flourless.

Since I stopped eating gluten (celiac seems to run in my Dad's side of the family), I have become increasingly interested in how I can make things without it.  Truthfully, I don't really miss bread, which is astounding because I use to love it, and baked a lot of it.  I did a lot of baking, period.  Being gluten free can be a challenge, particularly since most gluten free products use rice flour, and I can't eat rice, either.  So every time I find a new gluten free cookbook, I have to look through it just in case there are recipes with ingredients I can use.  Which is why I was so excited to find flourless (Recipes for Naturally Gluten-free Desserts) by Nicole Spiridakis.

It's one thing for you to eat gluten-free baking, and another thing entirely to feed it to your guests. I used to use wheat flour when I was baking to take someplace else, but now I don't even have wheat flour in my pantry.  This book is a pleasant surprise as none of the recipes use rice flour either.  Instead Nicole concentrates on recipes for delicious cakes, puddings, cookies, etc. that can be made without flour.

For instance - Angel Food Cake.  Most people just use an angel food cake mix, and that is definitely easier.  But if that's not an option for you, it's not difficult to make from scratch, but you do need a dozen eggs for one cake - not exaggerating.  Angel food cake is predominantly composed of egg whites and sugar, with a very small amount of flour.  In this case, Nicole substitutes corn starch which worked perfectly.  My gluten eating taste testers all agreed that it tasted just like regular angel food cake.

I borrowed an angel food cake pan, but it wasn't one that was in two pieces, so I had a little difficulty getting it out of the pan.

So since I used a dozen egg whites, I had to figure out what to do with a dozen egg yolks - they turn to rubber balls if you freeze them.  Back to flourless where I found a recipe called Salted Caramel Pots de Creme - an absolutely decadent custard which used 8 egg yolks.  Gluten eating taste testers again declared this delicious!  I used the rest of the egg yolks to make pastry, which I can freeze for later use.

In addition, I tried the Double Chocolate Brownies, which contain chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, cocoa, and vanilla - ooey gooey goodness.  And finally,  I made her Oatmeal - Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I brought these cookies to work, where they were scarfed down in one day by my coworkers.  They are a basic oatmeal cookie except that instead of adding flour, the recipes simply uses more oatmeal.  They are simple, and act just like a regular oatmeal cookie recipe does.

These are but a small fraction of the delicious recipes in this book, and it gave me the confidence to try adapting some recipes on my own.  I highly recommend it.