Vanilla Chiffon Cake Made with Powdered Sucanat

In the world of natural sweeteners — i.e., unrefined sweeteners like maple syrup and molasses — there aren’t as many solid sweeteners as there are liquid ones.  Normally, this works out fine when baking, because most baked goods include liquids (which allows you to tinker with the overall total amount of liquids), but some baked items are meant to be airy and towering rather than have a more dense, lower-to-the-pan crumb.  Case in point: chiffon and angel cakes vs. brownies and cornbreads.  Frosting is another thing that normally works best when made with a fine, powdery sugar rather than a liquid one.

In my quest to remove refined white sugar from my repertoire of baked goodies, I’ve been struggling with a way to make Qualitarian airy cakes and frosting.  This quest became especially pertinent a few weeks ago — one of my best friends was about to graduate from law school, and since she’s celiac and therefore can’t have gluten, I’d said I would bake several cakes for her party as her graduation present.  One of the cakes I wanted to make was a Vanilla Chiffon with Strawberry Frosting.  (Others were a Caribbean Chocolate-Banana Rum Cake and Chocolate-Cranberry Squares, but since those weren’t meant to be high and airy, I knew they’d be easy to do gluten-free — brown rice flour and sorghum flour make wonderful stand-ins for the traditional all-purpose wheat, and that was the biggest tweak I’d have to pull off.)  But I knew that the sucanat I normally use in place of white sugar would be far too grainy to make a successful chiffon.  How would I be able to make a Qualitarian cake that everyone would recognize as a chiffon?  (Albeit a far more flavorful one — natural sweeteners retain their signature tastes rather than just hitting your tongue as sheer sweetness.)

Two days before the party, I had an epiphany: use my trusty coffee grinder to grind the sucanat into powdered sucanat the same way I use that coffee grinder to grind grains/nuts into flour.  How had I not thought of that trick before??

It worked as well as I’d hoped it would!  In fifteen seconds, I had plenty of wonderfully-fragrant powdered sucanat to use in all of my cakes, not just the chiffon.  I used about 7/8 of a cup for every cup specified in the recipes (mostly garnered from the ever-classic Joy of Cooking) to account for the fact that the powdered sucanat is more densely packed in the measuring cup than standard white sugar, and I was very happy with the results.  (When using the cups-and-spoons measuring system, volume differs tremendously from one ingredient to the next.  This is the #1 reason why we’d be better off using the weight-based metric system rather than the volume-based English one, but that’s another topic for another post.)  The frosting came off equally well.

So, there you have it!  If you have a coffee grinder, you can have powdered sucanat in your chiffons, too.  Compared to one made with refined white sugar, the made-with-sucanat-cake’s color and flavor will be far richer, its texture will be fantastically fluffy, and you’ll have made a dessert that’s far better for your health and environment than anything you’ll find on a supermarket shelf.

Oh, and one more tip: store your extra powdered sucanat in a glass screw-top jar and use it to make your own hot chocolate (or any other sweetened beverage) from scratch.  It’s so fine that it’ll dissolve almost instantly.

Enjoy!

Cherry-Oat Custard

Top-notch eggs (i.e., eggs from hens who peck about in the dirt and eat bugs) are our best source of protein in terms of bioavailability and sustainability, plus they’re incredibly versatile from a culinary point of view.  The only caveat is that you can easily overcook them and therefore make them tougher than you’d like — I’m sure all of us have experienced Rubbery Scrambled Egg Syndrome at some point.  That’s the flip side of having so much protein in one little shell!  (The protein, by the way, resides in the egg whites, which is why the whites “cook” so much more quickly than the yolks.  I say “cook” because it’s really more of a coagulation process, but we won’t get overly technical about it.  For those who are interested in culinary chemistry, check out The Curious Cook by Harold McGee.)

Custards fall into the it-can-be-tricky category because they contain a high ratio of eggs to flour/sugar.  The good news, though, is that you can add a decent amount of flour to a custard — thereby making it less likely to overcook — and still have a nice custardy texture.  This recipe uses freshly-ground oat and Brazil nut flours, although you could just as easily use store-bought oat and almond/hazelnut flour.  The idea is to pair the cherries with oats and nuts in a custardy kind of way.

