Gluten free vegan coconut cookie

The other day I was talking to my sister on Skype, and she told me that she had made cookies first time in a long time... and there was me thinking... 'Oh, I haven't made cookies for a little while, I want to make some too!'

So, when I came off the call, I went into the kitchen and I started mixing the ingredients.

This time I've tried a new 'vegan' cookies with my homemade coconut butter. I made the coconut butter by food processing coconut flakes about 10 minutes until they became like 'butter'.

I also use gluten free flour, so the cookies ended up being both 'vegan' and 'gluten free'. Humm, I like the sound of it...;) But, not only do they sound nice and healthy, they also taste well good!

The sweet smell of coconut was so good, and I loved how it crumbled!

Lana loved it too. 

She even said 'more biscuit?' when she finished her half. ;D

Ingredients:

200g coconut butter

1tsp sesame seed oil

50g brown sugar

100g Gluten free flour

Gluten-free Coconut Lemon Tart

Coconut is one of the great alternatives to flour when it comes to gluten-free baking. I use just the coconut flour as a substitute of flour for my Coconut Swiss Roll, which works very well. However, for tarts or cakes that requires more height, you do need some more fine flour substitutes such as gluten-free plain flour or rice flour.

With this coconut tart, I used gluten-free plain flour, same as my Gluten-free Bakewell tart, but replaced some flour with the coconut flour and I also used coconut flour in the filling. When the tart was in the oven, the kitchen was filled with the smell of beautiful coconut and refreshing lemon... I couldn't wait to taste it!

Ingredients:
Pastry

Gluten-free plain flour 200g

Coconut flour 50g

Butter 100g

Sugar 100g

Egg 1

----

Lemon filling

Lemon 2 (juice and zest)

Sugar 150g

Egg 1

Butter (melted) 85g

Coconut flour 30g

1. Prepare the pastry. (follow the Sweet pastry recipe).

2. Preheat the oven to 180ºc. Blind bake the pastry for 10 minutes.

3. Make the filling. Combine all the ingredients together, and mix well.

4. Pour the filling in the blind baked tart. Bake 35 minutes. (If the top of the tart start to brown, cover with foil.)

5. Chill in the fridge for at least 2 hours, or overnight.

The crusty coconut pastry is a perfect match with the sweet lemony filling... ;D

More tart?

• Lemon Meringue Tart
• Nut About Nut Tart
• Chestnut Tart
• Pumpkin Tart
• Apple Almond Cheese Tartlet
• Glten-free Bakewell tart
• Plum tart

Gluten-free Orange & Poppy seed Swiss roll

With the orange custard and orange 'jam sauce' thing on my previous post, I made this gluten-free cake, Orange & Poppy seed Swiss roll.

I'm getting quite into the gluten-free baking and wanted to see how my basic Swiss roll sponge would come out with the gluten-free flour (I use Doves Farm plain white flour.). It worked so well that I could barely tell the difference and so did some people who ate the cake. Only thing was with the gluten-free flour the sponge cake was softer, which made the rolling action a little tricky.

The recipe for the sponge cake is the same as my basic Swiss roll. I just replaced the flour to gluten-free flour, then added a few table spoon of orange jam sauce, and folded a good amount of poppy seeds in the sponge.

For the cream inside, I mixed orange custard with whipped cream. Oh, I love custard and whipped cream together, and with a nice orange flavour with it, it simply cannot go wrong!

When you make Swiss rolls for customers or as a gift, I need to trim the ends, and they are, obviously, for me! ;D This time I put them in the freezer and had them a few days later. I couldn't wait for the cake to be completely defrosted so I had it half frozen, and guess what... it tasted amazing! It really was a treat for the baker! Please try it when you have Swiss roll next time;D

Basic Swiss Roll Recipe

More Gluten-free Swiss roll;
Coconut Swiss Roll

Gluten-free Bakewell tart

I've made gluten-free cakes and biscuits before but I'd never used what-so called gluten-free flour until now... However, the other week Andy bought me a bag of gluten-free flour (I got Doves Farm plain white flour), and said to me that one of his colleagues was gluten intolerant and hadn't been tasting my cakes that I bake for him to bring in almost every Monday...

So, that's how I came to try gluten-free flour for the first time. I made a sweet pastry with it for my Bakewell tart. I used the gluten-free flour the same way as I do with usual plain flour. When I was preparing the pastry, I felt it was a little wetter than normal, and it was a bit too soft to roll it out so instead I flattened it by pressing on to the prepared tart tin directly, which indeed worked very well. ;D

As the filling of Bakewell tart doesn't have any flour in it, I didn't need to worry about that part.

The result of my first gluten-free tart? It was a great success! The gluten-free pastry was really nice. The more crumbly texture reminded me of shortbread. (Maybe it's because the Doves Farm flour has rice flour in it...) The almond filling was sweet and moist, went really well with the pastry.

I got a good feedback from Andy's colleagues too, and most importantly everyone in the office could have a piece. ;) I can definitely see this gluten-free flour appearing more often in my cakes and pastries. ;D

Gluten free ginger cupcake

Even though I'm not particularly on any special diets (except non-meat...), I sometimes like to try recipes for special diets such as gluten free, wheat free, sugar free...

So today, I'm going for "gluten free". I used rice flour as an alternative to normal flour and unrefined palm sugar instead of refined white sugar. Sounds more nutritious and healthier, no?

Since I'm a big ginger lover and brown sugar and ginger go so well, I've added a lot of ginger in the cake. When I was mixing the ingredients, the spicy flavour of ginger was hitting my nose heavenly...

I was slightly worried that the cake might not rise with rice flour but it did come out looking just perfect! As soon as I bit into one, I was like..."I'm genius..." Oops sorry... I'm normally a humble baker..., but this gluten free cupcake was so tasty. Just how I like it!

Ingredients:

Rice flour 130g

Corn flour 20g

Palm sugar (grated) 150g

Butter 150g

Egg 2

Milk 50g

Baking powder 1 tsp

Ginger powder 1tsp

Crystallised ginger (chopped)  2-3 tbsp

1.Preheat the oven to 180ºc. Cream butter and palm sugar until it's fluffy.

2. Add eggs and milk into 1 and mix well.

3. Sift together rice flour, corn flour, baking powder and ginger powder into 2. Fold in.

4. Fold chopped crystallised ginger into 3.

5. Pour the mixture into a cupcake mould. Bake in the preheated oven (180ºc) for 20-25 minutes.