Sometimes you have to improvise. Or, better yet, you’re given the opportunity to. Like when you make mini cinnamon roll pavlovas and have a MASSIVE amount of cream cheese custard (aka pretty much the same as cheesecake filling) leftover and some extra time in the day. So, with waning light for a photoshoot, I set to work adding a few extra things to the giant bowl of custard, and tossing together a quick, nut-based crust. I really had to get creative with the toppings for these, seeing as I hadn’t been to the store in a week and the fruit I had left in the fridge was…a bit sad. Thankfully,…
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Gluten Free Kiwi Lime Tart
Are you a kiwi skin on or skin off type of person? I was always a skin off, slice in half short ways, around the equator of the fuzzy brown fruit, and scoop out the electric-green kaleidoscope with a spoon type of person. It wasn’t until I got the chance to travel to Australia when I was 13 that I first encountered a faction of skin-on folks. What a world this is. The trip was with People to People Student Ambassador program, started by Eisenhower in hopes of promoting cultural exchange and friendship through sending teenagers in delegations abroad to learn and meet people and generally foster greater awareness of…
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Gluten Free Oatmeal Cream Pies
In fifth grade, my teacher had a system of points you could accumulate for helping other students or cleaning up the classroom or doing generally nice things for the other 10 year olds packed into the first-floor learning space. At first, she would give you small pieces of paper that noted that you had “done a good dee” or something like that, but then, she leveled up the playing field and gave away Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies (this was only a year before the celiac diagnosis). Now, if you’ve never had the pleasure of biting into the unbelievably softy, slightly chewy, deeply sweet and molasses-y thin sandwich cookies that…
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Gluten Free Glazed Fruit Financiers
Grown up tea parties are the best. Something so simple but so out of the ordinary (at least here in the States it is – we’re jealous of the normalcy high tea and tea in general enjoy across the pond). High tea is particularly fun because of the veritable tower of treats that usually accompanies a good cream tea or pot of other varieties of hot beverage. We’ve gotten lucky enough to sample gluten free high teas on three continents now – here in the US, around London of course, and one of the best ones yet was at the Belmond Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. If…
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Gluten Free Peanut Butter Chocolate Mud Cookies
These cookies are for Hope. You know those friends who, even after years of losing track of each other, you fall back into friendship with so easily it’s like coming home? Hope is one of those friends. We hadn’t even seen each other since high school, back when we were both feeling a bit stuck in a rut in tiny Oregon towns, finding our outlet in community theater productions (I think we met on the set of West Side Story, so many years ago) and figuring out who we were. Fast forward nearly ten years and after watching her lay a foundation in actually writing, singing, and producing her own…
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Gluten Free Guava Cheesecake Cupcakes
These gorgeously-pink fairy tale cupcakes are 100% in existence because of a dear friend who, when asked what new cupcake flavors she’d like to see us make, gave us this winning combo: guava cheesecake. What’s not to love? Guava? fantastic. Cheesecake? also fantastic. Cupcakes? awesome. Guava has a light flavor that seems to wrap itself around the cheesecake swirl in a dreamy summer flourish, making us wish we weren’t stuck in smoky San Francisco and instead out somewhere more-frequently sunny and preferably with a swimmable body of water. Thanks Clarissa for championing these incredible cupcakes that are a new favorite. And if you’re lamenting not being able to make these…
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Gluten Free Almond and White Chocolate Sprinkles Cookies
These are the happiest cookies I’ve ever made. It’s amazing how gleeful you can get tossing cookie dough into heaps of rainbow sprinkles. Sprinkles! They’re such a great invention! These cookies are an homage to the incredible Liz of Cup of Ambition – another stellar baking blog that you should absolutely check out right now. It’s not all gluten free but it’s super inspirational and has some great gluten free options! She has an awesome Sprinkles Cookies recipe over there and after staring at her photos and wishing I had one of those pockets-of-sunshine on my brief lunch break (here’s to working from home and having a “home office” right…
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Gluten Free Pomegranate Cupcakes
A pomegranate is a challenge. Certainly if you’ve grown up cracking them open perfectly in Iran or Turkey or Israel, you’ll scoff at the absolute mess most of us in California make when we try to hack into the intricately-marbled honeycomb of garnet beads. The thin, gorgeously-cardinal skin poses both a hefty protection for the fruit inside and an impossibly-flimsy match for any kitchen knife. After years of trying, and looking up tips for getting into the tricky bulb without turning the kitchen into a bloodbath, I think I’ve got some sort of system down. Slicing a neat little square into the top and carefully peeling back the casing until…
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Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
Anyone else remember the old Bananas in Pajamas routine? I have a vague memory of the “Bananas, in pyjamas, are coming down the stairs…” theme song and the animated intro, but after looking it up just now to refresh my memory, it seems I completely missed the actual show. Human-sized teddy bears and bananas have every-day adventures in brightly-lit homes and sunny backyards. The episode I happened upon was “Pink Spots,” a rather timely short about one of the teddy bears coming down with a case of, you guessed it, pink spots. Alarmingly, neither teddy bear was wearing a mask, and even after proclaiming “you must be sick, Morgan!” the…
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Gluten Free Peaches and Cream Cupcakes
Fruit trees are simply the best. Food, on trees! Easily accessible (usually), and bursting with ripe globes of peach or plum or cherry in the summer. Of course there are so many other arboreal foods, but I’m talking about temperate orchards of stone fruit or apples or pears, the kind with literal low-hanging fruit and that pepper the valleys of southern Oregon each summer. Picking peaches in late July or early August was like a holiday for us kids. I remember what I think was the first year we brought home our haul – dusty from the dry, hot orchard haze, covered in a fine peach fuzz ourselves, and warm…
