I'll spare you the digestive details behind my decision to try going gluten-free, other than to say the issues were sufficiently annoying for me to try taking this step. The reason I suspect gluten as the culprit, rather than something else, is because in recent years I've noticed that I feel unwell if I eat bread more than once a day. For some reason cake binges don't seem to have the same effect (so the problem might not be a gluten intolerance after all).
It's possible to bake some passable cakes using ground nuts instead of wheat flour so I surmised it must also be possible to make a gluten-free steamed pudding. My first attempt one recent cold evening tasted great but looken incredibly insipid and had a dense, very rubbery texture.
"It's just like a dish sponge," hubby and kids pronounced. And I had to agree. Not even copious quantities of custard could hide the awful rubbery truth.
The dish sponge texture was hardly surprising, given I'd made it using smooth ultra-white flours such as tapioca, rice and potato flours. Maybe it just needed some texture from ground almonds? So I gave everyone enough time to recover from the horrors of Round One, then made a chocolate version that included a cup of ground almonds.
It wasn't quite so dish spongy this time round. But it still wasn't great. The left overs sat, studiously ignored, in the fridge until today. Curious as to its sticking power, I tried a few gluten-free steamed pudding experiments.
Experiment one:
Experiment two:
Although I've largely been good at avoiding foods containing gluten, self-denial has never been one of my stronger suites. As a result, I've fallen off the wagon several times over the past few days.
I'm back on it again but I don't hold out much hope for sticking (pardon the pun) to my gluten-free regime the next time I feel like having a steamed pudding for dessert.
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