From the category archives:

Gluten-Free Baking

Cake With Blueberries and Crème Fraîche

by Emilia on August 15, 2009

It’s all about the bilberries here right now; the forests are filled with them.

We call them blueberries, but they are actually bilberries as I learned not so long ago, they are smaller than blueberries and the taste is not as watery as in blueberries. The taste of them is really intense and a little sour - delicious if you ask me.  Bilberries happen to be my favourite berry.

I have been thinking about a bilberry cake for a couple of weeks now and luckily I stumbled across this recipe just when we had been out picking up some berries. The recipe sounded so decadent and lovely that I had no other choice than to try it, I am not someone who can say no to a recipe which uses crème fraîche and lots of butter. The cream cheese icing was also just perfect, it is not common to ice these kinds of cakes here, so to me the icing sounded a bit exotic and different.

The cake itself was very easy to make, I used some almond flour and white rice flour in it and that worked out well. I loved the taste of it, this is just the kind of cake I like, dense and moist, not too sweet and a little bit tart, but not too tart.

I would highly recommend trying this recipe.

I used almond flour and white rice flour, but the original recipe uses wheat flour (of course!), so if you are not celiac you should use just wheat flour instead of the almond and rice flour. Some quinoa flour instead of rice flour would also work out; I have been just very determined to try out some other flours than quinoa, at least for a while, and that’s why I used rice flour here.

I used only 1 dl/1/4 cup confectioner’s sugar in the icing, but the original recipe uses twice that amount.

The cake can be served when it has cooled down; it is very moist, so it will not hold itself together all that well when it is warm.

Bilberry Cake Recipe

The recipe was adapted from Ruoka Pirkka.

Serves 10, takes approximately 10 minutes to make and 45 minutes to bake.

The Cake

-150 grams/5,3 ounces soft butter

-1,5 dl/ 3/4 cup sugar

-3 eggs

-1 dl / a little bit less than 1/2 cup crème fraîche

-1 cup almond flour

-1 dl /a little bit less than 1/2 cup white rice flour

-2 tsp baking powder

-2 tsp vanilla extract

-200 grams/7 ounces blueberries or bilberries

Preheat your oven to 175 C/350 F.

Line a springform pan with baking paper and then grease it with some butter.

Mix together the butter, sugar, crème fraîche, vanilla extract and eggs. Mix together the flour and the baking powder.

Mix the dry ingredients together with the wet ingredients, but leave a little bit of the flour in the bowl and then gently mix the blueberries with the remaining flour.

Gently fold the berries in with the rest of the batter.

Pour into the pan and bake for 30-45 minutes until the cake is done. Let the cake cool down and make the icing.

The Icing

-200 grams/ 7 ounces cream cheese

-0,5 dl/ 1/5 cup crème fraîche

-2 dl/ 3/4 cup confectioner’s sugar (I used just half of this amount)

-2 tsp lemon juice

Mix everything together and then spread the icing on top of the cooled cake.

Popularity: 63% [?]

Gluten-Free Clafoutis

by Emilia on June 25, 2009

A clafoutis is a truly delicious French dessert which is made by baking a batter together with some fruit. I haven’t had much luck with my gluten-free clafoutis experiments; the taste has been something terrible at times and at other times edible, but not anything spectacular.

This changed when I first opened up Gordon Ramsay’s book Just Desserts and I saw the clafoutis recipe in it. The recipe used almond flour instead of all purpose flour - I somehow just knew that this was the way to make a wonderful gluten-free clafoutis and I could not wait to try it.

My feeling had been right and I am pleased to say that this clafoutis is not only edible, but it is in fact better than one made with regular flour. I think I died a little bit when I first tasted it.

So do try this, if you love clafoutis.

Almond Clafoutis Recipe

This recipe is adapted from the book Just Desserts which is one I would recommend to everyone, even to celiacs; it has a lot of delicious gluten-free recipes and it also describes basic techniques for making desserts. Of course it has some recipes which use regular flour, but there are surprisingly many naturally gluten-free recipes. Gordon Ramsay might be an extremely annoying Tv-personality, but he knows his food, in my opinion anyway.

Some people like to use whole cherries in a clafoutis - the taste will be much stronger this way - I would recommend using them whole if you don’t mind the trouble the pits give when eating.

The Recipe

serves 4

Dry ingredients:

-30 grams/0,4 cups/1 dl almond flour (do not pack the flour tightly if you are measuring it with dl or with a cup)

-1 flat tsp flour (I use white rice flour)

-a pinch of salt

-50 grams/0,4 cups/1dl sugar (I like to use unrefined sugar here, it tastes better than white sugar, brown sugar is fine too)

Wet ingredients:

-1 egg

-2 egg yolks

-1 tsp vanilla extract

-1,5 dl/3/4 cup cream ( or coconut cream for a dairy-free version)

-200 grams pitted cherries, or 250 grams un-pitted cherries (approximately a bit over one cup/2,5 dl of cherries)

Mix the dry ingredients together and then mix the wet ingredients together. Combine them into a rather loose batter. Let the batter rest for 12-24 hours. You can of course bake it straight away, but it will not be as good.

