Peaches: the ultimate orb of summer. Give me bucketloads, give me crates, give me windowsills full of peaches and I’ll be happy. They maaaaaay just be my favorite summer fruit (I mean favorite fruit in general, come on), so of course I had to go and made giant gluten free peach muffins. With crumble topping. And a peach glaze. It’s summer in a muffin and I wish I could freeze a batch all year so that in December I could pop one out and feel that dusty late summer haze again. In the meantime, I’m just eating my fill of stone fruit and thinking up more peachy keen recipes. If…
-
-
Gluten Free Guava Cake with Cream Cheese Buttercream
The wonderful thing about flavor is that there is so much of it in the world. Growing up in rural southern Oregon, I never once had guava, but years later, thanks to friends and travel and happy strangers, I’ve now fallen in love with it. The first time I actually had guava was when I was living in the Galapagos, conducting my undergraduate thesis research with a load of astonishingly patient teachers, principals, and 8th graders on three of the islands (yes, there are over 30,000 people who live in the Ecuadorian Archipelago!). One of the best restaurants on the main street in Puerto Ayora, the town on Santa Cruz…
-
Gluten Free Strawberry Lemonade Layer Cake
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is! Earlier this year, in June, we were commissioned to make a big birthday cake for a friend and we came up with the ultimate summer combo: strawberry and lemon cake layers, wrapped in more silky strawberry and lemon buttercream – the strawberry lemonade cake! We were subsequently commissioned by another friend who had tasted the cake at the June birthday, to make it again for their other friend’s birthday. And now, months later and solidly out of summer, one of my longest friends decided the cake she wanted for her November birthday was, you guessed it, the epitome of summer, the strawberry…
-
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…
-
Gluten Free Neapolitan Cupcakes
Anyone else remember getting giant tubs of cheap Neapolitan ice cream at the grocery store as a kid? Some were definitely better than others, and half the time I’m pretty sure I just scooped through the chocolate layer, leaving the less exciting vanilla to the right. But it was glorious – simply having the choice of not one, not two, but THREE ice cream flavors in one bucket? Incredible. And a good strawberry ice cream can’t be beat – the ones with threads of real strawberries throughout, heightened by the heaps of pink dye that made this seem like the perfect summer treat. Bowls or cones, whatever you chose, were…
-
Gluten Free Piña Colada Cupcakes
The best piña colada I’ve ever had was also the most difficult to get to. Difficult in a good way – just lots of legs of transportation involved. It was also the best because I got to enjoy it on a tiny beach alongside my younger, taller, sister, Kendra, the other half of Sisters Sans Gluten. We started taking “Sister Trips” every year after our first trip together for Kendra’s 21st birthday, when we both flew down to LA, stayed in our first solo AirBnB, and spent the weekend in Universal Studios (Harry Potter world), around farmers markets and old bookstores and dining halls in downtown LA, and generally being…
-
Gluten Free Fig and Rosemary Honey Cupcakes
Late summer droops like the slopes of so many purple, green, and yellow figs. I remember reading a book in 6th grade (11 years old) about a young boy in ancient Egypt who embarked on a terrifying adventure through a Pharaoh-dictated city, trying to find and then hide (I think?) a golden vase. Besides the very heat that radiated off the pages that described day after day in the desert, the one thing that stuck bizarrely in my mind from that book was a phrase about figs and how they were the fruit of the divine – something so sweet and sumptuous they were only good enough for the gods.…
-
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…
-
Gluten Free Strawberry Cupcakes
Strawberries are a fruit loved the world round. You see strawberry images on clothing and accessories; and you see strawberry flavored everything in the grocery store. But just switching from strawberry flavoring to a real, fresh strawberry? Absolutely to die for. One of my first memories of my parent’s produce garden was picking the sun-warmed strawberries and biting into them, just for them to be gone in just one quick bite. These gluten free strawberry cupcakes really bring me back to those simpler summers. For the simplest and easiest of desserts, we have to look at strawberries and cream. Now these gluten free strawberry cupcakes are filled with fresh strawberries,…
-
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…
