Baking Up a Storm

What biscuits or baking do you associate with Christmas?  For me, growing up we always had shortbread, lemon crunch slice, melting moments & chocolate afghans.  All of these recipes were in my mothers recipe ring binder.  I think most of them came from my Grandma & I have photocopies of the recipes from my Mum.  The measurements are in ounces, even though we’ve used grams in Australia since before I was born.

When my son was first diagnosed with his food intolerances, it was easy enough to make the recipes dairy free by substituting nuttelex for the butter.  However when we needed to make them gluten free as well, it wasn’t so easy.  I think I did just try subbing gluten free flour but most of the recipes didn’t work.

This year I got inspired to try again, after having baked gluten free for a few years now.  I also made a few other yummy goodies.

Here’s what I made & how I attempted to do so:

• Christmas Shortbread biscuits – Using my shortbread recipe, cut out stars in half the biscuits & put them together with icing.  I adapted the idea from here.

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• Lemon Crunch Slice – made using the original recipe & just subbing gluten free flour with baking powder for the SR flour. (recipe to come in another blog post soon)
• Melting Moments – adapted the gluten free shortbread creams that I have.  Just basically sandwiched them with vanilla icing rather than jam icing.
• Chocolate Afgans – used similar flours to the melting moments as they work well & don’t spread to much.  Unfortunately I ended up with very flat afgans as they spread a lot.  Will experiment with these again soon.

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• Gingerbread – using this recipe from The Gluten Free Lifesaver.  I made a half recipe but found I needed to add more flour. I think the heat made the dough hard to work with.  We decorated some but used some with other baking.

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• Gingerbread Brownies – I just used my go to recipe & added the gingerbread on top which was an idea from the free December Coles recipe magazine.

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• Christmas Chocolate Crackles – I used the chocolate crackle recipe with less cocoa as I used gluten free cocoa bombs, gluten free lollies & a gingerbread star on top to make them Christmassy.

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• Freezer Fudge with Macadamia Nuts – I used macadamia nut butter instead of cashew butter as my husband shouldn’t eat cashews.
• Chocolate Fudge for a gift
• Birthday Cake for Jesus – We traditionally have cake for breakfast on Christmas morning (with our bacon & eggs) & sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus.  I used the magic bean cake recipe & my daughter decorated it based on this idea.

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• Rudolph Caramel Tarts – my first attempt using my shortbread recipe failed but then I used the pastry an apple crumb pie recipe, a tin of caramel (not dairy free, could make dairy free caramel from coconut condensed milk), topped with a raspberry lolly for the nose, 2 choc bit eyes & 2 upside down Itsy Bitsy Bears for the antlers.

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Needless to say we still have lots of yummy goodies to eat.  I have frozen a small amount of eat.  Today I made jam drops using my gluten free shortbread creams recipe.

What baking did you do for Christmas?