from left over dough. I used the icing to stick them to the plate aswell). Dust it with icing sugar.
8. Wrap it all in cellophane so it keeps a bit better.

Please note that smarties and jellybeans are not FS. They did not contain any nasty additives and were considered a super treat by my son who was only allowed to eat a few of them.

Noteworthy

I've made no pretenses about my organisational skills so far on this blog. Basically I suck at it. Everything happens at the last minute, but I usually end up pulling things off to a certain degree. I've also had to change the way I cook for the purpose of blogging. I was always a "cook by feel" type of girl, you know, a splash of this, a splodge of that a handful of something else and cook it until I think it's done... That doesn't really translate well when you are trying to give someone else instructions. So I decided over Christmas that I would take notes as I baked with weights and measurements, times and temperatures. Generally I love notebooks; lists make me feel more organised and I have a plethora of exercise books that I buy at the back-to-school sales for that purpose. So I took Christmas notes with the intention of blogging them (albeit after Christmas, as I was too last minute to get it done beforehand) and then when the time came for me to do it, I couldn't find them. I went through every notebook I could find and came up with nothing. Disappointed isn't a strong enough word for how I felt. My dear husband bought me a lovely new notebook, all hard covered and pretty, so that I would write in that one alone and wouldn't mix it up or accidentally throw it away.

Then, two days ago, I found it! Next to the sewing table with sewing notes on it too. I looked there! I know I did, but there it was. And so now I bring you Christmas (or any other time really) baking recipes.

Pfeffernüsse
These are a traditional European Christmas/winter biscuit that are usually full of spices and pepper. These are not. But they are still delicious. This recipe made a *LOT* of biscuits. They kept very well in an air tight container, but you could probably portion the dough and freeze. I used saffron when I made these as I thought there should really be at least one spice in it. Not sure if it really made any difference to the flavour, but it made me feel better about it.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup (200g) Golden syrup
• 1/4 cup(100g) Rice malt syrup
• 1/2 cup nuttelex
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 4 cups (580g) Orgran plain GF flour
• 3/4 cup (170g) white sugar
• 1/2 cup (100g) brown sugar
• A big pinch of saffron threads (optional)
• 1 1/2 tsp bicarb soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup icing sugar for dusting

Method

1. Put golden syrup,  rice malt syrup, nuttelex and saffron into a saucepan, cook over a medium heat while stirring until it combines and goes a bit creamy looking. Leave to cool to room temperature.
2. Remove the saffron threads and stir in the eggs.
3. Put flour, white and brown sugars, bicarb and salt into a large bowl and add the syrup mixture. Mix until you have a nice dough. Cover and put into the fridge for about 2 hours.
4. Preheat oven to 165℃. 
5. Roll the dough into walnut sized balls and place on trays lined with baking paper approx 3cm apart. These do spread.
6. Bake for 10-15mins. The longer you bake them, the harder they are.
7. Cool on racks and dust with icing sugar.

Pfeffernusse front and centre. Spritz cookies on their right, iced biscuits at the back and meringues on the left

The spritz cookies are a recipe I found on Gluten Free Homemaker. These needed almost no tweaking to be failsafe. Simply omit the almond essence and substitute nuttelex for the butter. If you don't have the individual flours on hand, you can substitute the same quantity of Orgran flour and the results are pretty much the same. They don't need to be iced and if you don't have a cookie press you could always put blobs of dough on the tray. Equally delicious!

Happy Baking!

It's Another Party!

We recently came home from a holiday and got caught up in a lot of stuff that was happening, then suddenly realised that it was less than two weeks until our daughter's third birthday. Talk about a massive rush job party! Her party was on a much smaller scale than her older brother's was, partly because she is only three and partly because she doesn't have anywhere near as many friends as he did at that age.

Being three, she loves Charlie and Lola, so after a bit of messing around we settled on that as our theme, which is actually quite easy as it is all a mish-mash of colours and patterns. If we had planned it in advance we could have found a whole bunch of merchandise online for parties, but most of it would had to have come from overseas and there just wasn't enough time. So after a bit of searching online I came up with a colour theme and bought some of the items.

The food was a little different this time around. My daughter is not really failsafe, but almost becomes so by default since most of the food in our house is failsafe. Nor is she gluten or dairy free, but I wasn't going to make different food for everyone, and if we go to a party elsewhere my son has to eat different to every one else, so I figure that at home he should be able to have the same as everyone else. We also had a friend with an egg allergy, so I needed to make sure the majority of the food was egg free.

On the menu was fairy bread - too easy - I asked my friend to bring it as she wanted to help out. Bakers delight bread with nuttelex and some natural sprinkles. She also made some sandwiches. I pulled a couple of slices of gluten free bread out of the freezer for my son so he had some fairy bread and jam sandwiches.

There were also some doughnuts made with "egg replacer" instead of egg. I had plans of icing them, but ran out of time so just tossed them in caster sugar.