Heat an oven to 175 C/350 F.

Grease a baking dish or individual baking dishes. Place the cherries in them and then cover with the batter.

Bake for 30 minutes. The time differs because ovens are different, keep an eye on the clafoutis while it is baking.

Popularity: 41% [?]

Mint Chocolate Cupcakes

by Emilia on June 10, 2009

I haven’t been making cupcakes in such a long time, but this all changed the other evening when I felt a passionate cupcake craving raising its head; I felt like I needed to bake and also I needed to have something with chocolate and mint.

Initially it started because I remembered one of the desserts I ate at Näsinneula restaurant, which was voted as the 8th best restaurant in Finland some time ago. The restaurant is located inside Näsinneula tower and so the dining is rather interesting because you have fantastic panorama views all over Tampere and the lakes surrounding the city. It was actually scary at first because it is so high and I could feel the tower moving a bit, but after a while I got used to it and could focus fully on the food. We ordered the Ninth Heaven menu and thus we got to taste some really good gluten-free chocolate cake with a milk chocolate mousse, ice cream and a truly fantastic mint sauce. The mint sauce was so good with the dark chocolate cake that I needed to try making something at home with those same flavours and I ended up with trying out these mint chocolate cupcakes.

The gluten-free part was no problem at the restaurant and I can highly recommend it to anyone wanting a lovely dinner when visiting Tampere - which a city in the south of Finland. Usually eating gluten-free here in Finland is always easy, but the staff at Näsinneula took it to another level with their care and professional manners. The food itself was just really so good, with all the different elements melting together into a perfect and very balanced mixture of tasty local flavours. The menu had nine different elements in it - green asparagus with hollandaise, scallops served in two ways, jerusalem artichoke soup, pike perch,  blackcurrant sorbet, Finnish Charolaise beef served in two ways, local cheeses served with some cloudberry jam, chocolate cake and finally the meal ended with some local strawberries. The pike perch, the asparagus and of course the chocolate cake were so fantastic that these have stayed in my mind afterwards rather hauntingly.

The other night was one of those times when I remembered the chocolate cake with the mint sauce and couldn’t take it anymore without baking something; I started to go through a Finnish blog called Kinuskikissa -which is by the way very beautiful- and found a cupcake recipe which used cocoa powder and mint chocolate as flavourings. I didn’t have many ingredients at home, no quinoa flour for example, so I decided to use almond meal and white rice flour and it worked out well; the cupcakes weren’t exactly as good as the dark rich chocolate cake with a fresh and tangy mint sauce at the restaurant, but they were nonetheless very tasty.

After the baking I have been wondering if I should use more white rice flour; the flour behaved so well and the cupcakes were delicious. I used a chocolate candy called Pätkis, which is basically a chocolate mint truffle, in the cupcakes, but I am sure that any kind of mint chocolate would work here. The frosting is just regular unsweetened whipped cream;I don’t think that buttercream would be very good here.

Gluten-Free Mint Chocolate Cupcakes

-140 grams/5 ounces mint chocolate

-150 grams/5,2 ounces soft butter

-1dl/ 1/4 cup sugar (or more depending on the chocolate, use more if the chocolate is darker)

-2 eggs

-1,5 dl/ 0,6 cup milk or cream (I used full fat milk)

Dry ingredients:

-2 dl/3/4 cup almond meal (ground almonds)

-1,5 dl/ 0,6 cup white rice flour (0,6 cup means a little bit over half a cup)

-2 tsp (gluten-free) baking powder

-2 1/2 tbls cocoa powder

Preheat an oven to 170 C/340 F.

Chop half of the chocolate into really small pieces and leave half of it as bigger pieces which will later be inserted into the cupcakes.

Mix all the dry ingredients together. Cream the butter and the sugar until they are pale and light. Add the eggs one by one. Add the milk and then mix the dry ingredients into the batter, remember not to over mix. Finally gently fold in the finely chopped chocolate.

Line a cupcake tin with cupcake papers, or grease the tin. Start adding the batter one spoonful at a time, when you have added one small spoonful of batter into the tin, then place a piece of the chocolate which was not chopped so finely into the batter, and finally place another spoonful of the batter on top of the chocolate piece.

Bake for 15-25 minutes, this depends on your oven. Let them cool before serving.

Serve with some whipped cream.

Popularity: 40% [?]

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