Successful gluten-free Baking

[mlkramer2]

As I mentioned in a different thread, my wife was diagnosed with Celiac a few weeks ago. She is going on about two and a half weeks gluten-free. With this last weekend being Easter she wanted some of her traditional things to eat, so we set out attempting to make them gluten-free. To my surprise, we had great success!

First up was cookies. We decided to just make regular old Nestle Tollhouse cookies, except we substituted the flour with one of the all purpose blends in the gluten free for dummies book. This was a mixture of White rice flour, potato starch flour, and tapioca flour. The first tray didn't work as the cookies spread out to paper thin, and were near impossible to get off the tray. But we added an additional 3/4 cup of flour and a couple teaspoons of xanthum gum, and the next several trays turned out great! Hard to even detect a difference.

My wife comes from a Polish family so one of their Easter traditions is pierogi. She made these with her mom, so I don't know exactly how they did it, but again it was the same mixture of the above ingredients including xanthum gum, in slightly different proportions for the dough. Those also turned out fine, could not even tell the difference between the regular kind and hers.

Finally she wanted to make a coffee cake for easter brunch. We used the Bob's Red Mill muffin and baking mix, and then basically made the recipe that is on the Jiffy box. We found that we needed to add quite a bit of extra milk (appx 3/4 C - 1C), but once we did that, it was fine. We served it to her unsuspecting family and they didn't know we had done anything different.

I was glad to find out that it can be done!

[lonewolf]

Yay for you and your wife to jump right in! I've discovered that it's easier to use "regular" recipes and just substitute gluten-free flour than to try some of the crazy recipes. Chocolate chip cookies are one of our favorites and we've had good success too. My youngest son is adopted from Russia and we make Pelmini - which is like Pierogi - and it turns out great too.

Keep up the good work and keep us posted on how your wife is doing.

[Sweetfudge]

congrats to you both! it took me a long time to have much success w/ my gluten-free baking, which was disheartening as I have loved cooking since my childhood. just makes those successes that much *sweeter* hope you continue w/ that great luck!!

[kbabe1968]

Can you please post the pierogi recipe? I'd LOVE to make homemade pierogies. oooohhh...please???