I made biscuits on sticks (these contained egg) and using the same dough I made some jam fancies. They were made by rolling the dough out thinner, using a scalloped round cutter to cut rounds, and then using a smaller round cutter to cut holes in half of them. Bake them and then spread jam on the ones without holes, and then top with the holey ones.

A large selection of biscuits, because biscuits are Lola's favourite and best.

I opened a packet of Orgran shortbread hearts and dusted them with a bit of icing sugar.

Using the same dough as my melting moments I made checker board cookies and honey comb biscuits. The honey comb ones just have smashed up failsafe honey comb mixed through the dough. I rolled it into a log and put into the freezer until firm, then sliced and baked it. For the checker board cookies I divided the dough in half and mixed a tablespoon of carob into a portion of the dough. Roll both portions to approximately 5mm thick and roughly rectangular (or press/roll it into a slice tin to get the shape). Cut it into thirds lengthways and stack on top of each other in alternating colours. Put back into the freezer until firm again. Slice lengthways about 5mm thick and stack again in alternating colours. Freeze again, then slice crossways and bake (this sounds a bit more fiddly than it really is).

To nibble on, we also had failsafe chips, some homemade lollipops, white musk sticks and marshmallows. 

The hot food was meatballs and chicken fingers. I used egg replacer and psyllium to make sure my meatballs stuck together and added less vegetables that I usually would. I used a cornflour slurry (with a bit of egg replacer mixed in for "insurance" - I had no time for stuff ups) to stick the crumbs to the chicken and added crushed garlic to it for flavour.

The cake was also a last minute decision and kids always love cupcakes and there is far less chance of them failing than with a big cake. I searched around for a recipe that I liked and that would adapt quite easily. I found one that I liked the idea of, but it needed a little bit of adapting. The cakes worked well without egg or dairy, but I had recently been experimenting with flour blending and the resulting flavour was not the best. I'm not sure quinoa flour is right for a mildly flavoured cake, it just overpowered it. So just stick to the flour that is suggested in the original or use a pre-blended pack like Orgran. The other thing that I found is that the sprinkles didn't really make much difference in the cake. I'm sure the bigger artificial ones would work better, but they are completely out of the question from a failsafe perspective.

Confetti Cupcakes
(I doubled this so that there would be plenty)
Ingredients

Cake

• 2 eggs (lightly beaten) or equivilent egg replacer
• 1/3 cup rice milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 100mls canola oil (or other FS oil)
• 1 1/4 cups flour (if your blend doesn't contain it - add 1/4 tsp xanthan gum)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 Tbsp natural sprinkles (optional)

Topping

• 3 Tbsp nuttelex
• 1/4 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 1/4 cups icing sugar 
• 1 Tbsp rice milk (optional)
• cochineal (to desired colour)
• Dollar Sweets Butterflies (Be aware the label says "contains ingredients derived from wheat", although I can't figure out what it could be)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180℃ 
2. In a large bowl mix all dry cake ingredients
3. Make a well and add all the wet ingredients
4. Mix until just combined (if you want to use a mixer, just make sure you don't over beat it)
5. Spoon into patty pans and bake for 12-14 mins or until cooked and a skewer comes out clean.
6. Cool on racks before icing
7. Beat nuttelex and vanilla in a small bowl until soft and gradually add sifted icing sugar.
8. Add rice milk if a softer consistency is required or more icing sugar for firmer icing (not too firm if you want to pipe it)
9. Add cochineal drop by drop until you get the shade of pink you want
10. Pipe or spread onto cold cupcakes and top with butterflies.

"Pink icing always tastes the best."

A very happy birthday girl

 The cake was served with pink milk, another Lola favourite.  Vanilla flavoured milk with enough cochineal to make it pink (rice milk for my boy, dairy for the others). The kids don't even notice that the pink milk isn't strawberry flavoured, it is sweet and pink and that is all that matters.

Organised fun was kept to a minimum since the birthday girl was only three and didn't really care. There was a game of pass the parcel and we set up a colouring-in table with Charlie and Lola printables and butcher's paper covering the table.

Party boxes consisted of a small amount of failsafe lollies and a large amount of pencils, crayons, mini gel pens, mini highlighters, little erasers, colouring in sheets and curly straws all purchased at a cheap shop.

Even though it was a rainy day and everyone was stuck inside (and my poor time management skills meant that I was still cooking when people walked int the door) we all had a great day.

Just a Moment

Just a melting moment. Just a gluten free, dairy free, egg free, nut free melting moment. They are not healthy though. I once made the mistake of thinking that food that was free of all these things must be healthy. It's not. It's sugary and 'buttery' and oh so tasty.

The first time I made these free of everything I was unsure if they would work or how they would taste. But they are good, I mean really good. I eat gluten most of the time and these still taste good to me. Even in the gluten version you have to add cornflour to make them nice and short, so gluten free does that really well.

Just so you know, I am not really a developer of new recipes, especially when it comes to baking. I don't have the time to make something five times to get it just right and I don't have the money to waste on ingredients. I find recipes that look like they will be easily converted and go from there. I found the original recipe for these a few years ago and made them as special treats and afternoon teas. My son always loved them and he still loves them with all the substitutions. It works quite nicely with straight gram for gram substitutions which takes the effort out of it.

