Gluten Free Cake Mix 3.28.12

I did a little internet research on the best gluten-free cake mixes for chocolate and yellow cake.  After my try at the Betty Crocker yellow cake mix from Shaw's, I realized I needed to try more variety and some better brands.  So I went to Whole Foods this time, which had a nice variety of GF cake mixes, but nothing more than $7.

Here are some of my top picks from my internet search

Chocolate
Triumph Dining.com Best Gluten Free Cake Mix Betty Crocker
glutenfreefoodreviews.com Pure Pantry Wholegrain Dark Chocolate Cake Mix 5 Stars
glutenfreefoodreviews.com Pamela's Products Lucious Chocolate Cake Mix ? stars
glutenfreefoodreviews.com Betty Crocker Devil's Food Cake 4 Stars
celiac.com Namaste Chocolate Cake Mix
celiac.com Gluten-Free Essentials Extreme Chocolate Cake Mix.

Yellow
Rachael Ray Best Yellow Cake The Really Great Food Company Yellow Cake Mix

For the chocolate cakes I am testing three mixes:  Pamela's Luscious Chocolate Cake Mix, Cherrybrook Kitchen Gluten Free Chocolate Cake Mix, and Dowd & Rogers Gluten Free Dutch Chocolate Cake Mix

Pamela's
The batter was very thin, but did not taste gritty even though the dry ingredients felt the most gritty of the three.  Also, the batter tasted nutty and had a deep and interesting flavor.  I forgot to put in the extra egg for a lighter cake, but I though the cake came out great with just 2 eggs.

The cupcakes baked up beautifully mounded.  The tops were cracked, revealing they are gluten free, but I can certainly live with that.  The tops will most likely be covered with frosting anyway.  And I kindof like the signature gluten free cracking.    The flavor was amazing.  Chocolately and nutty and deep.  The texture had a slight rubberness to it and the crumb was light and even.  Half the batch made 8 cupcakes.

Cherrybrook Kitchen
The batter was also quite thin, but not as liquidy as Pamela's. The batter was not too gritty and tasted chocolately.  The cupcakes baked up into a pointy, volcano shape.  After  tasting the baked cupcake, the taste was not as rich and chocolately as Pamela's and it had some sort of artificiality in the flavor (a metallic taste possibly?) - The texture was great, and not rubbery at all.  The crumb was light.  Half the batch made 6 cupcakes.

Dowd & Rogers
This cake had the most complicated mixing method.  The butter and sugar need to be creamed first, then eggs added slowly and dry ingredients combined last.  The batter is curdled looking until all dry ingredients are in and the batter is thick like traditional batter.  These cupcakes had a nice rounded shape after they were baked.  They had a nice chocolate taste, light even crumb and good texture, a little crumbly (maybe not the best for layer cakes?) Half the batch made 6 cupcakes.

The final ranking

1) Dowd & Rogers
2) Cherrybrook Kitchen
3) Pamela's

	Taste	Texture
Dowd & Rogers	Y	Y
Pamela's	Y	N
Cherrybrook Kitchen	N	Y

As a follow up, I froze some of the cupcakes for 4 days, defrosted them and tried them again.  It was hard to distinguish between Dowd & Rogers and Pamela's.  Pamela's was more moist, and only a trace of the gummy texture was left.  Both had good chocolate flavor, but Dowd & Rogers was a little dry/crumbly.  Cherrybrook Kitchen still had a strange aftertaste.  Also, the top of Pamela's and Cherrybrook Kitchen's cupcakes got very sticky after I defrosted them, while Dowd & Rogers had a drier top. (Butter vs oil?)

Bertucci's desserts 3.21.12

Bertucci's, 799 Main St  Cambridge, MA

It's not worth it anymore to get dessert at Bertucci's.  This time I tried the crostata, but the crust was like pizza crust and I would have much better liked a flaky, buttery pastry crust.

This is the apple cranberry crostata.  The filling was like water.

Tiramisu

Honey Ice Cream 3.22.12

I've been to excited to try this recipe from Saveur with the local honey I have from the Poughkeepsie Farm Project.

