Anyone else have those fond childhood memories of staring wide-eyed at tray upon tray of muffins bigger than your FACE at Costco? Well, even if not, I’m sure you could conjure up images of unimaginably large muffins, in varying flavors (the chocolate chocolate ones were always the biggest pull as a kid, though it was only for a special treat that we got those ones), usually sliced into quarters to mix and match or to actually be a reasonable sized-snack. Our mom used to run two separate girl scout troops for each of us growing up (still unclear how she managed both, plus working, plus finances, plus just being a…
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Gluten Free Raspberry Chocolate Layer Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Buttercream
Is there anything better than a slice of gloriously-rich chocolate cake. Rhetorical, of course. This one was a particular stunner: four layers of the fluffiest, most decadent gluten free chocolate cake layers you’ll ever eat, filled with chocolate cream cheese buttercream (YES you heard that right – cream cheese frosting in CHOCOLATE? yes), raspberry puree + preserves, and bright raspberry whipped cream, and enrobed in more chocolate cream cheese buttercream, a rich chocolate ganache drip, and topped with gorgeous fresh flowers and raspberries. Just go ahead and let out that sigh of relief that it’s ALL GLUTEN FREE and serve yourself a second or third piece. One of the best…
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Gluten Free Almond Shortbread with White Chocolate
One of the best holidays as kids was Easter – the easter baskets, decorating real eggs, filling plastic ones with all the chocolates, marshmallow peeps, jelly beans, and other goodies we could get our hands on, and then the actual day-of – conducting the most elaborate hides and hunts of all of the easter goods in our backyard. When we were really little, we’d go to our friend Nathan’s house out in the hills above Ashland, where he and his family would host a massive egg hunt every year in the forests, tumbled trees, creek, and hillsides surrounding their home. We’d dress up in spring florals, do our hair, wear…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Caramel Pecan Tart
Currently looking for a boatload of friends who want to share this MASSIVE bottle of gorgeously rich 10 yo Tawny Port while indulging with a slice of this gluten free chocolate caramel and pecan tart because WOW I need to eat some real food and not just this glorious combo all day. But hey, it’s a heck of a way to start a Friday! This is our second collab with a brilliant wine-expert friend in Vienna, Austria, Iker Berasaluce (check out his Instagram here!!) pairing incredible wines with incredible gluten free desserts, and it does not disappoint. The first collab we did was bright, fresh, very citrusy, and AMAZING. Props…
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Gluten Free Raspberry White Chocolate Amaretto Cake
This is one of my favorite cakes I’ve ever made – inspired by the absolutely glorious-looking raspberry, white chocolate, and almond cake by Baker by Nature – though tweaked to be gluten free, a bit less sweet, heavy on the white chocolate (full-on whipped ganache instead of a white chocolate buttercream), with lots of fresh raspberries with the raspberry jam, fresh whipped cream and extra almond buttercream to boot – and toasted almonds to add a final touch! I highly recommend checking out the initial recipe-inspiration linked above, but if you’re looking for a less sweet, lots-of-white-chocolate, extra fillings, gluten free version, this is the recipe for you! The almond/amaretto…
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Gluten Free Spumoni Cupcakes
Alright, who else has had spumoni ice cream before? I have this magical, hazy memory of getting it once (maybe I got it every time we went – who knows at this point) at Antonio’s – one of the three restaurants in “downtown” Eagle Point where we grew up. Eagle Point was a town of 5,000 when we moved there in 1998, though as a 5 year old the sense that it was the town the size of a pinhead didn’t really register (and Kendra was 2 so she definitely didn’t have a clue at the time). The downtown consisted of one street. Not like a city street that stretches…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Snacking Bread
We’ve partnered with Bob’s Red Mill (#sponsored) (one of the longest-standing and favorite gluten free flour/ingredient companies out there) for a few collabs, and this one hit home after so many carefully-planned cook-at-home meals over the past year: a new recipe that includes their brand new Grain Free Flat Bread mix! It’s a quick, easy, and perfectly scrumptious gluten free strawberry snacking bread! I recommend making these for brunch or an afternoon tea and snacking on a slice with a bunch of butter. Bob’s has helped us get through so many ridiculously tricky gluten free times – back in 2004 when NO ONE else was making gluten free products, Bob’s…
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Gluten Free Yuzu Tart with Swiss Meringue and Sweet Sauternes Wine
Here’s to friends far away – and to reconnecting with folks you meet years later to collaborate on awesome projects that blend two perfectly-balanced passions: wine and dessert! This whole post starts back in the summer of 2019 (remember those days? no masks, hugs, handshakes, and seeing people’s smiles?) when we visited one of my best friends in Vienna, where she’s living her best life. She happens to have a marvelous rooftop terrace just above her apartment where we organized a late-summer dinner paired with incredible wine, and we met her downstairs neighbors, Iker and his boyfriend Felix. And Iker happens to be not only an incredible academic (just a…
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Healthy Gluten Free Banana Pancakes
Pancakes. I have a long history with these thinnest of cakes, the ultimate breakfast food (at least here in the west). When I was going through the entire rigamarole of tests and food allergies blood draws and biopsies back in 6th grade, we tried everything under the sun in terms of diets. No, I wasn’t trying to lose any weight as an already-under-average 11 year old, but heck if we weren’t trying to figure out why I wasn’t gaining weight, and food had a lot to do with it. One “diet” we tried on for size (I think only for a couple of months but it felt like a YEAR…
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Gluten Free Mango Panna Cotta
After making this dang-easy mango panna cotta, I realized that we (quite unintentionally) have NO OTHER mango recipes!! Which is something that I’m going to need to remedy pronto because we’re both big fans of the creamy, bright, sultry depth of this orange fruit. It happens to pair very well with custardy treats like this elegant and deceptively simple panna cotta too, so I’m at least glad we have this first stab at a mango creation. Props to Kendra for cutting all the mango halves into little hedgehogs (probably a better name for them but hey it’s cute) for the photo shoot – especially because it meant that I got…
