A Lovely Bridal Shower (and Cake!)

My cousin's bridal shower was last weekend and I was one of the hostesses. I was not really relishing the idea of watching everyone else have dessert when I could not partake, so I talked with my mom and sister about baking the cake myself and making it GF. I also wanted to be sure that everyone would be happy with the result, so I did a test run earlier in the week for them to taste test. I had baked a wonderful lemon sour cream pound cake from the Four Chickens blog I follow, and I figured that would be a winner. (Actually, I had a couple of other ideas from that blog that were various chocolate cake options, but mom and Michelle voted lemon for the shower.)

Anyway, the test run was a hit -- it even resulted in my 12-year-old asking for this lemon cake for his next birthday, so you know it had to be pretty good! So I baked it again on Friday night for the Saturday shower. Mom had requested that I make the glaze a little more yellow so it was obvious it was going to be lemon flavored before you bit into it, so I used a tiny bit of a Wilton lemon yellow dye to adjust that. Michelle brought raspberries to add a splash of contrasting color to the cake and this was the result (no flash so the yellow of the glaze is not obvious in this picture, but rest assured, it's a beautiful shade of lemon yellow):


I think it turned out very pretty and very tasty, and the bride-to-be was happy as well! Everyone seemed to enjoy it so I'll count that as a success. The only other thing I'd like to figure out is how to make the glaze stay shiny after it dries. It was a much more vibrant yellow while it was pouring on wet than it was when it dried. Guess I'll have to Google info on that!

(Now, if only I had remembered to grab the gift for the bride from my dining room before I left town to drive to Houston for the shower, everything would have been perfect! But let's dwell on the positive, shall we?)

King Arthur Flour Muffins

King Arthur Flour company is my hero! I just had a TO-DIE-FOR blueberry muffin made from their GF muffin mix (my own frozen/thawed blueberries added). They are moist, beautiful, and delicious! This adds to the already long list of wonderful product mixes they make -- brownies, cookies, and pancakes (and the bread mix was good, just not better than others I've tried that are slightly cheaper). I am highly impressed by and appreciative of their work to make a wonderful GF product for this market niche!

Thank you Land O' Lakes!

The Land O' Lakes website has an awesome recipe for GF chocolate chip cookies! It's no more complicated than the Nestle Tollhouse recipe and makes totally delicious and normal looking chocolate chip cookies! Yea them and yea me!

I've tasted them warm and cool and they're good both ways. I've frozen a couple of cooked cookies to see if they reheat from frozen well and I'm going to try to take some of the batter and form it into balls and freeze that to see if they can be good break-and-bake (from freezer) cookies too. The trouble with GF baked goods is that they don't really keep for long (they're best consumed within the first 24 hours) so finding ways I can make it easy to make just a few cookies when I want some is key.

I'll keep you posted!

Update 1: They reheat from frozen cooked cookies quite well. Microwave doesn't heat them perfectly evenly, so it's better if you get them warmed and then let them sit for a bit so the hot spots cool and the cold spots warm to room temperature. Then they taste the same as when first cooled. Will try another couple after they've been frozen for a few days.

Update 2: The frozen dough can be cooked and makes good cookies but takes freakin' forever to cook. I think the frozen and thawed cooked cookies are both more efficient and tastier, so I guess next time I'll just make up the whole batch and freeze what I don't think we'll eat.

Delicious Chocolate Cake!!

Unending thanks to Jeanne Sauvage and her Four Chickens blog for the recipe for this one! It was SO delicious and rich, and reasonably easy to make -- yea!

I added the strawberries as a little decorative touch. I think I was supposed to let the ganache (icing) cool a little more than I did, so it poured and spread more than it might otherwise have, but that's just aesthetics (and more icing to eat off the platter)!

Yum! Yum!

Another pancake mix

Are you sensing a theme here? Evidently, pancakes are a critical part of my happiness in life!

Well, I have even more good news. I have found a GF pancake mix that's even better than any of the other mixes I've tried AND I think is better than the rice-flour-based recipe I had decided was my favorite before this. The Kinnikinnik Pancake and Waffle Mix is AWESOME. Very exciting -- they LOOK like normal pancakes -- all the other GF pancakes I have tried have a kind of speckled or heavily freckled look to the surface, but these are smooth and brown like regular pancakes usually are. The mix smells like vanilla cake batter. I've looked at the ingredients to try to figure out what makes it smell that way but I can't tell (no vanilla in the mix or anything).

The downside is it has a LOT of sugar and about twice the calories of Bisquick (I hadn't looked at that till today and I'd probably be happier not knowing it, but I can't unlearn it now...). So perhaps I shouldn't use it EVERY time but it sure is good and even my kids don't say a word about it being different or weird or anything like that.

Yea pancakes!

Impatience

It's been over a week since I posted last and this one is mostly whining, so forgive me in advance but I guess -- it's my blog and I can whine if I want to (sung to the tune of It's My Party...)

I am very impatient for this to become second-nature easy. I'm certainly doing fine and making progress, but it's far more time consuming to deal with food than it was before. It's a huge up-and-down see-saw for me, balancing the pride I feel in making it work against the drain of having to make it work.

Some examples of this duality:

• I feel a great sense of accomplishment that I can duplicate condensed cream of chicken soup without the can (I modified the recipe I found to omit the added salt and it's just right), but it takes more time than opening a can (maybe only 10 minutes or so, but it's an adjustment I have to factor into my cooking).
• It's not a huge deal to pack some food in a cooler to take to a track meet or school carnival or whatever, but I have to be thinking that much further ahead to make sure I have suitable things in the house and that I budget the time in advance of our required arrival time to pack them. And if I don't, the consequence is that I don't have food to eat.
• It's kind of a pain to have to investigate every restaurant I want to go to, figuring out if I can even eat anything there, but it's also been nice to find some new restaurants to visit that I wouldn't ordinarily even know about, necessarily.

I'll figure it all out eventually and have it become close to second nature, I suspect, but it is annoying, at least at present.

More ranting about Pancakes

I tried the rice-based pancake recipe again this morning -- it's definitely the best -- better even than the King Arthur Flour recipe and much cheaper, if more time consuming b/c it involves mixing 8 ingredients instead of 3-4. But I can live with that.