Cherry-Oat Custard

1/2 stick butter, preferably from grass-fed cows
3/4 cup buttermilk (do NOT substitute regular milk!)*
1/3 cup maple syrup, preferably Grade B
1 tsp. vanilla
3 eggs, preferably from pastured hens
1/4 cup oat flour, store-bought or freshly-ground (you can grind your own steel-cut oats in a coffee grinder)
1/4 cup Brazil nut flour OR almond flour OR hazelnut flour, store-bought or freshly-ground (if the nuts are whole, chop them coarsely and then grind them in a coffee grinder)
1/4 tsp. sea salt
3/4 tsp. baking powder
2 cups chopped pitted cherries, fresh or frozen
Juice from one lemon

Place the butter in a 9″ glass pie pan and then place the pan in the oven. Preheat to 375 degrees F. Watch for butter to melt — it should be melted well before the oven is fully heated. (You’ll probably start to hear the butter hissing as it melts and spreads across the hot bottom surface of the pan.) Remove pan and melted butter from oven and continue with the preheating process.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the melted butter, the buttermilk, the maple syrup, the vanilla, and the eggs. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the flours, the sea salt, and the baking powder.

Sprinkle the chopped cherries across the bottom of the pie pan. Quickly whisk the dry ingredients into the wet ones, then whisk in the lemon juice. Pour batter over cherries and bake for 20 minutes or until the top is slightly puffed and golden brown. Serve as is or with a side of Greek yogurt. (The latter serving suggestion makes a great breakfast!)

Enjoy!

* The reason you need to use buttermilk and NOT regular milk is that the buttermilk is acidic while standard milk is alkaline. The anthocyanin pigments in the cherries (and in all dark purplish and reddish produce) will turn greenish-blue in an alkaline environment. That means that you need the acidity of the buttermilk and the lemon juice to ensure that your cherries retain their beautiful cherry color.  If you’ve made blueberry muffins in the past and wound up with greenish circles surrounding the blueberries, that’s because you had an alkaline batter.  But the good news is that berries/cherries-turned-green still taste great!

Ultra Nutty Carrot Bread

The word “flour” seems like it has a solid definition: it’s white, it’s powdery, and it’s made of wheat.  Fortunately, though, while those descriptions apply to all-purpose white flour, all-purpose white flour is only ONE kind of flour.  (And it’s a stripped-out, tasteless one at that.)  There are plenty of other flours that can be found on supermarket shelves or made in your coffee grinder.

In truth, if something is dry and hard enough to be ground into a somewhat-fine powder, that powder can be flour.  Grains (teff, millet, sorghum, etc.), legumes (chickpea, black bean, soybean, etc.), nuts (almond, hazelnut, Brazil nut, etc.), tubers (potato, tapioca, arrowroot, etc.) and those oddball plants that don’t quite fit in the previous categories (buckwheat, quinoa, coconut, etc.) can all be flours.  The biggest difference between these off-the-beaten track flours and wheat-type flours (kamut, spelt, soft white spring wheat, hard red winter wheat) is that the wheat-type flours have gluten, a protein that helps create the latticework structure that’s needed to make pouffy, stretchy breads.

But the other flours do have protein, too, just a different kind that doesn’t lend itself to creating that latticework.  Nut and legume flours have the most amount of protein (as do buckwheat and quinoa — the former is a member of the rhubarb family while the latter is an edible seed). But while I find the high-protein beany flavor to fit well with some savory goods, I wouldn’t want to make sweet or mild baked goods with such a strongly-flavored flour.  Nuts, on the other hand,  seem to complement nearly any baked good they’re in.

For this recipe, I ground up Brazil nuts and then added whole pieces of walnuts to make the bread even more delicious and protein-packed.  You could also use hazelnuts or almonds.

