SRC: Chocolate and Chilies’ Apple Coffee Cake

For March’s Secret Recipe Club, I was paired with Asiya of Chocolate and Chilies – a fellow Canadian! Asiya started her blog as a way to record of all the recipes that she’s tried and I’d say she’s done a great job at picking delicious recipes and taking great photos of them! She has tons and tons of beautiful, tasty looking recipes like this Spring Greens Risotto, this mango smoothie, these kiwi, lime and coconut muffins and this eggless, machine-less mango ice cream. She even has a coconut oil pie crust recipe and a whole page about substitutions!

After a lot of perusing her beautiful blog, I ended up choosing her Apple Coffee Cake and I wasn’t disappointed with my vegan, gluten free version! In the original recipe, you create a layer of apples, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon between two layers of cake, but since vegan gluten-free cake batters are usually thicker than their non-vegan glutenated counterparts that just wasn’t going to happen. As a substitute, a tossed the sliced apples in cinnamon and then mixed them into the batter. Since I took this approach, I probably could have added a third apple.

The cake turned out really well! It rose beautifully, and the texture was fluffy and had a good crumb. It was also tasty – I’d definitely make it again, although I’ll add less sugar next time, especially in the topping.

Gluten Free Vegan Apple Coffee Cake

Cake:

2/3 c. each of brown rice and sorghum flours
2/3 c. tapioca starch
1 tsp. xanthan gum
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. dairy free margarine
1/2 c. white sugar
2 egg replacers (1 tbsp powder + 1/4 c. almond milk)
1/2 c. almond milk
1 1/2 tsp. apple cider vinegar
2 apples, peeled and sliced and tossed in cinnamon (Could use 3)

Topping:
2-3 tbsp. brown rice flour
1 tbsp. dairy free margarine
1/4 c. white sugar (could also use brown/sucanat sugar)
1 tsp. cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Line a 9″ cake pan with parchment paper and grease both the parchment paper and pan.
2. In a small bowl, mix together the topping using your hands. Set aside.
3. Whisk together the dry ingredients and set aside.
4. Beat margarine and sugar together until fluffy (takes a few minutes.)
5. Add egg replacer and beat until combined.
6. Alternate adding flour and milk to the fat mixture, starting and ending with flour. Add the apple cider vinegar.
7. Mix in the apples. Scrape into the pan and used a spatula to smooth out.
8. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the cake.
9. Bake for about 40 – 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in multiple places comes out dry.
10. Cool on a rack. Can serve warm or room temperature.
11. Enjoy!

Asiya, it was great looking through your blog and I look forward to trying more of your recipes!

Please check out all the other recipes for Secret Recipe Club’s Group D below:

Gluten Free Vegan Valentine Cupcakes

Happy Early Valentine’s Day! In honour of the day of pink, hearts and all things kitsch, I decided to make cupcakes. Pink Cupcakes. Well, they couldn’t be any other colour, could they?

Being me, I wanted them to be healthier(ish), but still tasty. They are based off Cybele Pascal’s Vegan Vanilla Cupcakes recipe from The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook (great book & resource!), but I reduced the sugar and added raspberry purée as a swirl to take away some of the sweetness. Many raspberry swirl cupcakes get you to add sugar to the raspberries, but I don’t think that’s necessary.

These cupcakes work well with or without frosting – just make sure that you don’t add tons of it if you’re trying to reduce your sugar intake! (Don’t take a page from Crave Cupcakes. Seriously. No mountain-high icing swirls for me!)

I brought them to work and my coworkers loved them (“this is gluten free? Everything I’ve ever tried that was gluten free was gross, but this is really good!”) – little did they know that they were also vegan!

I asked one of my coworkers how they compared in taste and texture to gluten ones and she said they were fairly similar and that mine were considerably less sweet, which was a good thing. I take that as praise for gluten free vegan baking!

Gluten Free Vegan Raspberry Swirl Cupcakes

1/2 c. Sorghum flour
3/4 c. Brown rice flour
1/2 c. Tapioca starch
1/4 c. Potato starch
1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
1/2 tsp. Salt
1 tsp. Baking powder
1 tsp. Baking soda
1 c. Almond milk
1 tsp. Apple cider vinegar
1/2 c. Vegan shortening (I used earth balance, which is unfortunately not soy free, but I needed to use it up)
3/4 c. Sugar (could probably use even less as I found them to be quite sweet)
1 1/2 tsp. Vanilla
1 Tbsp. Powdered egg replacer, whisked with 1/4 c. water
1 c. Frozen raspberries, thawed and mashed (you could purée them in a blender, but why make extra dishes when you don’t have to?)

