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…
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Gluten Free Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Italian Pine Bud Syrup
This may be one of the easiest, simplest, and most elegant desserts you ever make. Looking for a show-stopping, dressed-to-impress post-dinner treat you can wow your quarantine date with? Wanting to spice dinners up after nearly (exactly) a year in semi-lockdowns? This is for YOU. It’s the ever-classic, ever-indulgent Panna cotta, an Italian gift to the world (in addition to so many others), that needs only a handful of ingredients, as many minutes as you can count on two hands, and some lead time. Yes, the only down side is that it needs to set in the fridge for at least 8 hours…but that just means that you won’t have…
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Giant Gluten Free Fudgy Brownies
Brownies. Need I say more? I need not, but I shall. When was the first time you remember experiencing the gloriousness of a warm, impossibly-dense, fudgy brownie? That moment of plunging into the chocolatey depths, only to resurface for a glug of cold milk or an extra spoonful of crisp vanilla ice cream. The rest of the world seems to melt away in that first bite – your peripheral vision compromised with visions of pools of melted chocolate chunks or in the velvety darkness of that center brownie piece. And then the satisfying chew of the caramelized edges. The most wonderful square you’ll ever eat. Brownies also happen to be…
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Gluten Free Orange Creamsicle Cupcakes
I don’t know why I never buy orange creamsicles – they’re FABULOUS. If you, too, have fond memories of these perfectly-orangey, perfectly vanilly popsicles, these are the cupcakes for you. For the life of me, I can’t remember the first time I had one of those beacons of cold creamy orange bars, but I do know that on every school field trip I’d hope that the treat at the end of the day wouldn’t be those twin cherry/strawberry/lime ice cream bars but a glorious orange creamsicle. There’s something about the smooth center and bright, peachy orange outside. So, here I am in my late 20s, continuing on the theme of…
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Gluten Free Ube Angel Food Cake
Ube got me through one of the weirdest days of 2020. Now, I know what you’re thinking: what day WASN’T a weird day in 2020. Touché. But the 9th of September 2020 was a particularly bad day. The 8th of September, a fire started at the north end of Ashland, Oregon, where Kendra (the other half of SSG), my parents, my grandmother, dear friends, and a few aunts and uncles and cousins all live, and tore through most of the Rogue Valley like, you guessed it, wildfire, demolishing thousands of homes in its path. From 10am to 10pm that day, I was getting Twitter updates to track the fire’s spread,…
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Gluten Free Pink Lemonade Bars
Today is the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and of Kamala Devi Harris – both titans in their own right, and people who will put the needs and hopes of a country before their own. It’s been a long four years, an even longer four years for those who do not look like me – I’m one of the lucky ones, despite Trump’s (and the entire GOP, let’s be honest) attempts to disenfranchise and demean women wholeheartedly. Today is a new day, one that will not mark immediate change, but one that will put us on a path to righting so many of the egregious wrongs that have occured,…
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Gluten Free Vietnamese Pandan Honeycomb Cake – Bánh Bò Nướng
This cake is one of my new favorites, and has me asking “why have we never been to Vietnam?!” because there are so many naturally gluten free desserts that are absolute dream boats of buttery, gorgeous, flavors and textures. Let’s back up. My dear friend and former roomie, Leslie Nguyen-Okwu (who happens to be an incredible journalist, speech writer, and all around amazing human – check her out here) sent me a recipe for Vietnamese Pandan Honeycomb Cake ages ago because it’s one of her favorites (her mother is Vietnamese and her grandmother still makes this occasionally) and because, lo and behold, it only requires tapioca starch which, as you…
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Gluten Free Black and White Cupcakes
Racism is baked into the bones of America. Even after perceived progress due to the courage, tirelessness, and perseverance of so many, including Dr. King, racism persists in the very systems that this country is built on. In all the ugliness of 2020, thousands marched for the same injustices, the same changes that Dr. King wrote and spoke about over five decades ago. Because racism never left; it’s been twisted and reformed to fit into what we think are socially acceptable channels today. The saying, “they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds” applies to racism and racists as much as it applies to those who are…
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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 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…