Ultra Nutty Carrot Bread (which happens to be gluten-free)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease 9×5 loaf pan with butter or coconut oil and set aside.

In a large bowl, thoroughly whisk together:

1/2 cup brown rice flour*
1/2 cup sorghum flour*
1/2 cup freshly-ground Brazil nut flour; a few chunks of the Brazil nuts will probably remain, which is fine (Brazil nuts are fairly soft, so a standard coffee grinder should be able to turn them into flour)
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. sea salt
3/4 cup walnut pieces

In another bowl, whisk together:
1/2 cup maple syrup, preferably Grade B
2 large eggs
1/4 extra-virgin olive oil or whole milk
1 tsp. vanilla
3 carrots, peeled and grated

Stir wet ingredients into dry ones until you have a smooth batter. You’ll want to work quickly, because as soon as the leaveners (baking powder and soda) get wet, they’ll start to react and pouf up the batter, and if you don’t get the batter poured into the loaf pan and into the oven ASAP, you’ll lose your lift.  This is why you want to have your pan pre-greased and all your utensils nearby and ready to be used.

Pour batter into pan and bake for about 45 minutes or until a toothpick poked into the center of the loaf comes out clean.  (The bread may take up to 55 minutes to completely cook through.)  Serve slices with an additional drizzling of maple syrup if desired.

Enjoy!

* If you can’t find these flours, substitute whole-wheat flour for either one or both.

Triple-Nut Jumblecake

When it comes to most things in life, I think it’s safe to say that the difference between “failure” and “success” is largely a matter of perception.  This philosophy is certainly true in the kitchen!  It’s even more true when it comes to baking — you never know when breads won’t rise or muffins will turn out to be too grainy or cakes will have an odd shape.  Most of the time, everything still tastes great, but it doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to and/or it doesn’t have the expected texture for that particular category of baked goods.  (Too-crumbly muffins, for example, wouldn’t be too crumbly if they were meant to be scones…but then they wouldn’t be shaped like muffins.)

Enter the Jumblecake.  I made up this new category of baked goods last week when my triple-nut muffins didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped they would.  (I had used all freshly-ground nut flours in place of wheat, and I think the added moisture of so many nuts backfired in terms of muffin structure.)  To put it bluntly, the muffins were a disaster: they came out of the oven completely concave.  They tasted fabulous, though, and were actually one of the best baked goods I’d ever concocted.

I tried to use the concave muffins as cups to hold more tasty items like fruit and/or ice cream, but they were so tender that they fell apart under the strain.  I resorted to enjoying them straight out of the muffin tin with a spoon, which was fine by me but not the classiest way to serve them.  That’s when I decided to spoon all of them into a large bowl and then serve spoonfuls of them as individual heaped Jumblecakes.  In that form, they could be garnished, adorned with fruit, nestled next to ice cream, whatever I wanted.

So, that’s the trick: if your baked good doesn’t have the shape or texture you expected, make it into a Jumblecake!  This works for any and all baked goods that are cake-/bread-like in nature.  (Doesn’t work for soft items like custards, cheesecakes, or pies.)  Your guests will be impressed by your one-of-a-kind, highly-customizable baked item and will probably ask for the recipe.

Whether you share the secret of your success is entirely up to you.

Cornbread "Panzanella" with Goat Cheese

I can’t be sure about this, but I’m guessing Italian panzanella sprang out of that greatest of all culinary traditions: using up the leftovers.  After all, who hasn’t grown up hearing “waste not, want not”?  The original Tuscan recipe calls for making a caprese salad — tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, red wine or balsamic vinegar, and extra-virgin olive oil — and tossing it with cubes of crusty, almost-stale bread.  The bread takes on the deep flavors of the vinegar, oil, and tomato juice and winds up making the most delicious croutons you could imagine.

That’s the same idea here, except that you’re using southwestern ingredients rather than Tuscan ones and cornbread instead of crusty loaf bread.  Like the original panzanella, this recipe is a great way to use up extra cornbread and to give it new life — cornbread is by nature a bit dry and crumbly, so it soaks up nearly as much liquid as the bread used in panzanella does.  ¡Qué rico!

