Baked Apples

Baked Apples!!

A dear friend of ours stayed at our house this whole week.

 One of the things we did was make gluten free baked apples with her.

They were a wonderful treat.

I got the recipe off of this website and adapted it. :)

With the sweetness of the apple mixed with the warm spiced filling,

 this dessert makes for a delightful treat

to warm you up during the cold weather. Enjoy!

Gluten Free Baked Apples

Adapted from this recipe

Ingredients:

12 large tart baking apples, (we used Granny Smith)

¼ cup honey

½ cup maple syrup

3 teaspoons cinnamon

¼ teaspoon ground clove

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

¼ teaspoon salt

¾ cup chopped pecans, and/or almonds, walnuts, macadamia nuts, pumpkin seeds, etc.

¾ cup currants or chopped raisins

3 tablespoon butter

3 tablespoon vanilla

1 lemon

enough boiling water to barely cover the bottom of cookie sheet

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees

Wash apples.

Remove cores to ½ inch of the bottom of the apples.

(It helps if you have an apple corer, but if not,

you can use a paring knife to first cut out the stem area, and then the core.)

Use a spoon to dig out the seeds.

Make the holes about ¾-inch to an inch wide.



 In a small bowl, combine the sweetener, salt, spices, fruit, & nuts. 
Place apples on a cookie sheet. Stuff each apple with this mixture. 

 A tablespoon at a time, drizzle the vanilla as evenly as you can, onto the apples.

Squeeze the lemon juice evenly over each apple.

Top each apple off with ¼ tablespoon of butter.

Add boiling water to the bottom of the sheet.

Bake 30-40 minutes, until tender, but firm.

Do not overcook, as this will yield mushy apples.

Remove from the oven and baste the apples several times

with the juices that have gathered at the bottom of the sheet.

Serve warm alone or with vanilla ice cream on the side. :D

         

Pumpkin Muffins

Ok, so I promised you the pumpkin muffin recipe! I made it last weekend with a few of my friends and they turned out delicious! I now imagine turning them into a sort of cupcake and piling them high with cream cheese frosting.  Doesn't that sound grand?

I felt like baking something "fall-ish" since we hadn't really made any thing fall related yet. Pumpkin muffins seemed the simplest route, so I scoured the web for a good, gluten free, pumpkin muffin recipe. I found one at the Glugle Gluten Free website. It looked promising, so I gave it a try and tweaked it a bit. They were great! My friends, sisters, and I had a good time baking and laughing together. :)

Here's my adapted version.

Gluten-Free Pumpkin Muffins

Yields 12 Muffins

Dry Ingredients:

•  2 cups rice flour
• 1 tsp. Baking Soda
• 1/2 tsp Sea Salt
• 2 tbsps Pumpkin Pie Spice
• a heaping 1/2 cup of turbinado sugar

Wet Ingredients:

• 1 cup Pumpkin Puree
• 3 Eggs
• 1/4 cup Olive Oil
• 1 cup of Chopped Nuts (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Grease muffin tin well with oil.
3. Mix dry ingredients together in a medium bowl. Get out all of the lumps.
4. Mix wet ingredients together in large bowl.
5. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredient bowl.
6. Bake for 22 -24 minutes. Check with toothpick for doneness.

Notes:
If you don't have turbinado sugar, you can use regular sugar. You can also use maple syrup, but remember to mix it with the wet ingredients. If you find that the final mixture is too dry, go ahead and add water or milk until the mixture is wet enough. Also, if you don't have pumpkin pie spice handy, you can make it when you triple the recipe below.

Pumpkin Pie Spice
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/8 tsp. allspice

1/8 tsp. nutmeg

This muffin recipe is pretty simple don't ya think? So...why don't you give it a try. It doesn't take long to make, and the result is delicious, sweet pumpkiny goodness. You can even top it with some cream cheese frosting if you'd like.

Have a blessed weekend friends!

~Madi

My Favorite Summer Salad ;)

  

In the course of one week, we have had this meal twice. It's a perfect summer meal because it's light, yet bursting with flavor.
It's one of Jamie Oliver's recipes. For those of you who don't know who Jamie Oliver is, he's an English chef who's cooking shows used to air on the Food Network Channel. My family and I like his "hobbit" style. He doesn't mind getting his hands dirty, uses fresh ingredients from his garden, and most of his recipes are simple, yet delicious. This recipe is one that we've enjoyed many a hot summer evening. Here is our version of his recipe for a "Proper Chicken Caesar Salad". 