Honey Ice Cream ingredients:

1 1⁄3 cups milk
1 1⁄3 cups heavy cream
3⁄4 cup honey
1⁄4 tsp. vanilla extract
2 egg

I ignored the directions and cooked the base like a creme anglaise.  I also added an egg to make it thicker (the original recipe uses only 1 egg).  I think I should have used another egg since the mixture is a little too thin and doesn't quite coat the back of the spatula yet.

The ice cream churned up nicely.  It was only a little icy, but very sweet from the honey.

Cafe on the Common 3.20.12

Cafe on the Common, 677 Main Street, Waltham, MA

I didn't get to try this Molasses cookie, but it was soft and it smelled good.

Heart Cake 3.19.12

I acquired some left over heart cakes from work in yellow and chocolate.

I filled the cake with buttercream and strawberries and placed the yellow cake on top.

I decorated the cake with colored buttercream.

Brigham's Ice Cream 3.17.12

Brigham's Mint Chocolate Chip

I'm so happy I found another ice cream with real chocolate chips in mint ice cream. The mint ice cream isn't as good as HD five, but it's pretty delicious.


INGREDIENTS:
Cream, Skim Milk, Sugar, Chocolate Chips (Sugar, Chocolate Liquor, Chocolate Liquor Processed With Alkali, Cocoa Butter, Vanilla), Peppermint Extract, Color Added (Yellow 5 & Blue 1), Guar Gum, Salt, Mono & Diglycerides, Dextrose, Polysorbate 80, Carrageenan, Cellulose Gum.

Rialto Restaurant 3.15.12

Rialto Restaurant, One Bennett Street, Cambridge, MA

Bread Basket with some really good breadsticks

Tiramisu parfait… candied chestnuts, walnuts, maple fudge

Bowl of hazelnut ice cream.  VERY delicious

Hazelnut chocolate cookie after dessert

Christina's 3.14.12

I only have good things to say about Christina's.  But I caught her on a bad day.  I tried this ginger molasses ice cream and it was a fail.  The ginger taste was raw and strong.  Overwhelming at first, the back of my throat started to tingle after eating about half of my small cup of ice cream.

Chia cupcakes 3.13.12

This recipe is based off of the Velvet cake recipe from Coppedge's Gluten-Free Baking.

There's some math involved here.  Velvet cake from the Coppedge's book involves two flour blends (#1 and #3).  I'm making one batch of the Velvet cake and making them into cupcakes.  I'm substituting the gum for ground, hydrated chia seeds.  I'm also substituting the powdered albumen for egg whites.  Basically, I'm substituting wet ingredients (or wet versions) of the gum and albumen.  So I just need to blend the dry ingredients from flour blend #3.

I mixed half batches of flour blend #1 and #3, but left out the gum and albumen in #3.  So flour blend #1 will be a straight substitution.  Flour blend #3 has only 9 3/4 ounces of the total (12 oz), or 81.25% .  The recipe calls for 3.25 oz of flour blend #3.  Thus, I will use 81.25% of 3.25 oz, which is 2.64 oz, rounding to 2 5/8 oz dry flour blend #3.

I used 2 t whole chia seeds.  The recipe calls for 0.17 oz.   [Note: 1.5t whole chia seeds = 1 t ground chia seeds.  2t whole chia seeds= between 1/8 and 2/8 oz]   For second half of the batch, I added more hydrated chia seeds to that the amount was doubled in the recipe.

I substituted 2 oz of egg white for 0.46 oz powdered albumen.

The batter doesn't come together and separates after it sits for a while.  I suspect the batter separated some for the first few minutes in the oven as well.

More tunneling here.  The left cupcake has half the amount of chia seeds than the right cupcake.

The cupcakes rose nicely during baking, but doesn't have enough structure and collapses after cooled.  The cupcakes had a gummy texture.  The bottom of the cupcakes had a different texture then the top, perhaps due to the batter settling in the muffin tin.  I believe the texture problem is due to increased hydration in the recipe.  For starters, I didn't account for the water used to hydrate the chia seeds.  Would cornstarch help thicken the batter?  Maybe only after it's baked.

