I know I’m a couple years late to the cake pop party. When I first saw a cake pop I thought…what a waste of perfectly good cake and icing. Then I started blogging and thought…those would make a cute a blog post. 🙂
I started with a gluten-free vanilla cake baked the night before.
The next day…trimmed edges and broken up.
Very finely crumbled cake and all supplies. I used the new Funfetti purple icing.
Cake and icing mixed by hand til completely smooth then scooped into small balls and rolled by hand to make sure they were all even.
Into the freezer for 5 minutes. The funky coloring is just lighting from the freezer drawer. They’re not frost burned. 🙂
While balls were in the freezer I melted the chocolate. I used an equal mix of Wilton orange melts and Giradelli white melting chocolate. I did this because I’d read reviews online saying that the Wilton melts were gross unless ‘cut’ with something else. I ate a few of the Wilton melts out of the bag and they were fine so I don’t know if I’d even bother with extra expense of cutting them the next time.
Dipping one end of stick in the melted candy and pressing into ball.
Into the icebox for 5 – 10 minutes to harden the stick to ball ‘seal’. The funky color of the balls in the icebox is again just the lighting.
Coating and letting drip to ensure a smooth cover and also that the coating doesn’t run once topped with sprinkles.
Coating with sprinkles. I couldn’t get a good shot of this but I put the sprinkles on by dropping them onto the balls. It’s a huge mess if you actually stick the ball into the pile of sprinkles.
The pics don’t show the actual colors well at all. Since somehow purple has become a Halloween ‘color’ I wanted to use orange and purple.
The cake balls are vanilla cake mixed with bright purple icing. The balls ended up a medium purple.
The candy coating is orange. It looks almost pink in some of these pics but it’s not pink at all.
The sprinkles above are all from a Halloween mix. You can see the little canister in the pic with the supplies.
I also did an ‘autumn’ batch with spice cake / cream cheese icing / white dipping candy and these cute fall leaves. These were my favorite but I would dip them in a different color candy next time because the white makes it look too much like milk and Fruity Pebbs.
I gave a variety of the cake pops to my neighbors (including three kids) and my extended family (two kids) and they all gave them rave reviews. I was there when my young cousin, C ate his and can I tell y’all I was so giddy inside when he ate the whole thing. That’s gotta mean something when a kid will eat your gluten-free food without any ewww’s or gross…right? 🙂
I’m thinking about making up a batch of these and taking them to the fall farmers market. I don’t know how well gluten-free would sell here in rural route though.
I’m having trouble with formatting so I’m going to have to share the cake recipes I used for these on Friday. I really want to share them because even if you wouldn’t want to make cake balls the cake…especially the spice cake…was so easy and great all alone. 🙂
Hope y’all are having a great week. Happy Halloween Eve. 🙂
I woke up with a horrible cold / sinus situation Thursday and it’s just been an awful weekend.
For the last few days my food has looked like this
Doesn’t that look…yum? No? You’re right it looks like some sort of slop. It’s really just mashed potatoes and creamy chicken broth with some shredded chicken. Gluten free cream of chicken over mashed potatoes.
In my last post I told y’all I would include pics of the cut cake in my next post
First one to show the height of the cake without the large pearls around the bottom.
Pics don’t do it justice but it was super moist and turned out better than I ever imagined it would gluten-free. 🙂
I’m off to drink some more homemade chicken broth. I’ll be back on Wednesday with a cute / fun Halloween themed idea. 🙂
This is wordy and nostalgic and will probably only interest my family so if you’re not into that there are also pics…a song and the recipe at the end of the post…just scroll down. 🙂
I was going to make this post primarily about how much it sucks to have to make your own birthday cake but then I thought ‘Who am I kiddin’?’ I love to bake and would have been happy if I was making a cake for someone else so I might as well just accept it and move along. Oh don’t get me wrong I wish my cake could still come from my favorite bakery because…well it’s delicious…but also it would mean I didn’t have this annoying disease. But I do and it can’t so here were are…red velvet cake…a birthday and an anniversary. 🙂
Today would have been my Mema and Pappy’s 75th wedding anniversary. They were married 62 years when she passed away. I was born on their 33rd anniversary and all of my family birthday celebrations were also anniversary celebrations.
