You'll Crack Your Head Open!

Gluten free potstickers!  I know!  I’m so shocked it worked.  I didn’t even take pictures, other than the end result.  These were the second batch, which I didn’t watch as carefully so they burned a bit on the bottom.  More of a caramelized thing, so it tasted good, but still.  It came across too dark on the camera.

Every once in a while I would think there’s got to be a way to make potstickers gluten free.  Because if you think about it, Chinese food is usually made by hand.  It’s country cooking, just a different country.  I learned how to make fried rice and a few chinese style sauces, but I figured potstickers would be a very long process of trying to figure out what flours worked, what I needed to add as far as gums or maybe a egg yolk to make sure it holds together.  But it was just a thought on the back burner that someday I’d give it a shot.

So I was looking at this month’s Fine Cooking magazine and it had a recipe for potstickers.  I was curious to see what they made the dough out of.  Turns out?  Flour and water.  That’s it.

Hmm… That is very interesting..  It got me thinking that if nothing else it would actually be a really good way to get to know the properties of the different flours.

So I decided to go ahead and make potstickers with the expectation that they weren’t going to work, but I’d play around with making dough with different flours and I’d probably end up cooking the potsticker filling on its own and just throwing it into the fried rice.  No biggie.

So I throw some of the same gluten free flour mix that I use for cookies in a bowl, stir in some hot water until it formed a dough and let it rest at room temperature (I wrapped it in plastic wrap) like the recipe said.  Patrick was late getting home so it probably sat for a couple hours before I got to it.

I made the filling from a recipe by Ming Tsai on FoodNetwork.com.  The recipes in Fine Cooking were more fancy and I just wanted to see if I could even make them.  So I got to work and started rolling out the dough, which was working very well.  I had some dumpling presses that I used to shape them.  They held together really well when I folded them.  I wasn’t too surprised about the potstickers holding together, but I was not expecting them to cook the same as regular potstickers.  I expected the dough to do something weird and I’d end up with a mess in the pan.

But they turned out great.  I just cooked them according to the Ming Tsai recipe.  They look just like potstickers.

Patrick ate five of them.  And he’s picky about gluten free food.  He said they were “excellent.”  They have that kind of chewy/crunchy bottom and the steamed soft/chewy top like regular potstickers.  I was blown away.

To go with it, I made Emeril’s Honey Soy Dipping Sauce.  I use San J wheat free soy sauce in place of regular soy and I just used regular honey.  It was really, really good.

So yea… Wow.  I never would have thought…

Yesterday was my son’s 6th birthday.  I told him he could have any kind of cake that he wanted and he chose chocolate and vanilla marble swirled cupcakes with chocolate and vanilla swirled frosting, and superhero cupcake picks.

Ta-Da!

Now, I have to say that this is slightly anticlimactic for Mommy, because this was the cake I made for my daughter’s birthday last summer.

Oh yes.  Yes I did.  I’ll do a post in a few days about how I did that.  Honestly, it’s mostly arts and crafts rather than frosting, and the doll is just one that I pilfered from my daughter’s toybox.  I just made sure that none of the glue, or the doll, actually touched any part of the cake.

Okay… So back to the cupcakes.  This is what I used to make them.

We’ve got Betty Crocker Gluten Free Yellow Cake and Chocolate Cake, Pillsbury Easy Frost frosting in vanilla and chocolate (verified GF through Pillsbury), one of those flavor injectors from the cooking accessories aisle of Target, and a skewer.

I made a package of yellow cake and two packages of chocolate cake according to package directions.  Then I lined a muffin pan with cupcake liners and filled them with chocolate cake batter.  Yellow cake with chocolate marbling would definitely work better, but my son requested chocolate with yellow marbling.

To do the marbling, I filled the flavor injector with yellow cake batter and swirlied it on top.

Then I swirled a skewer through it to mess it up a little so it looks marbly.

After they’re baked, this is what they look like.  The marbling in the middle of the cupcake didn’t really show up, but my son was just happy that it was marbled on the top.

Then all you have to do is frost them.  My absolute favorite part of the Easy Frost frosting, other than the fact that it’s gluten free is that it doesn’t need refrigeration.  After you’re done, the tip screws off so you can rinse it out and then it’s ready to go the next time.  This works great for me because I keep cupcakes in the freezer for those days when there’s a birthday party at school.  I used to keep extra frosting in the freezer, but this is much better.