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Line muffin tins with paper cups (I made 20 mini cupcakes and 7 larger ones, but I think you could easily do 24 mini cupcakes and six bigger ones. This should make about 12 standard sized cupcakes.)
2. Whisk together dry ingredients. Set aside.
3. Measure out your almond milk and add the vinegar. Stir and set aside.
4. In the bowl of a mixer, beat together the shortening, sugar, egg replacer and vanilla until fluffy, about 2 min.
5. Add flour mixture in three parts and almond milk in two parts alternatively, starting and ending with the flour. Beat until smooth.
6. Scoop a but of batter into each muffin tin (about 1/3 full). Add about a scant tsp of raspberries to the mini cupcakes and a scant Tbsp to the large cupcakes.
7. Cover with batter until tins are 3/4 full. Using a toothpick, swirl the raspberries around the cupcake.
8. Bake in oven for ~14 min for the minis and ~20 min for the larger cupcakes it until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
   Immediately remove from tin onto a cooling rack.
9. Frost once cool, if desired.

Raspberry Frosting

1/2 c. vegan margarine
2+ c. icing sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
2 – 3 tbsp raspberry purée (left over from cupcakes)

1. Beat the margarine until fluffy.
2. Add icing sugar, vanilla and raspberry purée.
3. Beat until smooth. Add more icing sugar or purée to get the desired consistency.
4. Pipe onto cupcakes with a star tip.
5. Add heart sprinkles if desired.
6. Enjoy!

*I found this amount of frosting to be perfect as I managed to ice all of the cupcakes. As you can see, I tried not to add a ton of frosting, so if you want more on your cupcakes, you’ll need to make more frosting.

What are your plans for Valentine’s Day?

SRC: My Judy The Foodie’s Bean Salad

For January’s Secret Recipe Club, I was paired with Shari of My Judy the Foodie. Shari started getting into the kitchen after her mom (Judy, her blog’s namesake) passed away and as a way of preserving her memories, decided to cook through her handwritten recipes.

After ready through Shari’s story, I really want to take my mom’s cookbook of recipes she copied from her mom when she got married and cook through the whole lot. It might be challenging given my food restrictions, but it would totally be worth it and a good way to remember my Grannie. Perhaps a 2013 challenge?

Shari has tons of delicious recipes – while I was sick, I literally clicked through over 50 pages of her blog because everything looked so good and I couldn’t decide on anything! There are things like her mom’s legendary banana bread, this homemade nutella, these slow-cooked beef tips and this blueberry cucumber feta salad. I eventually ended up choosing her Bean Salad.

It’s not your traditional bean salad as it only has green beans and chickpeas instead of a whole assortment of other beans. I didn’t mind as it was definitely very tasty! I used less marinade/sauce as I am really not a sauce person and added a bit of honey to take away the zing of raw onions/leeks.

Salad
1/2 to 3/4 package frozen beans
1/4 red onions, thinly sliced
3 green onions, sliced
1/3 yellow pepper, thinly sliced
1/2 c. thinly sliced leeks
1 rib celery, sliced
1 small can of chickpeas
1/2 c. parsley, chopped

Dressing
1/4 c. white vinegar
1/4 c. olive oil
Juice of one lemon
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. dry mustard (could use 1 tbsp. dijon mustard)
1 tsp. honey
1/4 tsp. black pepper
Pinch of salt

Lettuce Leaves

1. Place beans in a pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Once the pot boils, drain and rinse with cool water.
2. Place beans in a large bowl with the remainder of the ingredients. Toss.
3. Whisk together dressing (below) and pour over salad. Toss salad to even coat.
4. Let sit for a few hours, stirring occasionally.
5. Serve over leaves of lettuce or plain if you desire.
6. Enjoy!

Please make sure to check out the rest of Group D’s recipes below for January’s Secret Recipe Club!

Gluten, Dairy, Refined Sugar and Soy Free Orange Ginger Honey Cranberry Upside Down Cake

A few days after Christmas, I got the flu, which then morphed into viral bronchitis (fun, eh?), so I haven’t spent that much time making anything other than tea and chicken soup. However, I was really itching to bake something before I go back to work, so I thought: “why not make something that is full of cold-fighting ingredients, so it doesn’t make me feel worse?” (Any excuse works when it comes to me justifying my desire to bake!)  Things like:

• Honey – can soothe sore throats, is full of antioxidants and is anti-bacterial (source)
• Oranges & cranberries – contain vitamin C, which helps you fight colds (source – a book written by my favourite chemist, Linus Pauling. Yes, I am a nerd.)
• Ginger – is an antihistamine and decongestant (source)
• Coconut oil – helps your immune system and isn’t soy. (source)

Since sugar is known to not help your immune system, I wanted to reduce the amount used and use honey instead for its illness fighting properties. I did include a small amount of unrefined granulated sugar as I know that cakes get part of their fine crumb from granulated sugar. Plus, I’ve never really baked with honey so I didn’t want to stray too much from the original recipe.

The cake turned out quite well – it wasn’t overly sweet, the cranberries and orange flavour played off each other wonderfully, the cranberries were sufficiently goopy and delicious (look at the edge of the cake – upside down cakes can’t get better than that!) and the cake texture is moist and delicate. It wasn’t overly ginger-y, so if you like ginger, please feel free to add more!

I’m pretty sure that you can make this recipe to be egg free easily – either add two egg replacers or increase the xanthan gum to 1 tsp, add an extra tsp. of baking powder and increase liquid by ~ 4tbsp or until your batter reaches the desired consistency. If you try this, please let me know!