Pic was my 5th birthday and their 38th anniversary. We couldn’t decide if that’s my little hand to the left of the pic or Sister Lupiac (she would have been almost 3). If it’s mine I’m almost certain I’m asking them why we’re eating pie instead of that cake. 😉
Every birthday from one to twenty-nine Mema made a red velvet cake. I was very spoiled by that and have always had a hard time accepting other red velvet cakes. Thankfully a local-ish bakery made (until last year) a really good version and after she passed I got my cakes there.
And now?
Well now I have to try to recreate something so very special…something I’m such a huge snob over…AND I have to do it gluten-free. Needless to say…I was scared of how it would turn out.
Before I go on let me say that I’m not interested in opinions on how much food color (or sugar or fat) is in this. 🙂 No self-respecting Texas baker is going to put prune baby food or beets in their red velvet cake. Sorry. Not here. This should be self explanatory but hold onto your hats because apparently it’s not in some circles…red velvet cake is NOT a health food. 😉
This is the recipe Mema used for the cake. I have her original of this exact piece of paper complete with her red food coloring finger prints all over it. I keep the originals of all of her (and my Meme’s) recipes / cookbooks locked up in safe storage. Hey some people treasure gold…I treasure recipes. 🙂 One day I will pull them out and do an ‘old cookbook / recipe’ post but not today.
Legend has it that in order to sell more of his red food coloring plus vanilla and butter flavoring the Texas based owner of Adams Extract had his wife come up with this version of red velvet and then positioned these ‘tear off’ recipe ‘cards’ on the shelves in front of the red food color.
I realize there are other versions of the cake and other versions of how it was invented. As far as I’m concerned my Mema invented red velvet cake and nothing you can say will sway me otherwise. 😉
So anyway on to the baking
I followed the above Adams recipe just subbing my flour blend for the flour and butter for the shortening. As always the recipe is at the bottom of the post.
In the early days of making red velvet Mema used the basic old school ‘7 Minute’ cooked icing. She switched to a cream cheese icing in the 80’s and it’s my absolute favorite so that’s what I use.
I use a 1:1:1 formula for mine.
1 eight ounce package Cream Cheese
1 stick of Butter
1 box Powdered Sugar
Doubled or tripled as needed.
Not too bad for my first decorated cake in many many years. 🙂
I was going for a ‘waves’ effect with the teal icing. And the flowers are hybiscus…my favorite flower. The pearls are way too big for this size cake but it was either these or little tiny ones which would have looked silly. I’m scheduling this to post at midnight and haven’t cut the cake yet. I will include pics of the inside of the cake in my next post. The scraps were delicious. 🙂
We took this family trip to tube the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country the summer before my junior year of high school. It was my Mema’s favorite trip. She continued to talk about it until she passed away. Raise your hand if your elderly grandma has ever tubed the river complete with beer in hand the entire way. 😉
We’re full Czech on Papa Lupiac’s side of the family. That means two things…lots of polka music and lots of pevo (beer). They had a life long friend who played polka music on the squeeze box at get-together’s. Pappy always had polka music playing on Saturday mornings and Mema had a sign in the kitchen with the lyrics to todays song. It’s also in safe storage with the cookbooks. I’m using this song today because it’s just so ‘them’ and I know it will also make my family members smile. 🙂
Y’all know the one thing that would make this vid better would be if the beer bottles were Old Milwaukee. 😉
Happy Anniversary Mema and Pappy. 🙂
I miss them all the time but always a little more on the day we share. 🙂
Red Velvet Cake
1/2 cup Butter
1 1/2 cup Sugar
2 Eggs
1 tsp Vanilla
1 tsp Butter Flavor
1 large bottle Adams Extract Red Food Color
3 tbsp Cocoa
2 1/2 cups Flour
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Soda
1 cup Buttermilk
1 tbsp Vinegar
Instructions
Cream butter. Add sugar and beat til light and fluffy…about 5 minutes.
Add eggs one at time beating well after each.
Add flavors.
Make a paste of cocoa and food color and add to butter / sugar / eggs. Mix well.
Mix together dry ingredients.
Add dry alternately with buttermilk.
Add vinegar last.
Beat until smooth.
Divide evenly into 2 or 3 pans and bake at 350* for 20 – 25 minutes.