This is my son with the leftover cupcakes after he came home from school.  He was trying to be patient, but he really just wanted another cupcake.  Looks like a success to me.

I use this mix as a 1 to 1 exact replacement in all of my cookie recipes, including my old family recipes.  It’s never let me down. It’s also good if you like to eat some of the cookie dough because it doesn’t have any bean flour. If you’re using a flour mix that has bean flour in it don’t eat it. I know it smells good, but seriously. Don’t. I still have flashbacks from when I did that about four years ago. {shudder…}

I found the flour mix on page 6 of Annalise Roberts’ book – Gluten-Free Baking Classics.  Make sure you get the extra fine rice flour.  It is the reason this flour mix works.  It’s very powdery.  Not gritty at all.  I think that one of the many reasons that GF products tend to fall apart is because the gritty rice flour doesn’t stick together well.  With all of the other roadblocks to good GF baked goods, why not take one out of the equation.  :)

For three cups of this flour mix you need:

2 cups Extra Finely Ground Rice Flour (made by Authentic Foods)

2/3 cup Potato Starch (not potato flour)

1/3 cup Tapioca Flour (tapioca starch is the same thing in this case)

3/4 teaspoon xanthan gum

Mix all of this together thoroughly.  I use a whisk to get it all mixed.

Now go make some chocolate chip cookies.  And eat some cookie dough while you’re at it.  Or get yourself some Haagen Dazs Vanilla ice cream and make yourself some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Look….!  Aren’t they pretty..?  I still can’t believe I made those.

A few weeks ago I came across this blog - Bake at 350 .  You’ve got to go look.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait…. Okay good you’re back.  Can you even believe how amazing those cookies look?  I! know!

So… since Christmas is coming I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.  Gluten free, schmuten free.  Whatever.

I decided to go ahead and try her cookie recipe to see how it worked with my GF flour mix.  I wasn’t expecting much.  I was expecting it to turn out fine, but I didn’t think it would be any big deal.  I was so wrong.  It’s perfect.  You can go straight from mixing the dough to rolling and cutting it and putting it in the oven.  You don’t have to baby it at all, or refrigerate it first.  It doesn’t fall apart either.  Other than the GF flour, I didn’t modify it at all.   It was just like making regular cookies.  And they taste sooo good.  The cookies themselves aren’t too sweet so they hold up to having all of that sugar from the icing.  And they’re not heavy or dense.  They’re light in texture yet they hold together.  A total gluten free paradox.

I have to be honest and say I didn’t make my own royal icing, although I probably will next time just to get a wider range of colors.  But for these, I just used Betty Crocker’s Cookie Icing in the little squeezy bags.

It’s basically royal icing. It sets up hard and the whole bit, so you can do what Bridget does with all of the layering and other nifty stuff.  I also used some sprinkles I already had in my stash.  For the Christmas ornaments and the snowman face I used (clean) tweezers to place them.  On the stocking I did the white stocking cuff and letter first, let that dry and then did the red part so it wouldn’t bleed together.

I’ve got to say that when it comes to my kids, there’s nothing more important to me than making sure they don’t feel left out of anything because of food.  So when my daughter’s class did a Cookies Around the World cookie exchange, I had to make sure she not only had an international cookie to share (gluten free fattigmann), but she also had some really pretty cut out cookies too.

I can seem myself becoming totally addicted to making these.  So much fun.

Okay, actually they’re not goldfish crackers.  They’re goldfish cookies.  But stick with me here.

I have tried a bunch of recipes for gluten-free crackers and various ways to add cheese in order to make something that tastes like cheese crackers.  No luck.  Not even close.  I had given up on the idea that my kids would ever have anything resembling a goldfish cracker or even anything tasting remotely like any kind of cheese cracker.

But, I’ve got a theory about trying to create a gluten-free version of regular food that will come into play in the next paragraph.  Sometimes you have to choose – Do you want it to taste like what you remember or do you want to look like what you remember?  Most of the time, I just want the taste.  But with young kids, sometimes all they really want is something that looks the same as all of the other kids have.   It’s important for kids to feel included, especially with a condition that sometimes separates them from their friends.