The cake was inspired by this honey cake from Free From Kitchen. The upside-down-ness was inspired by this Cranberry Upside-down Cake by The Daily Dietribe, this cake from Hungry Cravings and the pineapple upside down cake in the Joy of Cooking.

Gluten, Dairy, Refined Sugar and Soy Free Honey Orange Ginger Cranberry Upside Down Cake

For Cranberry Upside-Down-ness
~ 3 tbsp coconut oil
1/3 c. honey
Grated fresh ginger (~ 1/2″ x 1″ knob, more or less to taste)
1 – 2 tbsp. sucanat
1 package fresh cranberries

For Cake
45 g brown rice flour
40 g sorghum flour
20 g millet flour
30 g sweet rice flour
40 g tapioca starch
1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
2 tsp. baking powder
Pinch of Salt
100g coconut oil
150g honey
35 g sucanat
1 tbsp. orange zest
1 tsp. grated ginger
1 – 2+ tbsp freshly squeezed orange juice
2 tbsp. almond milk
2 large eggs

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Place the 3 tbsp. coconut oil in a 9″ cake pan and place in the oven until melted (about a minute). Swirl around to coat the bottom.
3. Combine honey, ginger and sucanat in a measuring cup. Pour into pan and spread out over the coconut oil.
4. Place pan back in oven, stirring every few minutes until sugar mixture bubbles a lot. Remove from oven.
5. While pan is heating, wash cranberries and remove the gross ones. Once pan is out of oven, spread cranberries over pan until it is entirely covered in a single layer. Set aside.
6. Zest orange and squeeze the juice out of one half. Grate the ginger.
7. Whisk together the flours, xanthan gum, baking powder and salt.  Set Aside.
8. In a small saucepan, mix together the coconut oil, honey and sucanat. Heat up, stirring, until the sugar starts to dissolve. The coconut oil will stay separate from the honey and that is okay.
9. Pour mixture into bowl of a stand mixer. Add zest and ginger.
10. Alternate adding flour with the orange juice/almond milk, adding more liquid if needed. Beat until combined. Don’t over beat as you’ll end up with channels in your cake like I did.
11. Add eggs one at a time and beat until smooth.
12. Scrape into pan over cranberries and spread evenly.
13. Bake in oven for 25 – 35 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Place a pan on the rack below to catch any drips.
14. Let cool for a few minutes on a rack before placing a serving plate over the pan and inverting. Remove pan and let cool.
15. Enjoy!

What do you do for sweets while sick?

SRC: Jeanette’s Healthy Living Gluten-Free Pumpkin Spice Banana Bread

For October’s Secret Recipe Club, I was paired with Jeanette of Jeanette’s Healthy Living. Jeanette is a mother of four boys and loves to create healthy, tasty and delicious looking recipes that her kids actually want to eat.  Her youngest son has allergies to gluten and dairy, so all of her recent-er recipes are gluten and dairy free, which made this allergy conscious girl very happy! She has TONS of beautiful food – Soups – I bought Soba noodles to try after looking through her blog, Gluten and Dairy free recipes, including this Pumpkin Coffee Cake and Chocolate Marble Coffee Cake.

After spending at least 6 hours (I am not kidding) looking through her blog and being indecisive, I ended up choosing her Gluten-Free Pumpkin Spice Banana Bread and it did not dissapoint!

I did make a few changes to this loaf. Sometimes I’m a genius and assume something is a certain way based on what I want to see  (Does that ever happen to you?) and this loaf was the same. I read the recipe and was super excited to find a loaf that had both bananas and pumpkin, so I went and bought some pumpkin. Then when I was making the loaf, I re-read the ingredients list and it was “pumpkin spice” not pumpkin. (I had been confused as to why Jeanette said that she had substituted the spice for cinnamon as I assumed that all pumpkin loafs would have Pumpkin-y spices in them, not just cinnamon – way to go for reading things thoroughly.)

Being very stubborn, I decided to add pumpkin to the mix as I went and bought pumpkin specifically for this purpose. So, I added 1/2 c. of pumpkin puree in addition to the bananas. I also added some chopped up dairy-free dark chocolate (from a bar – way better than chips, in my opinion) and reduced the sugar by a couple tablespoons.

In the past, I’ve had issues baking with almond flour and bananas without eggs, so I was quite surprised to find a recipe with that criteria. Since there were other flours in the mix (it’s only half almond flour), it did work better than I expected it to, but I increased the cooking time to 55 minutes and it was still quite soft (I could have cooked it for another 5-10 minutes and it probably would have helped). I had a difficult time cutting the loaf (hence the ragged looking pieces), so to cut up the rest of the loaf, I stuck it in the freezer for an hour and it worked like a charm.

I took this loaf to a Halloween party and everyone loved it (it disappeared very quickly). It’s not too sweet, has a great depth of flavour thanks to the molasses and coconut palm sugar and is super moist and soft. I definitely recommend making this as it’s delicious! I almost didn’t want to take it to the party as it was so good – my waistline thanks me.

Please go and check out all the other recipes from group D by clicking the link below!