Cool for 10 minutes in pan and then remove from pan and cool completely before icing.
I usually follow a Monday / Wed / Fri posting schedule but this week is going to be a little off.
Today I’m doing a pic dump of meals and stuff that didn’t really fit in with anything I posted last week.
Still juicing and loving it.
Sausage / Corn and Cheese bowl. Homemade Chili con Queso. This will probably surprise y’all but I do not make my queso with Velveeta. 😉
Pizza. Doesn’t that dough look delish? Why oh why can’t I make my edges look better?
Early birthday lunch with the family at my favorite…Casa. 🙂 I had my usual…cheese enchilada / rice / beans and actually remembered to take a pic but the camera or the internet ate it because it is nowhere to be found. 😦 I can’t wait til I can get a new phone.
Fresh batch of Rustic Rolls. One plain and one Raisin. Y’all have got to try the raisin version. 🙂
Rustic Roll and Meatballs. Mexican Steak / Guacamole and Queso.
These aren’t new. They were a birthday gift from Mama and Papa Lupiac a couple years ago and they’re my favorite measuring spoons. The handle on each is a light house and inside each spoon is an etched (?) sail boat / seagulls and waves. When I picked them out they had different designs like flowers and chickens. They also had measuring cups made to match but didn’t have a set to match the design I got.
I really really want set of cups. I don’t care if they match the spoons. I just want a set of these heavy cups with a design in the handle and cup.
Do y’all have any idea what this type of design is called? I did a pic search for ‘cute measuring spoons’ and went through probably 50 pages of results. Lots of cute spoons but not what I was looking for.
If y’all have any idea what to specifically call these in a search…please….please…please share. 🙂
I don’t usually post on the weekend but this was so good I wanted to share incase y’all need some Sunday Brunch or ‘Breakfast for Supper’ inspiration today. 🙂
These are apple waffles inspired by this recipe from Southern Lady Cooks. She used the recipe for pancakes but I wanted waffles.
Don’t judge me but prior to the celiac…frozen waffles were one of my most favorite breakfast foods ever. I know. Y’all are thinking ‘lady this is nothing…we’ve been judging you ever since you told us you eat Velveeta and wear jeggings’. 😉 But it’s true. I loved me some frozen blueberry waffles. I would even eat the store brand if they were out of the name brand.
What I love about frozen waffles is the crispiness that until now I’d never been able to achieve with a homemade waffle. These turned out perfect. Crispy on the outside. Soft on the inside. I wonder if it had something to do with the oats?
And don’t even get me started on the syrup. Delicious.
I followed her recipe just halving it…and using gluten free flour of course. Plus I added a 1/2 tsp of baking powder just because I find it helps gluten free ‘baked’ goods.
I did change up the syrup though. I hate apple juice. Like seriously hate it. Even just the smell. So in place of the apple juice I used an equal amount of this cinnamon apple spice tea.
Steeped it for 2 minutes then followed the rest of the recipe. It was so good and I can’t wait to try this again with different fruit teas…Orange / Wild Blueberry / etc.
Hope y’all are having a good weekend. 🙂
Was trying to come up with a ‘breakfast’ themed song. Had to settle for a breakfast movie theme song. 🙂
I sit a lid on top of the rings for just a few minutes in the beginning to help them rise.
Look at all those nooks and crannies. 🙂
Sausage / Egg and Cheese ‘McMuffin’. 🙂
I adapted my recipe (as always…it’s at the end of this post) from a Michael Ruhlman recipe found here.
In describing the recipe he says
“This recipe uses equal parts by weight flour and liquid, virtually a pancake batter but with less egg and lots of yeast.”
His recipe is not gluten-free. The more gluten-free yeast bread recipes I make the more I realize the wetter the dough the better.
Prior to finding this recipe I tried making another recipe which wasn’t a wet dough and it was just a hard / heavy brick with no nooks at all.
His original recipe says it will make 8 – 12 muffins. I only have 4 rounds so I had to cut down the recipe. My best results came with a little more flour than water plus no eggs or butter. Also I just let it rise til doubled.
This is the recipe I’ve been using to make 4.