Cornbread “Panzanella” Toss

Using any cornbread* you like (my favorite is the Crusty Soft-Center Spoon Bread from the Highest Deity amongst the culinary gods, The Joy of Cooking), either cut the cornbread into wedges or cubes.  Toss with drained black beans, chopped tomatoes, and chopped fresh cilantro.  Drizzle on some lime juice and extra-virgin olive oil and gently mix again.  Crumble soft goat cheese over the top of the salad and grind on a few rounds of coarse sea salt and mixed peppercorns.  If you like, sprinkle on some slivers of minced red onions before serving.

Enjoy!

* If you want to make this a gluten-free dish, simply use corn flour (not corn starch!) rather than wheat flour when baking your cornbread.  The majority of the grain in cornbread is cornmeal, anyway, so substituting corn flour for the small amount of wheat flour called for won’t make too much of an impact on the overall recipe.

Chocolate Chestnut Cupcake

I don’t know about you, but when I find an exciting new (to me) ingredient, I like to drop it into as many culinary settings as I can to see what happens.  Some ideas, like my “let’s make hot chocolate with red wine instead of milk!” notion, though, are rather ill-fated.  Random combinations are not always for the faint of fork.  But isn’t living on the edge fun sometimes?

My newest obsession — as evinced by the recent post on chestnut snickerdoodles — is chestnut flour.  (The next step is whole chestnuts.  I’ve already got my eye on the roasted and peeled ones on the shelf at Trader Joe’s.)  In that vein, I decided to make chocolate chestnut cupcakes.  With cinnamon and pine nuts.  What the heck — why not?

I’m happy to report that these came out a whole lot tastier than the red-wine-hot-chocolate debacle!

Chocolate Chestnut Cupcakes
(Both gluten-free and glutenized versions are provided here, though it would be a shame to scrap the lovely coconut in favor of the much-more-bland wheat. And remember — if you can’t find coconut flour, feel free to make your own by grinding unsweetened coconut flakes in a coffee grinder.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a standard 12-muffin muffin pan (or use paper cupcake liners) and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together:

1/4 cup cocoa powder, preferably un-Dutched (un-Dutched cocoa has a stronger flavor)
1/4 cup almond flour (you can grind sliced almonds in a coffee grinder to make your own flour)
1/2 cup chestnut flour
1/2 cup coconut flour (again, you can grind your own; see above recipe note)*
1 T. cinnamon
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sea salt
1/2 cup pine nuts (optional)

* You can substitute whole-wheat flour for the coconut flour.

In a smaller bowl, whisk together:

2/3 cup maple syrup, preferably Grade B
2 eggs, preferably from free-range hens
1/4 cup whole milk, preferably from grass-fed cows
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup melted butter, preferably from grass-fed cows

Pour liquid mixture into flour mixture and combine with a wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the bowl to make sure you’re combining everything thoroughly. Promptly ladle/spoon the batter into the waiting muffin tin and pop it in the heated oven. (Speed is of the essence when you’re dealing with gluten-free baked goods.)

Bake for about 25 minutes, then do a toothpick test to see if the cupcakes are done. If not, return to oven and bake another 3 minutes before checking again.

Enjoy!

Chestnut Snickerdoodles

Chestnuts roasting over an open fire used to be pretty popular in the States, but that was before chestnut trees that had been imported from Asia caused the American stocks to fall prey to a nasty fungus.  By the 1940s, chestnut trees were very few and far between.

Roasted chestnuts remain popular in other countries, though — street vendors still cook them over open fires in the public squares of many towns.  (In Spain, they’re called castañas asadas; in Switzerland, they’re heiße Maroni.)  Others eat them candied, grilled, puréed, in stuffing, as a stand-in for coffee, and even as beer.  Italians are particularly creative with chestnuts in both savory and sweet dishes.

