It was a dark and stormy night…and I was creeping through the kitchen to bake up a spooky fright! Well… maybe not a fright, but definitely this gluten free Halloween cake! If you couldn’t already tell, Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain is my favorite holiday. It combines some of my favorite things: dressing up, spooky/Gothic aesthetic, and chocolate of course! Now, this lovely holiday has evolved over the years into what it is today, but it originated with the Pagan celebration of Samhain (pronounced Saw-wen). It was the Pagan’s end of the year celebration before the start of the new darker part of the year on November 1st. It…
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Mini Gluten Free Red Velvet Bundt Cakes with Cream Cheese Glaze
Happy almost Halloween!! It’s definitely a different feel this year, stuck inside and terrified of something we can’t see or touch but that is all-too-real. Not quite the Halloween scare we were all hoping for – though I heard that some car washes have transformed themselves into drive-through haunted houses if you’re craving even more scariness this weekend! In all seriousness, though, there are tons of people who wake up every day afraid for their life, whether that be because of COVID (wear a mask, it’s really not that hard), or because of the color of their skin. STILL. In 2020. In the wealthiest nation in the world and also…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Peanut Butter Tart
I’ve already waxed poetic about my love of chocolate and peanut butter and peanut butter and chocolate and any elaborate combination of the two, so I’ll spare you the same spiel here (if you’re into it, you can read ALL of it here on our chocolate peanut butter mud cookies or on these chocolate peanut butter cupcakes). Instead, I’ll just give you the ooey gooey fudgey details of this gluten free chocolate peanut butter tart, my new pride and joy of the weekend (it can be yours too if you follow the recipe below). I’ve seen so many elegantly-simple chocolate tarts on Instagram (our number one app for consuming egregious…
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Gluten Free Neapolitan Pound Cake with Neapolitan Glaze
There’s something delightful about the Neapolitan trio: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry smushed together into perfect bands of ice cream or cake or candy, layers of those three most classic (at least here) flavors that you never have to choose from again. I remember only ever eating one flavor out of the tub of Neapolitan ice cream as a kid, which, looking back, seems like such a bummer because the three flavors together really are perfectly, simplistically lovely. But hey! A tub of Neapolitan meant whatever mood you were in, whether it was straight forward vanilla, silky chocolate, or summery strawberry, you were covered. After a quick bit of “research” (one…
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Gluten Free Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Buttercream
Pumpkin desserts are one of those American things that seem to boggle people in other countries who haven’t grown up eating them every October, November, and December. I’ve probably told this story before on here but when my dad was in his early 20s and traveling through Europe, staying with Servas (an awesome international network of hosts + travelers!) families and picking up odd jobs to fund his next step, he stayed with a family in Sweden who had (not surprisingly) never tried an American pumpkin pie. So, being the guest that loves cultural exchange (as both of my parents are), my dad went searching through markets and grocery stores…
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Gluten Free Hi Hat Cupcakes
Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays. My sister and I were VERY into dress up (especially Renaissance and other time-period costumes) growing up – we even had a dress up closet that consisted of giant bins of fanciful dresses and capes and scarves and wigs and suspenders with which to enrobe ourselves for various make believe games and mock-plays. Stepping into the outerwear of some other character not only allowed us to feed our wild imaginations, but also to inspect various aspects of ourselves. We would heighten our silliness or breathe life into our anger or ambition and create characters flooded with those magnified bits of our own…
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Gluten Free Spiced Mandarin Orange Pound Cake with Spiced Blood Orange Tea
I’m not a fan of orange-flavored desserts. But here’s an orange (more specifically, mandarin) pound cake! Contradiction: absolutely. Successful baking venture: also absolutely. Chocolate orange is, in my book, one of the highest offenders, which I know is a wildly unpopular opinion. I used to love those chocolate oranges that we got as gifts on Christmas morning or Christmas eve and smash on the table until they splintered into a dozen perfectly-molded chocolate orange segments, melting on our tongues. Years and years of these, and probably some unfavorable experience with an overly-sweet orange cake over did it for the orange stuff and I retreated to safer spaces of lemon, lime,…
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Gluten Free Cranberry Bundt Cake with Cranberry Glaze
I remember being shocked and awed when I learned how cranberries were harvested. The mental image of a bunch of people in waders sloshing around in an artificial bog with millions of cranberries floating around was delightful – undoubtedly a lot more time consuming and tricky than I’m making it out to be but what a way to gather bucket loads (boatloads, if you will) of these deep crimson gems. Cranberries are strange, if you think about it. An entire bag of them weighs less than anything else you can pick up in the produce section, and they hard and dry until you toss them in with sugar and water…
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Mini Gluten Free Banana Nut Loaves
When I was little, I remember trailing our shopping cart through Costco, delighted every time we passed (and stopped at) a sample table – getting to savor a bite of sausage or a cracker or a tiny cup of smoothie made with an on-sale blender. But the best part of those shopping trips were the muffins. If you’ve ever had a Costco muffin, you most likely have a similar nostalgia around these larger-than-life bakery flats. Because they were huge! At the time of first eating them, they may even have been bigger than my face – a muffin that, when cut into quarters, would more resemble a normal, homemade-sized muffin.…
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Gluten Free Spiced Pear Cupcakes with Vanilla Pear Tea
Tis the season for spices in EVERYTHING, and we’re not mad about it. There’s something so cozy and comforting about the ethereal mix of nutmeg+cinnamon+ginger+allspice+cloves, and any combination of any two of them really, in baked goods, warm fall drinks, and in roasts or stuffing. In this case, we’ve dumped heaping teaspoons of them into these gluten free spiced pear cupcakes with a mapley/spiced buttercream. Pear is one of those delicate, nearly-not-there flavors that are usually best highlighted in slender slices on their own, especially when they’re perfectly just ripe and cut like butter. But we really wanted to figure out a way of putting them in cake form, or…
