But what is a Mum to do when her 11-year-old proudly bakes his first pizza and really, really, really wants you to have a taste? For the record, it was yum! Anyway, I'm going to be pragmatic and avoid gluten where practicable but not get too worried if I really want to eat something with gluten in it.
A good thing about going gluten-free is that it largely keeps me away from the temptation of the cake tin. Most weeks I bake something yummy for the kids' school lunches and sometimes feel tempted to undertake (quite a bit of) quality control. I work from home, so the cake tin and its goodies is always handy.
A bad thing about going gluten-free is that the cake tin is usually off limits when a snack attack hits. Sometimes fruit just does not do the biz. We've had some quite cold weather over the past week, which bumped up my appetite and got me thinking of caaaake. A lot.
The weather has warmed up and my appetite has abated, but I thought I'd have a go at making a flourless walnut cake with the pre-shelled and diced walnuts that I bought at the Food Show. Here's the recipe:
350 g walnut meal, lightly toasted
5 eggs, separated
200 g caster sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla essence
Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease a 24 cm springform tin and line the base with baking paper.
Beat egg yolks until smooth then gradually add in sugar. Beat for about 4 minutes until misture is thick and creamy.
Transfer mixture to a large bowl. fold in walnut meal and vanilla.
In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until firm peaks form. Fold 1/3 of the egg white mixture into the walnut mixture, then add remaining egg white.
Spread the mixture into the tin and bak for 20 min or until cooked. Cool cake completely in the oven with the door ajar.eheat oven to 180 C. Grease a 24 cm springform pan and line the base with baking paper.
(Recipe courtesy of Uncle Joe's: www unclejoes.co.nz)
For some reason I had the hankering to turn it into a European-style cake by splitting it horizontally and smearing the middle with raspberry jam. The cake was very crumbly so it took quite some doing without destroying it in the process.
Here's how cakey looked after its little operation:
Don't you just love the mis-en-place. More like 'messy place'!
Keeping with the European theme, I made cinnamon icing (something I invented specially for this cake). It's yum: just put a tsp of ground cinnamon with the icing sugar, then add lemon juice. What do you think of the end result? I think it looks really funky. Maybe there's hope yet for a future food styling career.
Okay, maybe not.
Even though the cake is intended for the kid's lunches, we sampled some (accompanied by whipped cream) after lunch. It's nice but extremely crumbly. It would be impossible for the kids to easily eat it at school, so I consigned it to afternoon tea duty and whipped up a batch of date and walnut muffins for the lunch boxes.
No comments:
Post a Comment