Gluten Free Donut Muffins

I just made these this morning and they're a big hit already, they really do taste like donuts, at least they do to us!  Of course it's been quite some time since we had a regular donut I admit.  Anyway here's the recipe:


Preheat oven 375.

1 cup arrowroot flour
1cup coconut flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder (gluten free)
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

Stir all dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

1/4 cup softened butter
1/2 cup honey
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk

Cream together honey and butter. Beat in eggs. Add milk.
Pour wet ingredients into dry and mix thouroghly. 
Scoop into muffin tins and bake for 20-25 min.  Makes 1 dozen.

Topping:

1/4 cup melted butter
1.4 cup coconut sugar (or rapadura)
2 tsp cinnamon

Mix coconut sugar and cinnamon in small bowl.  Dip tops of muffins into melted butter than sugar mixture. 

Yum! Lovely addition toSaturday morning breakfast!

Special Treat! Grain-Free (Gluten Free) Chocolate Cake With "Boiled" Icing

One of my favorite traditional family desserts is chocolate cake with boiled icing.  Now we're gluten free (for now anyway), grain free, and only using honey as a sweetner, well almost always.  This recipe uses maple syrup in the icing  and makes a lovely rare treat.  I guess honey would probably work just as easily but you just can't beat the maple flavor which is closer to the traditional boiled icing flavor I grew up with since it was made with brown sugar.  So here is the recipe!

Grain Free Chocolate Cake:

1 1/2 cup almond flour  (finely ground)
1 cup coconut flour
1 cup honey
1/2 cup cocoa powdeer
1/2 cup softened butter
1  1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch sea salt
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups hot water

Preheat oven to 350.  Put all ingredients into mixing bowl ( in order) and beat very well. Pour into greased
9 x 13 pan and bake for 40 min. 

"Boiled" Icing

4 egg whites
1 cup maple syrup (the real stuff!)
1 tsp vanilla

Put egg whites, syrup, and vanilla into a  good size pot.  The egg whites will expand quite a bit.  Beat with hand mixer over medium low heat  until soft peaks form and icing is shiny.  This won't take too long, maybe 4  or 5 minutes.  Spread over cooled cake.  This icing shouldn't sit in the pot too long as it will begin to separate so it's best to make it when your cake is already cooled.

Date Sweetened Cinnamon Cookies (Gluten Free, SCD, GAPS friendly)

I just tried a little experiment and I'm pretty happy with the results.  I do quite a bit of baking around here and like to have cookies and baked goods to throw into the kids' school lunches but I don't want to load them up on sugar, even natural sugar or honey (which is all we're using right now).  Eva likes dates and has used date butter (just equal parts butter and dates processed together) on top of her occasional breakfast oatmeal but my boys don't care for them normally.  But I just tried two experiments with dates and both worked out well and are very popular with the boys!  One is peanut butter balls rolled in flaked coconut (containing peanut butter, dates, flaked coconut, coconut flour, and coconut oil) and the other were cinnamon cookies. 

The cookies are not very sweet but are tasty.  If you're kids are used to refined sugar and flour then these may not go over so well... Here is the recipe!

1 1/2 cup dates (loose dates, nothing added)
1 cup almonds (soaked and dried)
1/2 cup flaked coconut
1/4 cup coconut flour
3 tbs soft butter or coconut oil
2 eggs
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla (optional)
pinch sea salt

Preheat oven to 350.   Put all ingredients into food processor and process until dates and almonds are well ground and mixture is a dough consistency.  Shape into small balls and place on parchment lined cookie sheet.  Flatten with the heel of your palm (or you could use the back of a greased spoon, etc...).  Bake 12-14 min.  Makes about 2 1/2 dozen cookies.

Best Gluten-Free Peanut Butter Cookies (honey sweetened)

I've tweaked this recipe a couple of times and I think I will stick to this recipe.  They're very good and makes a large batch which for my family it's a waste of time making small batches of anything!   All the kids like them.  Here's the recipe:

2 cups natural peanut butter (I used smooth, crunchy would be good too)
1 cup softened butter
1 cup honey
3 eggs

Beat together very well.  Then add the following:

1 cup arrowroot flour
1/2 coconut flour
1 tsp baking soda

Beat well, scraping the sides of the bowl.  Shape into small balls and place on cookie sheet, flatten with a fork in criss cross fashion.  Bake in pre-heated oven at 350 for 10-12 minutes until edges brown a little.  You may have to let them cool a bit before removing from the pan.


