Today is my 28th birthday! For those of you new to the blog, I’m Amelia Farber, the older, shorter sister of Sisters Sans Gluten (check out more about Kendra – the younger, taller one – and myself on our About Us page!). Twenty eight always felt like that shining age, emblematic of a settled, confident adult. Maybe because my parents got married at 28, or when a few friends back in college turned 28 it felt so foreign to all of us 20 year olds. Whatever it is, I’m now that age and feel thoroughly…the same – though closer to 30 than I’ve ever been and THAT, my friends, is…
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Gluten Free Gingerbread Orange Bars
For these gluten free gingerbread orange bars we are giving a huge shout out to Simply Delish for this recipe inspiration! Full disclosure – we joined the Simply Delish affiliate program which essentially entails them sending us a box of their gluten/dairy-free pudding and jel boxed mixes every few months, and us coming up with recipes that involve those boxed mixes as an ingredient every month, so you’ll see a few other Simply Delish-inspired recipes on here once in a while! This one uses their Orange Jel boxed mix and if you’re into it, use our specific link here to go check out their products, and use our 10% discount code SSGPUDDING to get 10% off…
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Gluten Free Toasted Coconut Butter Cookies
Anyone else remember dark blue round tins filled with rustlely paper cups holding heaps of differently-shaped butter cookies? I do. They were incredible. They were the most perfect, melt-in-your-mouth cookies, each piped into delicate swirls or rolled in sugar or printed with a stamp. And they were impossible to eat just one of, in fact, it was customary to eat a quarter of your body weight both before and after the family dinner, resulting in greater rotundity and probably a stomach ache. I did push this limit one year and ate nearly an entire tin all on my own which had the disastrous consequence of feeling queasy everytime I saw…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Peppermint Shortbread
Thin Mints were my absolute favorite Girl Scout cookie. Samoas were a close second, but Thin Mints won every time. I’d definitely sell more than I ended up eating, thank goodness, but there were a few boxes of those buttery, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate shortbready cookies waiting for me every year when I donned my saleswoman attitude and took to the streets of Eagle Point neighborhoods, heralding the springtime revelation that is all Girl Scout cookies. I was a proud scout for 10 years, starting with Daisies, then graduating to Brownies, then Juniors, then Cadets, then Seniors (for those who aren’t familiar with the Girl Scout organization, there are different titles/names for…
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Gluten Free Chewy Glazed Molasses Cookies
I am a big fan of molasses. There’s something about the tar-like jar of deeply earthy, sticky, caramelly syrup that nestles perfectly into childhood memories, ghosts of holiday bakings past, and evokes that golden moment of a hot slice of cornbread slathered with butter, waiting for a smear of this edible black gold. It’s richer than other syrups, heavy with hidden flavors and notes you wouldn’t find in honey or maple syrup, and the silky depth of it’s dark ooze is far more dangerously fun than either. The molasses glaze I made for these chewy gluten free molasses cookies is by far one of my favorites (and I’ve made a…
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Gluten Free Sugared Cranberries
These are mind. blowing. If somebody had told me last week that eating totally RAW cranberries covered in a thin layer of sugar was safe enough to avoid a WHOLE FACE pucker at the insanity that is cranberry tartness, I would have laughed. But gosh dangit I’m a total convert to sugared cranberries. They aren’t just for incredible cake decoration! I’ve eaten 20 of these in a row, popping them like halloween candy at age 10, and I had to lock the rest away in a tupperware so I wouldn’t end up eating 3 cups of these tart garnet beauties which would have undoubtedly led to disastrous consequences. And they’re…
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Kendra’s Gluten Free Velvet Spice Cake
This was the cakes to end all cakes. Every year, my sister and I would enter things into the Jackson county fair. Yes, it does sound like we just stepped out of a mid-20th-century Rogers and Hammerstein musical, but honestly these were some of the most exciting parts of summers in Southern Oregon! There were loads of categories too, which meant you could enter photographs, canned goods, home-sewn dresses, paintings, drawings, and baked goods all at once and vie for county-fair fame by coming out with one of those multi-colored, frilled, glorious objects: the GRAND PRIZE ribbon. The first price ribbon wasn’t too bad either but the grand prize, or…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Lemonade Layer Cake
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is! Earlier this year, in June, we were commissioned to make a big birthday cake for a friend and we came up with the ultimate summer combo: strawberry and lemon cake layers, wrapped in more silky strawberry and lemon buttercream – the strawberry lemonade cake! We were subsequently commissioned by another friend who had tasted the cake at the June birthday, to make it again for their other friend’s birthday. And now, months later and solidly out of summer, one of my longest friends decided the cake she wanted for her November birthday was, you guessed it, the epitome of summer, the strawberry…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Hazelnut Layer Cake
I could not wait for someone to request this pairing as a commissioned cake, and it finally happened! A friend recalled the chocolate hazelnut cupcakes I had made earlier this year (because sharing cupcakes during tough times is always a good thing) and asked it I could make it as a giant birthday cake. Answer: of course. So here it is in all its glory: four layers of the most heavenly, moist, cloud-like hazelnut cake (made with heaps of finely ground, freshly-roasted hazelnuts because that’s truly the only way to eat these perfumed little beauties), enrobed in the silkiest chocolate hazelnut buttercream, topped with dark chocolate ganache, and then decorated…
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Gluten Free Gingerbread House
Some of my fondest holiday memories involve taking a hammer to a month-old, stale-as-all-get-out gingerbread house and watching chunks of dry gingerbread, rock-hard gum drops, and royal icing fly in every direction across the kitchen floor. If you’re also reminiscing about the utter destruction of something so beautiful and yet so inedible, this is a post for you. After years (a decade?) hiatus, we decided that we should make a gingerbread house this year. Being older and oh-so wiser, we figured we should construct an epic house, from our own template, with homemade gluten free gingerbread that we carefully piece together with hot caramel instead of the takes-forever-to-set royal icing.…