So, one day I was making some cut-out cookies, using my snazzy gluten-free dough rollout method, and it occurred to me that I could probably make cookies that look like goldfish crackers.

I used a package of gluten-free cookie dough mix from 123 Gluten Free .  You can use any kind of gluten-free roll and cut cookie mix or recipe, but you’ll want to make sure it works (maybe with basic circle cut-outs) before you take the time to try making the goldfish cookies.

I made the cookies according to the package directions and put the dough in a gallon-sized ziploc bag.  I started adding orange and yellow food coloring a bit at a time and squooshed it together in the bag until I got that goldfish cracker color.  I think I might have added just a tiny bit of red to make it a bit brighter.

Then I transferred some of the dough to a new bag and rolled it out, using the SGFDRM (snazzy gluten-free dough rollout method), mentioned above.   Since the goldfish cookies aren’t square, I don’t work the dough into the corners.  I just do a roundish shape like you do with regular cookies.  I roll it out to about 1/8 inch or so.

After you refrigerate the dough for a bit, take the dough out of the bag by gently peeling the dough out of the bag.

Now take a paring knife and make the goldfish shape.   It’s not as hard as it sounds.  Just think about the shape.  It’s very basic.  With just a bit of practice, you can totally do this.  And the ones that don’t turn out quite right?  Mommy Snack!

I just use the tip of the paring knife and just kind of tap the tip up and down and move it slowly rather than trying to slice the dough in a fluid motion.  Tapping allows me to have a lot more control.

When I bake them, I set the temperature about 25 degrees or so less than the package directions.  This allows me to keep an eye on them and allows them to bake a little slower.  After all the work of cutting them out, I don’t want to burn them.

This is time-consuming, but my son’s reaction to finding goldfish crackers (just like all the other kids) when he opens up his snack bag at church makes it all worth it to me.   He gets so excited, and he’s so proud that he gets to eat the same thing as everyone else.

I’ve been contemplating figuring out a way to make some sort of cookie cutter for this, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Well, making my own GF Goldfish crackers Works for Me.  For more Works For Me Wednesday tips, visit Shannon at Rocks in My Dryer.

My gluten-free graham crackers are based on one of the free recipes at Top Secret Recipes .   Since it’s one of his free recipes, I’ll go ahead and post the whole recipe.  I wrote a post about some of the other Top Secret Recipes here.

If you’ve ever worked with gluten-free dough, you’ve discovered that most doughs aren’t as thick as gluteny doughs.  They can also be very difficult, if not impossible, to work with.  I created the rolling technique that I use here so I could have rolled cookies, such as cut-out Christmas cookies.  It ended up being a great way to store cookie dough.  I can just pull one out of the freezer when I need it.  It also keeps me or my kids from eating a whole batch right after it’s made.  So now, that’s what I do with all my rolled doughs.

To be honest, you could make this into a pretty workable dough by adding less water.  You could probably roll it out the regular way, but the method I’ve been using really makes it easy to create the square crackers without any waste or re-rolling of the dough.

Gluten-Free Graham Crackers

1/3 cup shortening

3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon Sugar

3 tablespoons honey, warmed

1.5 teaspoons vanilla

3 cups Pamela’s Ultimate Baking and Pancake Mix

1/4 – 1/2 cup water

For the procedure of mixing the dough, I’m just going to link you directly to  Top Secret Recipe’s version of Nabisco Graham Crackers.

I only have a couple of notes in addition to the recipe as written for making the dough.  It turns out that graham flour is just a course grind of whole wheat flour.  Pamela’s Baking Mix is really good with duplicating the appearance and graham-y flavor because it actually has almond meal in it, which is where the dark brown flecks in the picture come from.  Pamela’s Baking Mix also has the salt, baking powder, baking soda AND the ever- important GF baking ingredient – xanthan gum.  When you get to the part where you put the water in to bring the dough together, go easy on the water.  I start out with a 1/4 cup and see how it goes from there.

To roll your dough out, you will need a gallon-sized zip-top bag, a one-cup measuring cup and a rolling pin.  In the pictures, I put a white towel down just so you can see the dough.  I actually did everything directly on the cutting board and not the towel.