As soon as they're cool enough I wrap some up and throw them in the freezer so they don't all get eaten up.  That way I still have something for school lunches, which comes in handy if I get behind in baking or low in groceries etc...  If you are doing SCD or GAPS I would just omit the arrowroot and increase the coconut flour to 1 cup and add an extra egg.  The texture will be a bit heavier  but they'll still be delicious.

Oh, and a glass of cold and creamy raw milk would sure come in handy about the time you're taking a pan of these out of the oven!

Frozen Peanut Butter Pie (SCD, Gluten Free, GAPS friendly)

I'm not  a GAPS or SCD diet expert by any means, but this pie I whipped up yesterday is as far as a know compliant.  We are newly trying to follow the basics and so far I really like this way of eating, lots of room for creativity and yumminess.  This is a crustless pie but you could easily add a press in nut type crust, or even a baked coconut flour crust.  Cooking With Coconut Flour by Bruce Fife is an excellent resource and has several good pie crust recipes.

Here's the recipe for the filling:

1 cup natural peanut butter (no additives)
1 cup plain yogurt, NOT low fat (preferably homemade)
1/4 cup butter or coconut oil
1/3 cup honey
4 egg whites
pinch of sea salt

beat the first four ingredients until light and fluffy
in separate bowl, beat egg whites and salt until stiff
fold the egg white into the peanut butter mixture in two parts (half at a time)
pour into buttered pie dish and smooth out, cover and freeze until hardened if you can wait that long! 

I served this with homemade vanilla ice cream and it was good.

Gluten Free--Never Say Never!

So I believe I've mentioned that one of the things I most want to see is my oldest daughter overcome some health issues she's had pretty much her whole life.  She's had stomach pain and problems associated with it (such as gas, constipation, and some other embarrassing symptoms) since she was a baby, she's also is very prone to blood sugar fluctuations, has vision problems (for which she wears corrective glasses), headaches, shoulder and neck pain sometimes, hay fever, and randomly breaks out in hives for seemingly no reason at all.  She got the poorest start in life compared to the other children because she lived the longest without the benefit of decent real food on a regular basis--I didn't start looking into nutrition until she was almost 3. 

When I first ransacked my kitchen and dumped any and all processed and refined foods she experienced immediate improvement in some areas, mainly her moods and temper tantrums.  Taking the sugar out really seemed to help her.  At that time I also switched to soaking all my grains, using raw milk and cream, natural sweeteners, more organic and grass fed meats and wild caught seafood, and plenty of fresh veggies and fruits.  I look back on that time as a time I never felt healthier or had more energy.  I've never really been able to recapture that feeling fully since. 

I've been searching the internet and books, reading, reading, reading....and listening to interviews ect...and I have to say I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that we need to go gluten free.  To me, this would explain why I did so well on Fat Flush the first time I did it when I was quite a few years younger.  I experienced such good results but since then it seems to take longer and longer every time I try it.  I think it may because the longer I keep eating certain offending foods, the more damaged my digestive system has become.  Just a theory anyway.  The other factors that I can't get away from are taking a look into my family.  Celiac itself is an autoimmune disease that contributes to a host of other autoimmune diseases such as diabetes (on both sides of my family), arthritis (rheumatoid, my grandmother), thyroid disease (on both sides of my family), Alzheimer's (on my mom's side) and more.  Celiac is very often never diagnosed and underlies so many of these conditions that I'm now very suspicious of our genetic predisposition of gluten intolerance whether it's truly Celiac or not. 

So when Eva gets back from her grandparents' house I'm taking her to see our local natureopathic DR. so we can hopefully get to the bottom of all this once and for all.  I could go gluten free on my own, but for her I think she will do much much better with it if she has a doctor explain it to her.  On the one hand I don't really want to go for the full fledged gluten free life, (which will NOT be just for Eva or even for her and I but for the the whole family) but on the other I'm already familiar with plenty of great recipes and have experimented a lot with gluten free cooking and baking.  I already make several cookie and muffin recipes that are gluten free, and even always make gluten free pasta and lasagna when we have it.   

And all this just after I said I wasn't giving up bread haha!  Oh, but I'm NOT giving up bread, I've already discovered a gluten free recipe for sourdough buckwheat rolls....and I have many more delicious alternative ideas percolating.... Once thing I won't do is use those gluten free recipes that I find nutritionally very weak or use weird and complicated ingredients.  Whatever we eat will have to be richly nourishing, extremely delicious, and simple to make!

Check out this great interview with Dr. Thomas O'Brien on Underground Wellness Radio on celiac disease and gluten sensitivity for more information on all this.