While I’m not a huge fan of the actual roasted nuts (although I would love to try chestnut beer!), I do enjoy using chestnut flour in sweet baked goods.  Chestnuts are like almonds:  they’re dry enough to be ground into a nice fine flour, but they’re still moist enough to make soft cookies and breads.  Flavor-wise, chestnut flour can be the main attraction (as in these snickerdoodles) or can blend into a pleasant background. In this recipe — partly in homage to Italian cookie traditions, partly because they pair well with chestnuts, and partly because I think they’re sadly underutilized in American cuisine — I’ve also included pine nuts.

Chestnut Snickerdoodles

Note: since chestnuts are nuts, they’re naturally gluten-free.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and grease two cookie sheets.

Whisk in a medium bowl:
2 cups chestnut flour (if you’re a bit short on chestnut flour, use 1 cup chestnut and 1 cup sorghum or brown rice flour)
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon

Cream together in a large bowl:
1 cup (2 sticks) softened butter, preferably from grass-fed cows
1/2 cup to 3/4 cup sucanat (depends on sweet you want your cookies to be)

Beat into the butter mixture:
2 eggs, preferably from free-range hens

Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture.

Also stir in:
1/4 cup pine nuts

Spoon little mounds of cookie dough onto the greased sheets. (I use an ordinary teaspoon to ensure that I get uniformly-sized cookies.) Be sure to leave an inch or two between each soon-to-be cookie — they’ll spread as they bake.

Bake for about 12 minutes and check to see if the edges are turning golden brown. If they are, your cookies are ready to be eaten!  Store uneaten cookies in an airtight container for up to a week.

Enjoy!

Cinnamon Peanut Chocolate Maple Cake

What started out as a basic chocolate cake became much more fragrant and flavorful with the simple switcheroo of unrefined peanut oil for butter.   Using maple syrup instead of sugar intensifies both the chocolate and the peanut, and you can add your choice of spice to provide a different dimension of flavor.  In the end, this cake is versatile enough to be either a satisfying breakfast or a sweet dessert — serve the former as is and the latter with fruit, jam/preserves, icing/frosting, or a drizzle of maple syrup.

Cinnamon Peanut Chocolate Maple Cake
both gluten-free and wheat versions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  For a shallow cake, grease an 11×7 pan with butter or peanut oil (the resulting pieces are more stackable if you want to frost between them); for a thicker cake, grease an 8×8 pan.

Using a whisk, combine all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl:

1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup almond flour*
1/2 cup sorghum flour*
1/2 cup brown rice flour*
1 T. cinnamon (or 1 T. of a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and/or ginger)
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

In a smaller bowl, use the same whisk to combine the liquid ingredients:

2/3 cup maple syrup, preferably Grade B
2 medium eggs or 1 extra-large egg
1/4 cup whole milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup unrefined peanut oil (this oil retains its flavor and nutrients when heated up to 395 degrees F)

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ones and mix with a wooden spoon, then quickly pour batter into pan. Bake for about 20 minutes, then do a toothpick test to see if the cake is done. If not, bake an additional 5 minutes and test again. (The 8×8 cake may require more baking time than the 11×7.)

*If you would rather make this with wheat, simply use a total of 1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour (or white whole wheat flour — it’s another type of wheat, not a refined flour) rather than the sorghum, brown rice, and almond flours.

Enjoy!

Pinenut Torte with Date Sugar & Honey

There’s a “new” natural sweetener in town — at least, in U.S. towns — and her name is Date Sugar.

The term “sugar” is only used to describe form and functionality in this case, however, rather than what the item is, which is simply dehydrated and ground-up dates.  (Likewise, palm sugar is boiled-down and dried-out sap from a palm tree; coconut sugar is boiled-down sap from coconut blossoms.)  Even in their fresh state, dates are so sweet — they can be as much as 50% fructose/glucose — that they make fantastic  “sugar.”  Dried, they’re even better (with a wonderfully concentrated flavor), and thanks to their high natural sugar content, they store for long periods of time.