1.  Fill a one cup measuring cup with dough.  Put it inside the ziplock bag and squash it down with your hands.   Do not seal the bag yet.

2.  Using the rolling pin and your hands, work the dough down into the bottom corners.

3.  Using the rolling pin and your hands, work the dough to fill the bag.  As you get to the top of the bag, get as much of the air bubbles out and seal the bag.   You want as flat and uniform an end-product as possible, so you’ll want to roll the sealed dough back and forth, side to side until you get it as flat and uniform as you can.

4.  At this point, I put the dough in the freezer.  I keep a cookie sheet in the freezer just for this so I can keep it completely flat.   When you take the dough out to make the graham crackers, you’ll need to work fast because it warms up pretty quickly.

5.  When you’re ready to make the graham crackers, open the bag and cut down the sides and across the bottom, removing the bag from the top surface of the dough.

6.   Flip the dough onto a greased cookie sheet, dough side down, and peel the rest of the bag off.  I usually have to work at this a bit to get the first edge off the bag so it stays in one piece.

7.   Now, take a pizza cutter and cut the dough into squares however big you’d like.  (Being a girl, I have to point out that the popeye arms are just a trick of the camera.  Man…  My forearm looks like a slice of pizza…!   Anyway…)

8.  Bake them in a preheated  300 F oven for about 5-7 minutes, or until they are beginning to turn a light brown.  At this point, you’ll need to take them out of the oven and space them apart.  The spacing is how you’ll get that crisp graham crackery-ness.  If you keep them all together, you’ll end up with the outer ones having a crisp edge, and the inner ones being soft.  If they aren’t cooperating with the spacing, put them back in the oven until they firm up more and try again.

9.  Return them to the 300 F oven until they’re a medium golden brown.   They will still be soft at this point, but will be crisp when cool.

Enjoy!

I’ve had varied luck with gluten-free cake.   Some of the chocolate cakes are good.   Gluten-Free Pantry’s Angel Food Cake is, frankly, perfect.  But I haven’t been able to find a yellow or white cake mix that I really like.   Some have a pretty good texture, but not quite there on flavor.  Others have a good flavor, but have a texture problem.  Some even have a weird aftertaste.

Not long after I went gluten-free, I started really paying attention to the site Top Secret Recipes http://topsecretrecipes.com .  I’ve been subscribed there for years.  Mostly it was just interesting to get the recipes to see what the secret was, but I never tried making anything.

After I went gluten-free, that site gained new meaning for me.  My first attempt at a recipe from that site was Nabisco Honey Maid Graham Crackers.   It’s one of many Free recipes that are on that site.  I’ll blog about that another time, but if you want to see how I modified it, it’s at Top Secret Recipes, under the comments for that recipe.  http://www.topsecretrecipes.com/recipedetail.asp?sessionid=&login=yes&id=70&page=

The graham crackers are one of many free recipes on Top Secret Recipes.

Most of the recipes on Top Secret Recipes you have to purchase.  Stay with me here…  It’s ONLY 79 cents.  It’s well worth it.   With all the work that Todd Wilbur puts into cloning these recipes, 79 cents is a bargain.

Today, I bought the recipe for Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Yellow Cake Mix.

Can I just say Oh. My. God.

It’s exactly perfect.

Exactly. Perfect.

I can’t even believe it.

Apparently the magic of the soft, pillowy texture isn’t in the wheat flour.  It’s somewhere else in either the rest of the ingredients, or the method, that gives you that specific Moist Deluxe magic.

The only thing I modified was the flour, and I added xanthan gum.  Everything else was just verified gluten-free ingredients.   For the three cups of cake flour I used my favorite mix of gluten-free flour, which is on page 6 of Annalise Roberts’ book – Gluten-Free Baking Classics.

For three cups you need:

2 cups Extra Finely Ground Rice Flour (made by Authentic Foods)

2/3 cup Potato Starch (not potato flour)

1/3 cup Tapioca Flour (tapioca starch is the same thing in this case)

3/4 teaspoon xanthan gum

Mix all of this together thoroughly.  I use a whisk to get it all mixed.

Other than that, follow the recipe as directed.

Last Bite.