Also, I used a dutch processed cocoa blend.  This blend will have less acidity than a natural cocoa, which would inhibit the reaction with the baking soda and may decrease the leavening in the cupcake.

Next time I will try half of the batter with no chia seed slurry, and half with chia seeds.  I also want to try using half chia seeds, half flax seeds.

I used a white buttercream for these cupcakes. (quadruple the recipe to frost an 8" cake)
6 T butter
2 c conf sugar (208 g)
1/2 t vanilla
pinch salt
 1 1/2 T milk

The flavor of these cupcakes was really good.  But the texture and shape need some work.

Lyndell's Bakery 3.10.12

Lyndell's Bakery, 720 Broadway, Somerville, MA

Lemon Donut

It's the most delicious donut!  What a treat!

Filled Cokies: Raspberry and apricot

Linzer cookie (raspberry)

Bambara 3.9.12

Bambara, 25 Edwin H. Land Blvd., Cambridge , MA

Such good food.  Desserts were spectacular.  I died when I tasted the caramel sauce.  And the raspberry coulis. Wow.


Warm Caramel Date Cake
Caramel, vanilla ice cream

The only thing I didn't like was that the ice cream melted pretty fast on top of the warm cake.  The cake was very good, a little sweet, but good.  I haven't eaten dates in a while, so it didn't really make me think of dates, but it was yummy and went great with the caramel.  The ice cream is Christina's.



Hot Chocolate Cake
Creme anglaise, raspberry coulis

Iggy's bread.  It was very good.  Warm with a nice crust.  I was happy the way it was served.

Dark Hot Chocolate 3.9.12

I made some hot chocolate with Hershey's Dark Cocoa.  I thought I would like it more than I did.  It tasted good, but I prefer the regular cocoa/chocolate flavor.

Black & White reprise 3.7.12

I love this recipe for classic New York style Black & White cookies from Baking Illustrated.    I thought the lemon flavor in the cookie was subtle and next time I'll use twice the amount of lemon flavoring.

I love that the cookies look like pancakes.

For the frosting, I used melted chocolate (Ghirardelli unsweetened chocolate baking bar).  I might have used cocoa powder previously.  I had forgotten to add more water after adding the melted chocolate, but remembered after already frosting 6 cookies.  I added water until the icing looked glossy and was thinned out.  Then it was perfect!

I am experimenting more with wrapping now that I'm very happy with this cookie and have had consistent output.  I tried individual bags with twist ties.  The cellophane candy bags are more expensive than ziplock bags, so I bought some ziplock bags and cut the ziplock part off.   I think they came out pretty well.

Henrietta's Table 3.6.12

Henrietta's Table, One Bennett St, Cambridge, MA

Low Fat Chocolate Angel Food Cake & Peppermint Frozen Yogurt

This was such a delicious dessert. The scoop of ice cream was sliding all over the plate, so it would have been nice to put on a thin slice of angel cake, or some cake crumbs, or something.  The cake was light and delicious with perfect texture. The frozen yogurt left a strange waxy coating on my mouth, but the flavor and texture was great. 

Hamantaschen! 3.5.12

Happy Purim!  I love hamantaschen.  And I've found there are so many different versions. Here is one from Clear Flour Bread in Brookline.  The crust is like a butter cookie and the filling is soft, and rich.  This one is apricot.  The third side of this cookie fell over, but usually they look like triangles.

These are really big too, as you can see it's bigger than an apple.  

Quebrada sampler 3.2.12

I got a huge sampler box at Quebrada Bakery.  I am so lucky.

Cookies: chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, double ginger, white chocolate walnut brownie, oatmeal

 Pastry: Cinnamon roll and pecan roll

 Croissants: Cinnamon-almond, raspberry, plain, pain au chocolat

  Muffins: Blueberry, Poppy cream, Banana cranberry, banana blueberry

Scones: currant, blueberry