You can find date sugar at health-food/natural-food stores, right alongside the sucanat and unrefined honeys and maple syrups.  It’s a great alternative for refined sugar when you’re making fruit-based desserts or Indian/Asian/African sauces.  (Many people in those regions of the world use sweeteners made from sap or sweet starches like tubers or roots; tapioca syrup, for example, is another interesting alternative.)  Date sugar also works well in hearty cakes and pies such as the Pinenut Torte pictured above.  It isn’t as sweet as refined sugar, however, so don’t expect an identical outcome…plus, of course, the dates present flavor as well as sweetness, which is why they work especially well in baked goods featuring fellow warm-weather ingredients (think banana bread and coconut muffins).  In the Middle East and northern Africa, dates (and date sugar) are also paired with savory dishes.  And date sugar is ideal for sprinkling on top of ice cream (either dairy-based or coconut-milk-based) and bananas.

So, the next time you’re searching for a different natural sweetener to try, bring home a bag of date sugar!  (I transfer mine to a glass jar for easy storage and dispensing.)  Not only is the flavor sure to tease your tongue, just inhaling the heady scent of the dates will make you think you’re on a sunny Mediterranean island.

Apple & Quince Pie with Cheese Streusel

The holiday season is well-nigh upon us, and with it comes tinseling, caroling, and streuseling.  (At least, in a Currier-&-Ives kind of way; the modern holidays are more about shopping, gift-carding, and cabbage soup dieting.  I think I prefer the tintype version.)

Traditional streusel (streuen means “to strew” in German) consists of butter, flour, and sugar blended into crumbs with either a pastry blender or two knives.  It’s sprinkled — or gently strewn — across the tops of coffeecakes and pies to create a rich, sweet top layer that manages to be crispy and buttery and the same time.  Streusels are an easy way to add visual and flavor appeal to many a baked good.  (And yes, you can use a natural sugar like sucanat or date sugar in place of the refined white sugar; you can also use whole-wheat flour or brown rice flour or any other whole-grain flour in place of the white — I just wouldn’t use a bean or starch flour such as chickpea or potato.  Their strong flavors would overpower the dish.)

If you’d like to stray a bit from the traditional sweet streusel and go for a savory one, cheese and nuts work well, too.  Technically, it’s not a “streusel” if you’re not blending the ingredients into crumbs, but like a true streusel, it’s a quick topping that can adorn many dishes.  If you’re making an apple pie, for example, hard cheeses and dry nuts such as Cheddar and almonds pair well.  Pears would be delicious topped with soft goat cheese and pinenuts.  (Both apples and pears are strongly-flavored and can stand up to strongly-flavored cheeses.)

Softer fruits like peach and plum would be better suited to a smoother, richer cheese-and-nut combination, like Havarti and macadamia.  Brie and hazelnut would be stunning with full-throated berries like cranberries or raspberries.  You could even combine one of the ideas of a traditional streusel — i.e., the sweetness — into your cheese-and-nuttiness by drizzling a bit of honey over the top of everything.  Just tweaking the topping of a standard holiday pie could turn dessert into a new experience.

Happy streuseling!

PB & J Pancake "Sandwich"

Technically, a sandwich is a bready dough filled with something.  Hoagies, gyros, calzones, quesadillas … they all fall into the “sandwich” category.  You can stuff them with veggies or meats or cheeses or herbs or condiments or whatever your tongue desires.  Sandwiches are, in short, the ultimate custom dish.

In the spirit of adding to the roster, I’d like to introduce my new pancake sandwich concept — not only is it a great way to elevate a mundane filling to triple-decker status, it’s a great way to use up leftover pancakes.  In this case, I warmed up three silver-dollar-sized pancakes I’d enjoyed for breakfast the previous morning (I made them with cornmeal and quinoa, but any type of flour makes great pancakes to use with savory fillings), then liberally doused them with apricot jam and crunchy 100% PB.  The result?  One heck of a tasty sandwich!

The next time you have leftover pancakes and some random sandwich fillings, I heartily suggest you try coming up with your own triple-decker.  Or quadruple-decker, or even quintuple decker.  Maybe pancake sandwiches could become the next dinner party sensation:  just whip up a few batches of ‘cakes, lay out some assorted sandwich insides, and step back to see what your guests come up with.  You could even make pancake ice cream sandwiches for dessert!