1/2 package Active Dry Yeast
Pinch of Sugar
3/4 cup Water (or milk…I use water)
1 cup Flour
1 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Baking Powder
Cornmeal (for sprinkling on the pan)
Instructions
Proof yeast in water (or milk) with a pinch of sugar.
Mix flour, salt and baking powder. Here’s where you’d also add your xanthan if it’s not already in your mix.
Add the yeast mixture to the flour mixture. Stir well. Cover and let rise til double.
Using a 1/4 cup measure scoop into rounds and cook on stove top or oven til brown on both sides. You don’t want to flip them until the bottom is brown AND the top is no longer wet. I don’t know how else to describe it. While the bottoms cook the tops kind of get a non wet feel even though you can tell the muffin isn’t cooked all the way thru yet.
After both sides have cooked remove from pan and let cool on a rack for 30 minutes before touching.
I found that it’s best to split these with a FORK before storing them. Once they’re cold they don’t split as ‘pretty’. After they get completely room temp I split them with a fork and put them in a Ziploc in the icebox.
The original recipe said to hold out the baking powder until after the rise and then mix it in. In the beginning I was doing it that way but wasn’t getting nearly as many or as ‘pretty’ nooks / crannies. It may have to do with the whole gluten-free thing. I don’t know but it worked best for me just mixing it in at the beginning.
Also these are about 1/2 – 3/4 the ‘height’ of an English muffin from the grocery store. You could try using more than a 1/4 cup per muffin but when I tried that I ended up with a goopy mess. 1/4 cup seems to be the sweet spot. I’d personally rather have a smaller…crispy on the outside / nooks and crannies on the inside muffin than a larger goopy mess. 🙂
We got a little blast of cooler air in South East Tejas today. Low 70’s but I kid y’all not a lady was walking out of the post office in FUR.
Still as crazy as that is…when the temps drop from the 90’s to the 70’s it is hard to not wanna cook some stew.
I picked up a box of lentils the other day. You can see it in the top pic. It had a packet of spices.
So last night to the crockpot I added
The box of Lentils and Seasoning
6 cups Chicken Stock
Sautéed (in butter) and pureed White Onion and Celery
1 chopped Potato
2 Ham Hocks
When it was close to done today I added
1 can of Green Beans
1 cup frozen Corn
I served it with cornbread.
It was really good. Well the cornbread wasn’t that great but the stew was. I’m still trying to perfect an acceptable gluten free cornbread. I’m super spoiled / picky when it comes to cornbread. I don’t like a straight corn base at all. I like a flour / corn base and I just haven’t gotten it ‘right’ yet.
Have you made your first pot of soup / stew of fall yet? If not what are you looking forward to making (or just eating). 🙂
If this post looks weird…something crazy is going on with my wordpress dashboard. The format is all crazy looking. Not sure what it’s going to look like when I hit ‘publish’.
Some pics from the weekend
Fall flowers and icing dye for next the big red velvet birthday cake next week. Pretty red / white plate.
Lunch at my favorite diner. Forgot to take pics until I was done. Had my usual…hamburger patties / cheese / fries.
Sweet Cream milkshake and an old timey car from 1928. It had the year on it. Also had an Aggie sticker on the window. Papa Lupiac would say ‘those are some good people right there’. 🙂
New brown jeggings. Don’t judge me. 😉
Also got a new convection countertop oven and needed to bake something small to test it out. In honor of Canadian Thanksgiving today how ‘boot some maple oat muffins? 😉 (Recipe at the end of the post.)
Thank you to everyone for checking out my flour blend post. It’s gotten quite a few more views than my usual posts so I hope y’all are finding it helpful or inspiring. 🙂
Hope your weekend was great and your week is off to a good start…or you’re enjoying the day off if you have it for Columbus Day / Thanksgiving up north. 🙂
Happy Motown Monday. 🙂
Maple Oat Muffins
1 cup Oats
1/2 cup Milk
1 cup Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Cinnamon
3/4 cup Maple Syrup
1/4 cup melted Butter
1 Egg
1/2 cup chopped Pecans
Instructions
Soak oats and milk for 5 minutes.
In a seperate bowl combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon.
To the oat / milk mixture add maple syrup, butter and eggs.
Add the oat mixture to the flour mixture and stir just until moistened.
Fold in half the pecans.