Melting Moments
Ingredients

• 250g nuttelex
• 55g (1/3 cup) icing sugar, sifted
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 310g gluten free plain flour, sifted

Filling

• 60g nuttelex
• 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
• 110g (2/3 cup) icing sugar, sifted

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
2. Cream nuttelex, icing sugar and vanilla essence in a medium bowl with electric beaters. Add flour and mix with the beaters on the lowest possible speed until just combined and a soft dough forms. Lightly flour hands then roll the mixture into small balls. Place on the prepared baking tray with a little space around them. Use a fork to flatten each ball to about 3cm in diameter and 1 cm thick. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes or until cooked through. They should be just turning golden around the bottom edge. Cool on baking tray. Repeat with the remaining mixture.
3. To make the filling, beat the nuttelex and vanilla essence until soft. Add the icing sugar and beat until combined. Refrigerate until required.
4. To assemble biscuits, spread the base of a biscuit with filling and then join with another biscuit. Repeat with remaining biscuits and filling. Store in an airtight container for up to 5 days.
   
   
   

If you can have gluten and dairy check out the original recipe. I always halve the amount of vanilla in a recipe to reduce the salicylates and leave out pesky things like orange zest. You really can't go too far wrong with recipes as simple as these.

Another variant on this is to sprinkle them with some caster sugar before baking and leave the unfilled for lovely little short breads. Or you could add a tablespoon of carob powder to either the dough or the filling for something different.

I hope you enjoy these tea time treats.

Things go Wrong

Two weeks ago we were hit by that really enjoyable strain of flu that is going around. When I say we I really mean my son and to a lesser extent myself. My other half had the fortune of being interstate for work and was spared having to look after one sickie and one very active almost 3 year old while feeling close to death. Cooking was minimal. Dinner consisted of what I could find in the freezer that required little effort or my sons favourite "breakfast dinner".

Friday was different in that I needed to do some baking for a cake stall that was being run at school while there was an election taking place. I usually try to make a heap of stuff, but it wasn't going to happen, so I made an amazing white chocolate mud cake, some melting moments (half of which went in the bin burnt) and some biscuits on sticks. Then Sunday was Fathers Day and we had an amazing failsafe afternoon tea with my parents. I baked, my mum baked and I took tonnes of pretty photos of the food in the gorgeous afternoon sunshine. Then I was about to blog about all these lovely sweet cakes when I discovered that all the afternoon tea photos had disappeared from the camera. Fifty photos completely gone. All I have left is some photos of the biscuits from the day before. So now I blog biscuits.

My son has dubbed these "iced biscuits" for fairly obvious reasons. I had found a recipe which looked really good and tried it out only to find that the resulting dough is completely unworkable. I thought it may have been a gluten free thing, but my friend made them with normal flour and had the same problem - dough that you couldn't roll nor cut. I kept adding flour until it seemed right and this time I actually measured how much extra was needed to get the right consistency.  There is a fair chance that both you and the kids will really like these, so I wouldn't bother to make anything less than a double batch of these.

Iced Biscuits

• 100g nuttelex
• 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/4 tsp vanilla (optional; the original recipe calls for lemon zest, so add a little citric acid instead if you like)
• 1 1/2 cups Gluten free plain flour
• natural sprinkles (optional)
• bamboo skewers (soaked for half an hour and with the sharp end cut off if you prefer)

Royal Icing

• 1 egg white, lightly whisked
• 1 1/2 cups pure icing sugar, sifted

1. Cream nuttelex and sugar together. Add egg and Vanilla (or citric acid). Beat to combine. Sift flour over mixture. Stir to combine (or if you have a stand mixer use a slow speed until dough comes together) Place dough onto plastic wrap. Knead gently. Shape into a disc. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in fridge for 30 minutes or until firm.
2. Preheat oven to 180°C/160°C fan-forced. Line baking trays with baking paper. Roll dough out between 2 sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick (don't get carried away and roll it too thin as the biscuits will be too hard). Use whatever shaped cookie cutter you have to cut shapes form the dough. Press remaining dough together and repeat.  Place on baking trays (they don't spread very much at all, so feel free to put them close). If you are putting them on stick, carefully slide the skewer at least halfway into the dough. Bake for approx 10 mins (depending on the size of you shapes) or until golden. Stand for 3 minutes. Cool on a rack (biscuits firm up when they are cooling, so don't think they are not done because they are soft straight away).
3. Make icing. Place egg white in a bowl. Gradually add icing sugar, whisking until smooth. Spread over cookies. Top with sprinkles. Set aside for 20 minutes or until set.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   

   I think my camera is dying. Hence disappearing photos and photos of dubious quality (I can blame the camera for that this time).

   
   

   
   
   My son loves these and when I first made them I had to limit how many he had because of the sprinkles. So he told me not to put sprinkles on them all then, because it doesn't make them taste better (how very mature of him). In saying that, if you wanted you could use natural colours in the icing (be careful of salicylates) too.