These have been proclaimed the house favorite by all three of my roommates out of all the things I’ve baked so far while living here in the UK. They’re THAT good. These gluten free pecan pie bars aren’t just any old pecan pie bars, they’ve got a buttery shortbread crust, they’ve got bourbon, they’ve got chocolate, and they’ve got a so much richness that you may just fall asleep after eating one. I wanted to make a pecan pie for our belated house Thanksgiving + early Christmas dinner that we put together last Friday in our little row house here in Oxford, but after pondering making a pie crust (something…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
These are a family favorite and one of our mom’s absolute most brilliant recipes – gluten free or otherwise!! In this case, these gluten free chocolate crinkle cookies are a dream and a half and perfect for the holidays or for a year-round treat. These have a bit of a new twist on them, with more cocoa powder (and dutched!) than in the original Mama Lynn recipe, which give them a deeper chocolate flavor and a bit of a chew reminiscent of macarons that I just love. They’re also some of the easiest cookies on the blog, so as long as you have a few hours (the dough does need…
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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…
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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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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.…
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Gluten Free Decorated Gingerbread Cookies
These may some of the most iconic cookies known to children across the Christmas-celebrating world. From finger-painted gingerbread people at age three, to a one-legged gingerbread fellow in Shrek, decorated gingerbread cookies hold nostalgia and holiday cliche in the perfectly-spiced, cookie-cutter package. So it seemed only appropriate that this year, of all years, we go back to our deepest, nearly-forgotten family traditions and make a truck load of gingerbread cookies and spend an entire evening decorating them and turning the kitchen table into a royal icing Jackson Pollock. This was actually our first time making homemade gingerbread dough in recent memory, so we totally underestimated how many gingerbread cookies could…
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Gluten Free Toasted Coconut Custard Pie
Custard pie has been one of my absolute favorite Thanksgiving dessert table treats since I can remember. To give you a bit of background – my mother hails from Alabama (moved to Oregon when she was in 8th grade), so we continue to ride the long coattails of southern cuisine, from pecan to karo to custard pies, to green jello salads (I had a MIND-blowingly-good one when we visited family outside of Montgomery when I was five and still think about it *sigh*), to hush puppies and family-secret barbecue sauce. Custard pie is arguably one of the simplest ones on that list, but it’s just so dang good! Now, after…
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Gluten Free Bourbon Balls
Thank goodness for Instagram, or I wouldn’t have even thought to make these delightfully indulgent holiday goodies last week! Calgary Glutenfree, another top-notch gluten free blogger, mentioned that their favorite way to use bourbon in baking was bourbon balls, and that sparked a full-fledged recipe hunt for how to make our own! I’d heard of these southern delicacies before but had regrettably never tried them, and after perusing various recipes, determined that I had everything I needed to make them right then and there. So I did. And I’m not disappointed with the result – quite the opposite! Now, apparently, the original bourbon ball was created by Ruth Hanly Booe…