Spoon batter into muffin pan. Top with remaining pecans.
Bake at 350* for 15 – 20 minutes. (Obviously…know your oven.) 🙂
**You can also add some chopped apple or mashed banana. 🙂
This post is long / wordy and probably won’t interest those of you who have no interest in making your own flour…but I’ve spent the better part of two months working on this flour blend and want to share. 🙂 I realize this isn’t anything special and that every single gluten-free person in the world has their own favorite blend. But it’s special to me. 🙂
If you’ve read here before you know that I love Cup4Cup. Prior to working on my own blend it was the only gluten-free flour I’d used. I ordered a 25 pound bag and fell in gluten-free love. It works amazingly in everything I’ve tried it in. I didn’t have to tweak my recipes. I just subbed it…cup for cup. 🙂
The problem with Cup4Cup? It’s expensive and because of the heat where I live I can really only order it between Nov and April and I just don’t have the freezer space to store the amount I’d need to make it thru the rest of the year.
I know a lot of you have no problem with measuring out each flour depending on your recipe. I’m the opposite. The neat freak in me can’t stand the mess and I like to be able to just go in the kitchen and pull out one container of flour and get to work.
So it was time to try to make my own blend. I wanted a blend as close to Cup4Cup as possible.
Prior to working on my own blend I had no idea how to go about actually making a blend so naturally I turned to the internet for help. 🙂
The ingredients in C4C are…cornstarch, white rice flour, brown rice flour, milk powder, tapioca flour, potato starch, xanthan gum.
First I searched for a copycat Cup4Cup recipe. The one I found wasn’t even remotely like the real thing. Having used C4C exclusively for months I was somewhat of a minor C4C ‘expert’. I could tell just from the feel of the finished blend that it wasn’t what I was looking for. For the next few tries I kept working with the basic percentages in the copycat recipe but try after try was a fail.
Then I found Shauna at glutenfreegirl. She recommends using a basic 40 / 60 split for your mix. 40% grain / 60 % starch. As soon as I started working with that formula I started seeing results…dare I say…even better than Cup4Cup. The goal then became working C4C ingredients into that 40 / 60 formula. I was dead set against a brown rice base and tried sorghum instead. It was awful. I gave in and went with brown rice and it’s been a dream. If I had to name one complaint about Cup4Cup it would be the cooked rice smell of some recipes. All of my research told me that smell was coming from the white rice flour.
Shauna considers white rice flour to be a starch so I decided to leave it out completely…start with 40% brown rice flour and adjust the other ingredients until it worked ‘flawlessly’ in various recipes. It took 17 tries (I kept count and notes) but it’s finally there. Yes…seriously…something as little as 1% in one or two flours was the difference between the blend working great in one recipe but not working in another. I just kept tweaking until it worked across the board.
When I say ‘working’ I mean as a Cup4Cup replacement. Every version of the flour ‘worked’ as flour but my goal was to get as close to my C4C results as possible.
Throughout the tweaking process I realized that the main key to Cup4Cup is the high content of cornstarch and the dry milk. When I tried dropping the cornstarch below 35g / cup it changed the results more than tweaking any other flour in the mix. For the rest of my testing I decided on 40% brown rice and 35g cornstarch and then tweaked everything else around those numbers. Remember even though cornstarch is the first and largest single ingredient in the C4C mix…the combined total of white and brown rice would most likely make rice the actual largest component.
A major question I had to answer? What is the weight of a cup of flour? You would think this would be a simple question to answer but it’s not. Some people use 125g. Some use 128g. Some use 130g. Others use 140g. I settled on 125g because that is what’s worked the best for me all along.
Following test after test these are the numbers I settled on…in grams. I’m sorry but I don’t know how the numbers would translate to cups / spoons. I’ve been measuring even wheat flour by weight since long before my celiac diagnosis.
Brown Rice 40% 50 100 200
Cornstarch 28% 35 70 140
Tapioca 15% 18 36 72
Potato Starch 5% 7 14 28
Sweet Rice 5% 7 14 28
Dry Milk 7% 8 16 32
**There is no Sweet Rice in Cup4Cup but I’d been adding a tiny amount to recipes and wanted to incorporate it into my blend so I wouldn’t have to add it separately anymore.
