This recipe is bittersweet in light of the huge blow dealt by climate change to Australia and its animals, ecology, and people. Let this post be a a celebration of one of the most colorful, friendly, and wonderful countries and groups of people out there, and a digital hug from across the Pacific that might comfort those who’ve lost so much in the recent and ongoing fires and disastrous weather. Australia is dear to me for many reasons, not least of which is that Australia was the first country I traveled to outside of the US which left a cherished impact. When I was thirteen, I applied to be…
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Gluten Free Roasted Hazelnut and Chocolate Snow Cookies
One of my dearest friends now lives a million miles away in the fairy-tale land of Vienna, Austria. Her moving was terrible news, until I considered the fact that this undisputedly meant that I had to travel to said fairy-tale land to visit her at least once a year. Not a bad deal. The first time I visited it was the second week of December, and Vienna, let alone us, was entirely frozen. Nevertheless, the city has a marvelous way of distracting you from the bone-chilling cold by decking itself in heaps of holiday lights and decorations, and by constructing myriad Christmas markets (or Adventmarkt/Weihnachtsmarkt) that seem to magically appear…
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Dark Chocolate Peppermint Cake Truffles
Ever develop a new recipe that you know will be a success, and then something goes terribly, horribly wrong? These truffles are the spiteful result of just that – though honestly, the only thing that was truly a disaster was the Italian buttercream frosting that I completely flubbed to top the chocolate peppermint cupcakes I had made. The cupcakes themselves were divine, the perfect mix of deep dark fudgey chocolate and crisp, winter peppermint that feels like candy canes and hot chocolate and everything lovely about the holidays. You’re more than welcome to make a dozen cupcakes out of the cake recipe below (or double it for a normal, two-dozen…
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Gingerbread Swiss Roll with Spiced Buttercream
This lovely russet Swiss Roll is a continuation of our Search for Delicious this holiday season, and the desire for soft (not rock-hard) gingerbread dessert items. Instead of heading in the direction of cookie-cutter vaguely-human shapes with limbs that may be harder to break than actual bones, we did a 180 and drafted a gingerbread version of our favorite (if you can’t tell from all of the other similar posts) recipe: the Swiss Roll. If you’re new to the blog, you may want to do a bit of background research on our burgeoning obsession with this light, aesthetically-pleasing sponge cake (see the Pistachio Rose roll, or the Chocolate Coffee roll,…
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Soft Gingerbread Cake
It’s been a while since our last post, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been baking and developing new recipes! (quite the opposite, actually). And now that we’re hurtling towards the rest of the holiday season, we figured that it was about time for something a bit more festive, leading us to Kendra’s Soft Gingerbread Cake. If you’ve ever been sadly disappointed in rock-hard gingerbread cookies or stale gingerbread people, this cake is for you. I distinctly remember making and then smashing gingerbread houses as a kid and always being massively let down by the flat slabs of “gingerbread” that I gingerly picked out of the rubble. For an easier,…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Crème Fraîche Truffles
Congratulations! You’ve survived perhaps the first of many holidays this season, and you’re about to get steamrolled by the rest. To celebrate this brief respite, in the quiet that hopefully is your house after relatives have left and before every corner grocery store starts playing headache-inducing numbers of holiday songs, we give you tiny bites of heaven (ie gluten free chocolate truffles, because, of course). They’re brilliantly easy to make, and we won’t judge you at all if you end up making an entire batch just for YOURSELF because honestly ’tis the season for self care and indulgence. You can also make more for your coworkers or those family members…
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Gluten Free Pumpkin Madeleines with Pumpkin Spice Glaze
Need some fancy pants desserts to wow your out-of-town relatives tomorrow? Or just want to have a pre-Thanksgiving high tea fit for queens? We’ve got you covered with these gluten free pumpkin madeleines. And these aren’t just any gluten free pumpkin madeleines, they’ve got brown butter (a glorious ingredient I recommend putting in nearly everything), AND pumpkin spice glaze. As background for this post, I’ve actually tried making madeleines twice now with different recipes and equally disastrous outcomes. Either they were too stiff and so didn’t fit the delicate mold and just ended up looking like lumps of raspberry coal, or the batter was too thin and rose too quickly,…
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Magic Hot Chocolate Pudding Cake
This is a 100% Kendra recipe (as are many of our concoctions), written up and photographed by Amelia (we’re the two sisters behind Sisters Sans Gluten if you haven’t read our About Us section). While this recipe was thought up by Kendra one evening when a sudden craving for pudding hit and this was the glorious solution, both of us sisters LOVE pudding. You know those instant Jell-o pudding boxes in the baking aisle that range from lemon to coconut to white chocolate and all you have to do is tear open the flimsy cardboard packaging, rip the foil packet open, dump the contents (questionable at best) into a mixing…
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Pistachio Snow Cookies
My mother makes a mean chocolate crinkle cookie, and a lemon version as well. Whether you call them crinkle, earthquake, or snow cookies, they’re one of the most visually delightful cookies with satisfyingly geometric splits and cracks that come from the dough being rolled in copious amounts of powdered sugar before baking and melting into this white-clad form. The earthquake title was recently brought to my attention by a coworker who only knew them by that name – but, as we’ve referenced before, a rose by any other name… This pistachio version looks quite similar, except for the telltale green hue that comes from heaps of ground the ground green…
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Persimmon Pudding
This is hands down one of the easiest and most densely earthy and rich winter cakes you can make. Being from the US, when I first heard my grandma say she was going to make her persimmon pudding, I pictured a bowl of actual pudding: the jiggly stuff that my sister and I loved to make from instant pudding packets, our patience tested by the 3-minute stirring time needed for the artificial flavors and colors to thicken into a goop that we would greedily spoon out while watching afternoon shows. Oh no, as any commonwealth citizen will attest, pudding is something quite different, and much broader than just a bowl…
