Happy mid-week treat time to everyone! A huge thanks to everyone who is fighting the good fight and having tough discussions with family, friends, and with themselves (especially us white folks). One thing we value at Sisters Sans Gluten, in addition to awesome gluten free baked goods, is a responsibility to always self-examine ourselves – life long, not just when you’re in college or when you befriend someone who’s BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color), but every day. We all hold within ourselves built up prejudices based on family teaching, religious teaching, or even one-off experiences that we let shape our ideology too much. So, every morning, it’s on us…
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Gluten Free Berries and Cream Swiss Roll
We had a great Saturday today, complete with this marvelously-summery gluten free Swiss roll, and a whole spread of other homemade dishes. It was 4th of July today, but instead of celebrating as we have done in years past, we took note of how our country, and all of us in it (especially us white folks) can be better. If you truly love this country, it is paramount that your love pushes it in a direction of change, progress, justice, and peace. There is no peace without justice, so our daily pledge and work will be to dismantle systems that are inherently cruel and lethal to groups of people who…
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Gluten Free Red Velvet Cupcakes
Food means so much to my family, and to most families around the world. We store traditions in the food that we have, whether it’s $1 strawberry milkshakes at the diner in downtown Eagle Point, Oregon that I thought were huge as a kid, or pimento cheese that mom would make in big batches to bring to potlucks and Fourth of July family gatherings, or the nostalgic combo of a can of V8 and a Nature Valley granola bar that my dad stashed in his classroom and that I would munch on in kindergarten after school while I waited for him to finish grading before we walked home together. Food…
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Gluten Free Mexican Chocolate Cake
Chocolate may be able to stand on its own two legs just fine without any flavorings, but you’ve got to hand it to the Olmec, Aztecs, and Mayans for unlocking not only the fact that chocolate is, well, great, but producing the first fermented chocolate drinks and adding in complimentary notes like cinnamon, nutmeg, and chili. According to the good ol’ wikipedia, the Olmec were the first to turn the strangely-fruity cocoa beans (surrounded by a white fleshy pulp – which actually tastes great) into alcoholic drinks (good idea, Olmec) as early as 1750 BCE (a hell of a long time ago) around present-day Veracruz, Mexico. From that pivotal moment…
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Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chip Bread
We may be late to the banana bread train (so many amazing loaves out there that we’ve seen during shelter in place), but it’s never too late for a good ol’ fashioned slice of this stuff. While I do adore traditional banana bread (who first thought “hey, I have a bunch of near-mush brown bananas, let’s put them in a quick bread!) and its roots in deeply homey, practical, and penny-wise baking, but there are a few twists that, for me, make some very excellent banana bread/cake. This particular recipe leans more towards cake than quick-bread (hence the nifty bundt pan instead of the loaf pan), and it’s hands down…
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Gluten Free Strawberry Lemonade Tiered Cake
Summers are for lemonade and sunblock and big, cloudless skies that seem to expose more of the world than in any other season. If you’re still stuck inside (or if you also live in San Francisco or various areas up in the PNW) then those big skies might still be a little out of reach, depending on your windows. But lemonade and sunblock are totally in-season, and anything that involves the two sounds like a plan for a great sun-soaked day. One positive adjustment that many folks seem to be making during shelter in place is a newfound love of parks. Now, it’s arguable whether your neighborhood 2×2 block green…
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Gluten Free Pistachio Raspberry Rose Cupcakes
As we continue shelter in place ordinances, I’ve been reminiscing about travel from last year, or even from the first two months of 2020. While it’s actually been quite fun to re-discover our own neighborhood and take time to just enjoy San Francisco and its many (way more than I thought) local parks, there’s something nebulous and intangibly lovely about international travel that, once you’ve tasted it, remains as an ache or a longing at the back of your head and your heart. If you’re fortunate enough to have had the chance to travel, even just a bit, beyond your national borders, may you treasure those memories and experiences forever.…
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Gluten Free Matcha Latte Cupcakes
When I got to travel to Japan just after my senior year of university I was more than a bit excited to find anything and everything matcha-flavored at the corner convenience stores. Matcha is one of those love or strongly-dislike flavors that is at once earthy and light, teasingly sweet but also pleasantly savory. If you love it, then of course Japan is the place to be to indulge in both the best straight matcha you can find, and explore a whole new world of culinary delights like matcha pudding cups or matcha pastries or matcha milk bread (the latter two I definitely could not partake in but at least…
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Gluten Free German Chocolate Cupcakes
I distinctly remember scooping giant spoonfuls of Betty Crocker German Chocolate Frosting out of the plastic tub it comes in, and eating it gleefully when I was maybe eight or nine. Prying off the red plastic top to find perfectly-solidified caramel custard, pecan and coconut goop was like finding buried treasure. How I got my hands on the tub of frosting in the first place is the real question – either very impressive childhood sneaking into the kitchen and up into the baking cupboards, or maybe we all just indulged after making a cake or cupcakes or something more reasonable. Overall, this penchant for German Chocolate topping aligns with what…
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Gluten Free Birthday Cake Funfetti Cupcakes
I’ll tell you what, this was one of the most fun recipes I’ve gotten to develop and bake – there’s something about thousands of little tiny sticks of colored sugar that just exude child-like glee (even though we never really made funfetti cake consistently for birthdays when I was a kid). And who knows, with all of the days blending together being stuck inside 24/7 it might as well be my birthday, or yours! or your cat’s! or the dude’s who lives next door! Let’s just say to heck with it all and celebrate our birthdays whenever we want, thank you very much, while we’re all stuck in this amorphous…