The first column of numbers is the %. I used 125 as my base but you can use any number that works for you. You don’t have to recalculate at all if you don’t want to. You can use my numbers and then just weigh out whatever amount YOU use to represent a cup. If you use 140 you will run out quicker of course but it works…up or down.
The second column is the amount of each flour to make 1 cup.
The third column is for 2 cups and
The fourth column is for 4 cups.
You don’t have to add your xanthan gum to the mix. You can do it with each recipe but since it’s all I’ve ever known I really like having some in the mix.
So here are the amounts I used for the xanthan gum. I use a tsp for this because I wasn’t getting good results at all with weighing it.
1 cup a little less than 1/2 tsp
2 cups 1/2 tsp plus 1/4 tsp
4 cups 1 tsp plus 1/2 tsp plus 1/4 tsp
8 cups 3 tsp plus 1/2 tsp
Is realize this probably looks silly and unnecessary but using a straight 1/2 tsp per cup of flour did not work for me with this blend.
The way I’ve been mixing mine to make sure it’s evenly distributed is…say I’m making 8 cups…which is what I’m doing with each batch right now…I weigh out my brown rice then add the total amount of xanthan and mix well. Then I add the corn starch and mix well. Followed by the rest of the flours mixing well after each. When I get to the potato / sweet rice / dry milk I add those all together since it’s a smaller amount.
Once I moved up to making 4 cups at a time I started using the mixer with the whip attachment to do the work and to make sure everything is evenly combined.
I’ve now tested it with all my ‘mainstays’ and this is the blend that gave me all of the following results…
Banana muffins. Same recipe. C4C on the left. My blend on the right. Notice the rise with my blend?
Mini bread loaves. C4C on the left. My blend on the right. Notice the rise with my blend? Note – the pan to the far left of my blend is bigger than the other pans so the rise wasn’t as high.
Dr. Pepper Cake. C4C on left. My blend on right (before icing). I’m showing the un-iced cake with my blend so you can see the rise. No sinking at all with my blend…in any recipe I’ve tested so far. Knocking on wood now. 😉
English Muffins with some pretty nice ‘nooks and crannies’ plus the cut mini bread loaf. I’m going to do a dedicated English Muffin post soon.
Rustic Raisin Bread and Tortilla that stayed rolled without breaking.
Red Velvet cake and Pizza.
Super moist Dr. Pepper cake and of course the donuts. 🙂
I’m very happy with this blend and while I didn’t recreate Cup4Cup…flour for flour…for me what I did create is even better. It has all the lightness and ease of use as C4C but with better rise and just overall structure. I’m sure 17 tries probably sound excessive…maybe even obsessive…to some but I’m so glad I took the time to get it exactly where I wanted it to be. Knowing that I can just mix this up, throw it in the freezer, pull it out and go makes me excited to get in the kitchen and try some new recipes. 🙂
If you read all of this…thank you for reading 🙂 and I hope you found it helpful. 🙂
Hope y’all have a good weekend. 🙂 Happy Thanksgiving weekend to our friends in Canada. 🙂
**If you have any comments / questions about the flour…I’ll always answer but I’ve had a tiring week with lots of lost sleep and a trip to an out of town doctor. I have a massage today and I might not get back to the blog until later in the weekend or Monday.
Tomorrow will be back to ‘normal’ around here but today we’re going to roll with something a little more meaningful than gluten-free treats and my ridiculously eclectic taste in music. 🙂
I don’t usually blog on Thursday but a reader contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in sharing this video. At first I wasn’t sure since it doesn’t have anything to do with lupus / celiac or gluten-free cooking…but after watching it and reading a little bit about Heather I think her message of hope can resonate with both lupus and celiac patients.
Heather was diagnosed with mesothelioma (from second hand asbestos exposure) three months after her daughter was born. She was given 15 months to live. Her daughter is now 8. 🙂 She’s not looking for money or donations or anything like that. She simply wants to raise awareness.
Her message is “With hope, the odds don’t matter”.
I think that’s one we can all embrace. 🙂
Have a look if you need a little inspiration today and best wishes to Heather and her beautiful family. 🙂
This is the link to her site if you’d like to read more about her diagnosis and triumph. 🙂
Rural Route Lupiac 