 ♠

Proper Chicken Caesar Salad

Ingredients:
1. Chicken thighs(we like to use boneless chicken thighs. You can also use chicken legs)
2. 1 loaf of gluten free bread
3. Chopped rosemary
4. Olive oil
5. Two or three heads of romaine lettuce

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Tear up gluten free bread into crouton size pieces and mix with olive oil and chopped rosemary. Fit the bread into a glass pan. We use a 9x13 pan. Place the chicken thighs on top of the bread, drizzle with the olive oil, sprinkle with the chopped rosemary, and season with salt and pepper. Bake for 45 minutes. The chicken thighs are ready when the meat comes off of the bones easily. Remove from oven and let cool slightly. Enjoy! I'm sure you will. :)

Delicious Scones

A few years ago I came across a strawberry scone recipe and decided to try it out. When I did, I was pleasantly surprised. The scones weren't dry and they tasted delicious! I changed the recipe a bit and then decided to sell it in my little bakery business. They were a great hit. I would say my Auntie Jen was the biggest fan. :) When my family became gluten free I stopped making them. However, this past weekend, my Auntie Jen came to visit. So, my mom thought it would be a good idea to try the recipe again and this time, make them gluten free. So, I made them, along with my sister, and the scones turned out great. In fact, that's all I wanted to eat all day. It was perfect weather, cold and cloudy, so I sat with my warm tea and ate scones with my family. It was lovely.

Here are some pictures!

Blueberries!

You can download the gluten free recipe here Strawberry Scone GF and the regular wheat flour recipe here Strawberry Scones.

I hope you find the scones to be to your liking!

The First Pie of the Season

Ever since I was a little girl, I've loved baking. When I was ten, I started my own baking business at home called Madison's Neighborhood Bakery. As the name suggests, I started out baking for my neighbors. Soon, family members began to order and they told others about my baked goods and God graciously kept the orders coming. I sold homemade bread and cookies when I first started but then went on to make fruit filled scones and pumpkin scones as well.  Though It was tiring somedays when I would be baking all day to fulfill the orders, I loved it; I was making people happy, eating the leftovers with my family, and earning money at the same time!  :D Thank you to all my family members for generously buying my baked goods and for kindly supporting me!

A few years ago, my Mom and older sister were diagnosed with Celiac Disease, which means they are allergic to gluten which is a protein commonly found in rye, wheat, and barley. So we started having to bake with different types of flour such as rice flour, corn flour, and buckwheat flour, which makes for a different consistency than what we were used to.  I stopped my baking business because I couldn't bake with wheat flour anymore and now we bake every once in a while each time being an experiment.

Apple pies are good every time of the year but especially good in the fall when the apples are in season. I love baking apple pies in the fall. Last week, my sister and I made the first apple pie of the season, a gluten free pie to be exact. We weren't brave enough to make our own dough, due to the fact that we had guests coming over, so we used a ready made gluten free dough. Hopefully we will have time to come up with our own soon though. :D Anyway, It was delicous!

Here is the recipe:

 Ingredients:
8 apples ( 4 granny smith and 4 fuji)
1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon of sucanat sugar
1/3 cup of maple syrup
2 tablespoons of gluten free flour blend (or rice flour)
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon of grated lemon zest
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 gluten free pie crust (we used the one from Whole Foods)


1.   Adjust an oven rack to the lowest position. Place a rimmed baking sheet on the rack and heat the oven to 500 degrees.  Toss the apples with the sucanat and maple syrup, flour, lemon juice, lemon zest, salt, and spices, and then set it aside.

2.   Roll out the top crust to a 12" circle.  Spread the apples in the unbaked pie crust bottom, mounding them slightly in the middle (make sure to add in all the sugary juices from the bottom of the bowl).  Lay the top crust over the apples, seal and crimp the eges, and cut four vent holes in the top.  Brush the crust with the egg white and sprinkle with 1 Tb. of sucanat.
3.   Place the pie on the heated baking sheet and lower the oven temperature to 425 degrees.  Bake until the top crust is golden, about 25 minutes.  Rotate the baking sheet, reduce the oven temperature to 375 degrees, and continue to bake until the juices are bubbling and the crust is deep golden brown, 30 to 35 minutes longer.  Transfer the pie to a wire rack and cool to room temperature before serving.