Coconut cake with Lime icing

CAKE!!!!

Everybody loves cake, well in my house they do. So I thought to myself, why not try baking your first gluten free cake??

I chose to make coconut cake with lime icing (the only recipe my mum and I could agree on).

What a great choice it was! The recipe was exactly the same to a normal cake recipe apart from the fact that I was using gluten free flour.

The sponge turned out lovely and light and fluffy, it did have coconut cream in it which I had never used before, it was basically just extra thick coconut milk. The icing was really really good. It had the zingy lime flavour and was sprinkled with toasted desiccated coconut, which gave a lovely flavour.

This recipe came from ‘The Gluten Free Cookbook’ by Heather Whinney, Jane Lawrie and Fiona Hunter.

SAD NEWS!!

Firstly, I would like to apologise for not blogging for ages. I haven’t really had time.

Now, down to the reason why I’m writing this. I have recently been diagnosed with Ceoliac disease.

This is a life changing condition which limits what I can and can’t eat. Being Ceoliac means that I’m ‘allergic’ to gluten, wheat contains gluten, so that means no more wheat for me.

From now on I won’t be able to eat the same kind of flour as everybody else. Also I will have to start cooking with meat instead of using the vegetarian option Quorn, which the rest of my family use. This is not a problem, as unlike the rest of my family I am not a vegetarian.

Being Ceoliac has really made me aware of what I eat. I now have to use gluten free flour, or special flour, as my friend Emily calls it. The NHS has been really helpful and I now get a prescription for the food I need as it isn’t widely available.

If anyone out there is Ceoliac I would highly recommend the recipe book ‘The Gluten Free Cookbook’ by Heather Whinney, Jane Lawrie and Fiona Hunter. It helps you with everything, from how to properly clean your kitchen when you are first diagnosed to making pasta.

Madeleine's

A French classic.... with a twist. The traditional Madeleine’s have raspberries and lemon curd, but the ones I made don’t as raspberries aren’t in season. I made honey and vanilla flavoured ones.  The recipe is very simple as all you have to do is sift together flour and sugar, then mix together melted butter, egg yolk and vanilla extract. You whisk together egg whites until stiff. Then all you have to do is mix them all together. However when I baked these I took them out to early so they were uncooked in the middle, I had to keep putting them back into the oven as the centre wasn’t cooking as fast as the outside.

 

This recipe can be found on the GoodFood website.

Chocolate Cheesecake

A few nights ago we had guests round so I got to make CHEESECAKE!!! Baked white chocolate cheesecake to be exact. Making the base was great anger management as I got to crush to biscuit to smithereens. This pudding was quite fattening as there is about 900g of full-fat cream cheese!

To go with this rich desert I made a raspberry coulis. It was sweet and had a little alcohol in it. I put in lemon liquor, it gave a lovely after taste.

Serving the desert caused a problem, the base decided to stick to the bottom of the tin, so everyone got cheesecake with a side of biscuit base.

This recipe came from a GoodFood magazine.   

Panzanella

Mum and I were watching a cooking programme on telly and saw that the chef was cooking Panzanella. So mum went to the shops and bought some bread, but I couldn’t make that day as the bread was supposed to be stale so I had to wait till the next day. You have to prepare it in advance so the bread can soak up the juices, so you had to plan ahead.

To prepare the veg I had to place tomatoes in boiling water for a few minutes until the skin started to crack and peel, then I took them out with a spoon and peel the rest of the skin off. You then had to scoop the seeds out of the tomatoes and pour it over the bread, along with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and garlic. The peppers and chilli had to be roasted under the grill until charred on all sides. The veg got chopped up and layered with the bread, along with black olives and capers.

French Fancies

For the past week I have been in France on a school trip, so when I got home I thought I might cook something to do with France... never cook if you get home at 4:15 in the morning, which I did. Mum showed me some recipes that looked nice but then we saw FRENCH FANCIES!!!!

First of all I had to make the sponge which was easy enough. While that was in the oven I made syrup to pour over the sponge when it came out of the oven. I cut the sponge and poured over the syrup, and then disaster struck..... Fondant icing.  At first I had no problem, the recipe told me to follow the instructions on the pack. All I had to do was mix water, the fondant icing mix and food colouring, all was going to plan until it was time to put the icing onto the cakes. The recipe said to put a blob on top of each cake and let it drizzle down the sides, but my mix was a little thick so I decided to spread it... BAD IDEA!!!  The icing just dripped off the cakes onto the kitchen work surface and then onto the floor. I had to make 3 batches of icing to cover all the cakes as most of the icing was all over the kitchen and not on the cakes.

They turned out beautifully, and I got my dad to help me tidy up.

This recipe was taken from the recipe book ‘Stacie Bakes’.

Bake sale

As my sister absolutely loves my baking, I hope, she asked me to bake some biscuits for her to take into school for a bake sale. I had just finished my dinner so I had to clean the kitchen which wasn’t the most appealing job, but who cares I love baking.

I started making chocolate Rolo biscuits and they were going great until I decided to make them way too big and then had to reroll them to a reasonable  size. Then I put chocolate nibbles on the top so that when they were baking the caramel would ooze out and make a lovely sticky topping.

When they were just about finished mum said I had enough time to make so flapjack, which I love making as it’s really gooey and tasty. For some reason my mind had gone to goo that day and i started to try and melt the oats, I soon realised my mistake and started again. This recipe is quite simple, you melt butter, sugar and syrup, then mix in the oats and bake.

The Chocolate rolo biscuits come from the recipe book: Biscuit, by Miranda Gore Browne. The flapjack is an old family recipe.

You should definitely buy Miranda’s biscuit book, I love all the recipes in it.