Weekend Cooking is a weekly feature hosted by Beth Fish Reads, linking up food-related posts. Click here for links to this week’s Weekend Cooking posts on Beth Fish Reads and other blogs.
In my last Weekend Cooking post, I mentioned that our homemade gluten-free pies and spectacular gluten-free pumpkin cheesecake from Thanksgiving would require their own post, but now it’s already past time for the gluten-free Christmas baking update, so I’m combining the two posts here. Although I wasted spent a lot of time pinning recipes to my Gluten-Free Thanksgiving and Gluten-Free Christmas boards, and although we did use some of them, these are the cookbooks we relied on most for recipes this holiday season:
From Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking we tried recipes for pie crust, apple pie with streusel topping, pumpkin cheesecake, and frosted sugar cookies. All pretty successfully. The pie crust was very easy to work with. Personally, I wasn’t crazy about the graininess of the g-f streusel topping on the Thanksgiving Day apple pie, but other people didn’t notice a problem. At Christmas, everyone said that although they were slightly more crumbly, the flavor of the frosted sugar cookies was the same as the ones we traditionally made from a Joy of Cooking recipe. Although it was gorgeous to look at, the pumpkin cheesecake was a little pumpkin-y at Thanksgiving, we thought. We froze half of it and brought it out before Christmas, and it was amazing! So, we just need to remember to make this recipe ahead and freeze it next year to give the flavors time to meld. Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking isn’t limited to baking. The General Chang’s Chicken is delicious, and can be made with chicken or tofu. We also devoured the Spinach and Cheese Quiche this week. Cookbook authors Kelli and Peter Bronski blog at No Gluten, No Problem.
From Gluten-Free Christmas Cookies, we loved the Brazilian Sugar Cookies, Caramel Pecan Bars, and Almond Pine Nut Macaroons, but did not care for the beet-like flavor of the Christmas Sugar Cookies made with amaranth flour. There are many other recipes I still want to try from this cookbook, including Cornmeal Dried Fruit Cookies, Cranberry Nut Bars, Almond Bars, and Marble Fudge Brownies.
Nosh on This will get its own review post, once I’ve had a chance to try more recipes from it.
A sample of our calorie-laden but gluten-free baking successes:
Gluten-free baking is trickier than taking a tried-and-true family favorite recipe and subbing in a gluten-free flour blend for the all-purpose white flour. We owe many thanks to Lisa Stander-Horel, co-author of Nosh on This, for adapting our traditional Christmas morning yeasted coffee roll, Maple Butter Twist, to be gluten-free. To see Lisa’s adaptation on her adaptation, check out her recipe for Maple Twisty Donuts on her and her husband Tim’s blog, Gluten-Free Canteen, where the motto is: “No Cookie, Strudel, Brownie, Pie, Cake, Tart, or Treat Left Behind.”
This maybe isn’t the best photo, but I think we ate half of it before I remembered to take a photo of a slice!
Happy Weekend Cooking!
Disclosure: A close family member works for The Experiment, publisher of Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking and Nosh on This. Both cookbooks are distributed by Workman. I purchased my own copy of Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking and received a copy of Nosh on This as a gift. I purchased my own copy of Gluten-Free Christmas Cookies, published by Cider Mill Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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