Peanut-Butter Cinnamon Cookies

What’s your style — crunchy or creamy?  Salted or un-?  Virginia or Valencia?  Seems like there are just as many varieties of peanut butter as there are wines.  (And we haven’t even gotten into blanching or skins…)

I think the #1 thing you can do with really top-notch organic 100% peanut butter is use it as a dip for 90% dark chocolate — it’s Reese’s magnified by 100!  The second-best thing you can do is make extreme-style PB cookies…which I’ve done here.  Using unrefined, straight-from-the-shell peanut oil adds even more flavor, and using honey in addition to sucanat gives the cookies more depth and keeps them soft and chewy.  (Honey is a natural humectant, which means that it absorbs water from the air and therefore maintains a nice moist cookie.)  Cinnamon rounds out the peanut-and-honey base with its warm tones.

Peanut-Butter-Cinnamon Cookies*

*Note:  these cookies are gluten-free.  To make them with standard wheat flour, simply use 1 teaspoon of baking powder instead of 2.  All other measurements stay the same.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two cookie sheets or line them with parchment paper.

1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup unrefined peanut oil
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup 100% natural peanut butter (crunchy or creamy, salted or un-, Valencia or Virginia…it’s your call)
1/2 cup sucanat
1/4 cup honey
1 tsp. sea salt (you might want to omit this if you’ve used salted butter and salted PB)
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. baking powder
2 eggs
2 cups teff or brown rice flour (1 cup of brown rice + 1 cup of teff is also a nice combination)
1/2 cup crushed/chopped peanuts (optional)

In large bowl, mix butter, peanut oil, applesauce, and peanut butter. Add sucanat, honey, sea salt, cinnamon, and baking powder and thoroughly combine. Stir in eggs, then flour. (You can either use a blender or a wooden spoon to mix the batter — you’re not trying to aerate this the way you would a lighter cookie or cake.)  Stir in crushed or chopped peanuts if you really want to go nuts.

Use a teaspoon to drop rounds of batter onto the cookie sheets. If you want them round and a bit pouffy, leave them as they are; if you want your cookies to be a bit flatter, you can press them down lightly with a greased fork (that will also give them an interesting ridged pattern on top).

Bake for about 10 minutes, then remove from oven and let cool for another 10 minutes before removing the cookies with a spatula. Sprinkle additional cinnamon over them just before serving if desired.  Store uneaten cookies in a tin, jar, or any other airtight container.

Enjoy!

Pumpkin-Coconut Muffins

Perhaps I’ve spent too many hours in the Caribbean sun, but I think pumpkins and coconuts should occupy a more prominent place on the American table.  They both have a smooth, silky flavor, are durable to ship and easy to grow, and are endlessly versatile in sweet and savory dishes.  There’s pumpkin bread, pumpkin-stuffed raviolis, pumpkin dip (especially terrific with apples and pears), and pumpkin soup…and equally-luscious coocnut smoothies, coconut fish curries, coconut macaroons, and coconut chicken.  (If you’re still not convinced, try to imagine the world without piña coladas.  Takes some of the fun out of it, doesn’t it?  And Thanksgiving would seem incomplete without pumpkin pie.)

Since I’m such a proponent of pumpkins and coconuts, I thought I’d create muffins with both.  (Coconut milk is also a great substitute for dairy milk, especially if you skip the “light” coconut milk and go straight for the much-better-tasting, much-more-nutritious whole milk.)  These muffins make a great breakfast or snack; you could also top them off with a scoop of high-quality ice cream and a splash of maple syrup for dessert.  And making the muffins is simple — all you need is two mixing bowls, a whisk, and a mixing spoon.

Pumpkin-Coconut Muffins*

*Note:  these are gluten-free muffins.  If you want to make them with standard wheat flour, use 2 cups of wheat flour and only 1 T. of baking powder.  All other ingredients/proportions stay the same.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Prepare muffin tins by either greasing them well or filling them with paper muffin cups.

