brownie-gasm

Sometimes you just need a brownie. Or three. Yesterday was a must-have-brownie day for me. Rather than indulge my craving with a crappy store-bought brownie full of gluten and high fructose corn syrup and who knows what else, I picked up a box of King Arthur Flour's gluten-free brownie mix. I had been meaning to give the mix a try and maybe write up a review on it, so this seemed the perfect excuse. Plus, brownies!

The King Arthur mix is super easy to make - all you need are two eggs, two tablespoons of water and half a cup of melted butter or oil. I followed the directions to a T, except I added one very important step: when it came time to spread the batter in the greased baking pan, I only spread half the batter in, then topped the batter with spoonfuls of organic chunky-style peanut butter. I smoothed the peanut butter out a little bit but not enough to mix it into the brownie batter, then I spooned the remaining batter over the top and smoothed that out gently as well. After about 38 minutes of baking and another hour of not-so-patient waiting for the brownies to cool, I was rewarded with these babies:

Get into mah mouf, brownies!

They. Were so. Freaking. Good. They came out dense and fudge-y, and the edges...oh god, the edges. I am a huge fan of the corners and edge pieces of brownies because I love that chewy, slightly crisp quality that they get. This mix made brownies with seriously THE BEST corner pieces I've ever had - so chewy without being hard or crusty at all. Utterly delicious.

In addition to being gluten-free and incredibly easy to mix up, the King Arthur Flour mix doesn't contain any crazy ingredients. It's just sugar, their specialty flour mix (which is a mixture of rice flour and tapioca starch), cocoa, baking powder, vanilla and salt. That's it. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. In this day and age of fat-free, sugar-free chemical shit-storms of fake food, it's SO nice to turn a box over and see a really short and straight-forward, all-natural ingredient list.

The mix retails for $6.95 on the King Arthur Flour website, and I call that an excellent value. I certainly couldn't concoct my own gluten-free brownies from ingredients at home for $6.95, and I doubt you could find a bakery that would sell you a dozen gluten-free brownies of comparable quality for that cheap, either.

So, as you could likely tell from the post title alone, I will definitely be buying this mix again. I want to try a batch with almond butter filling instead of peanut butter, and maybe one with some kind of minty filling for my mint-obsessed husband. The possibilities are endless!

scones!

These are Cranberry Orange Pecan scones. The basic dough is just flour, butter, a little sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and buttermilk. I really like scones because they're rich and not super sweet. This was my very first try at scones, so I was a little skeptical that they'd come out well, but I surprised myself! They came out nicely tender inside with a slightly crispy outside. NOM!

I'm not 100% sold on the pecan-cranberry-orange combo. I think next time I might just do cranberry orange, and add a little orange juice to the dough. I have some other combos I'd like to try as well, now that I know I can make execute the basic recipe well.

Ooooh, whoopie pies!

I can't give you the recipe for these (it's my secret), but I can taunt you with a (blurry) picture of them...:D

These are for the monthly birthday "cake" at work, on the request of the only person with a birthday this month! She actually requested a gigantic whoopie pie cake, but I couldn't quite figure out how to transport it, so I went for individuals.

special banana bread

This is my special banana bread. It's SUPER GOOD, even if I do say so myself.



It's special because it's made with low-fat yogurt in place of most of the oil / butter. The yogurt gives it a lovely richness without all the fat. I also use graham flour in addition to regular white flour. The graham flour adds a little nuttiness to the flavor, plus it adds some fiber and gives the bread a lighter texture than if I were to use regular whole wheat flour. And yes, I cook it in a cake pan rather than loaf pans. Not only does it cook faster and more evenly, but when I'm cutting pieces out of a cake pan, I can consider it dessert and therefore not eat so much of it. Theoretically.

birthday cake

Today is my mom's birthday! She's a major chocolate fiend, so I wasn't surprised when she wanted a chocolate birthday cake. We decided to call it "Near Death By Chocolate", and you'll see why.



I confess that I'm not much of a baker. It's a bit too rigid for my liking. I'm more of an improviser and unless you have a pretty good grasp of what you're doing, baking isn't too forgiving in that respect.

I used a recipe from King Arthur Flour, which is just down the road from here (oh yes, be jealous). The recipe called for hazelnuts but I couldn't find them in any sort of affordable quantity, so I skipped them and just went for chocolate on top of chocolate, smothered in chocolate. The cake itself is pretty standard. The frosting between the layers is bittersweet chocolate, and the ganache is bittersweet chocolate combined with heavy cream. I had a little mishap with the ganache as I was applying it to the cake. I didn't realize the recipe was for about twice what I'd need to cover the cake, so I blithely dumped three quarters of it on, only to panic when it started to overflow the edge of the plate and creep across the counter like The Blob. I managed to clean it up and salvage a lot of the extra, which I used to make truffles...stay tuned!