In a large bowl, whisk together:

1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup teff flour
2 T. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. sea salt

In a smaller bowl, whisk together:

1 cup pumpkin, either canned or freshly-roasted, peeled, and mashed
1/3 cup maple syrup, preferably Grade B
1 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 tsp. vanilla

Stir wet ingredients into dry ones until just blended. If you like, add a handful of dried berries (cranberries or cherries work best) and/or chopped nuts (walnuts and pecans are tasty options).

Spoon into muffin tins and bake for 22 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Enjoy!

Also note: in addition to being gluten-free, these muffins just happen to be dairy-free, egg-free, and sugar-free — if you know someone with lots of food sensitivities, these might just be the muffins for them!

Chocolate-Coconut Cupcakes (sans gluten)

Whether you’re gluten-intolerant or just want to try something new, you’ll love these very-dark chocolate cupcakes.  The coconut flour is the perfect backdrop to the chocolate — it provides just enough creaminess to accent cocoa’s rich tones without getting in its way.  And the teff and brown rice flours give the cakes a bit of toothsome texture.  Trust me, if you’re a chocolate lover (and who isn’t?), you’ll think these luxurious cupcakes are well worth the effort of using four mixing bowls.

Chocolate-Coconut Cupcakes (gluten-free)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare a muffin tin by either greasing the cups or lining them with paper cups.

In a small bowl or pot, melt:

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped or broken into chunks to facilitate melting
1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 cup sucanat

Stir often to avoid burning the chocolate. The best way to melt chocolate smoothly (and safely) is in a double-boiler, but a microwave also works if you use it in short bursts and stir between each. I used my trusty toaster oven and kept pulling it out to stir. Whichever heating element you choose, be sure not to completely melt the chocolate — the final lumps should be stirred out (rather than melted out) so that you don’t scorch the mixture.

Stir in 1 egg yolk. Set chocolate mixture aside.

In another small bowl, combine and set aside:

1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup water
1 tsp. vanilla

In a medium bowl, whisk together and set aside:

1 cup coconut flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
1/2 cup teff flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. sea salt

In a large bowl, beat until creamy (less than a minute):

1 stick butter

Add and beat for another 5 minutes:

1/2 cup sucanat

Beat in one at a time:

2 egg yolks (save the whites in a separate bowl)

Add flour and milk mixtures to the butter mixture, alternating them. Stir in (or beat on low speed) chocolate mixture.

In a clean bowl, whip the 2 saved egg whites into a stiff, white foam. Carefully fold them into the chocolate batter. (Separating the eggs this way and whipping the whites gives the cupcakes extra lightness and height.) Spoon the mixture carefully into prepared muffin tins and bake for about 25 minutes.

Enjoy!

Custard Straight from the Toaster Oven

Warm, jiggly custard is one of life’s great comfort foods…and it’s also ridiculously easy.  There are more complicated kinds of custards, sure — Créme Brulée is one of my favorite desserts — but you can make this breakfast custard in your toaster oven in 25 minutes flat.  Think of it as a baked omelette (or a simplified Dutch Baby, for those of you who have been to some classy pancake houses).  You can make it sweet by adding a bit of maple syrup as I’ve done here, or you could sprinkle on some fresh herbs and cheese and make it into a savory dish.  Swirl in a hint of organic jam to create an ersatz fruit pie.

To make a single serving of simple custard, find a small glass or ceramic baking dish that will fit into your toaster oven.  (You could use a regular-sized oven, too, but why waste the energy?  Toaster ovens save a lot of money on electrical bills.)

Combine 2 eggs and 3/4 cup milk.  Bake at 350 degrees F for about 25 minutes.  You’ll know it’s done when the edges are set and the center still looks just a touch wobbly; the entire top will be golden brown.

Add whichever toppings you’d like to the custard — sweet or savory — and enjoy.

P.S.  As soon as I get a kitchen blowtorch, I’ll share tips on making Créme Brulée!