Are you sitting down?  Good, ok, here goes.  I have a confession to make : I’ve recently starting dabbling in gluten-free and dairy-free baking.  There, I’ve said it.  It’s out.  Go ahead, you can judge me now.  I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking I’m doing this to be “cool”, cause ya know, gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, egg-free, vegan-baking is all the rage right now.  Well, you’re wrong.  I’m a lot of things, but I am not trendy (says the girl who started a cupcake bakery).

For years now I’ve been a firm believer that all these food sensitivities people claim to have are  just another example of how lame we are as a society.  Yet another example of the fact that those who live in developed counties don’t have to worry about, oh I don’t, SURVIVING anymore, so we starting coming up with other stuff to worry about, like, for instance, seasonal depression.

In the words of Chris Rock…

“You think anyone in Rwanda’s got a fucking lactose intolerance?”

Funny, all that changed a few months ago when I started experiencing some weird symptoms.  I won’t bore you with the details cause it’s sort of  a long story and this isn’t that kind of blog, but basically it boils down to this: I might have a food sensitivity.  Oh, excuse me while I take my foot out of my mouth (thankfully my sensitively isn’t to my feet cause they end up there quite often).

When the possibility of a food sensitivity was first suggested to me I, of course, balked.  “I don’t believe in food sensitivities” I said.  Since then I’ve done a lot of research in the area of food allergies, sensitivities and intolerance and, well, I gotta say, I’ve learned a lot, namely, that I’ve been kind of a jerk when it comes to this topic.

Turns out the reason that people who live in places like Rwanda don’t have food sensitivities is because they are probably still eating the way their ancestors did a thousand years ago.  In other words, the way humans evolved to eat.  Food sensitivities tend to be more prevalent in developed countries because, basically, we have the “luxury” of eating a bunch of crap that our bodies haven’t really had time to adapt to.  I could go on and on about this topic, but you and I both know that if you’re looking for scientific evidence or concrete data on just about anything, chances are you’re not looking for it at Naughty Little Cupcake.  So, I’m going to cease my rant and instead share this awesome cookie recipe I’ve stumbled upon.

They’re what I like to call The Big 3-Free Cookies, the big 3 being gluten, dairy and eggs.  Behold…

Below is all you’ll need to make these cookies.

Front row: walnuts, dates.  Back row: maple syrup, grapeseed oil, kosher salt, nutmeg, vanilla, cinnamon.

Ingredients -

• 2 cups walnuts or pecans
• 12-ish dates, pitted
• 2 tsp grapeseed oil
• 3 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt (I like to use kosher, not because I’m Jewish, but because the flaky consistency incorporates quickly)
• 4 to 5 tbs pure maple syrup (you worth it, don’t settle for maple flavored high fructose corn syrup)
• 1 cup unsweetened, shredded coconut (optional)

Directions -

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Place walnuts and dates in a food processor and pulse until coarsely ground.  Pulse in oil, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.  Contiue to pulse until mixture begins to form a ball.

2. Remove mixture from food processor and tranfer to a large mixint bowl.  Add maple syrup and mix well.  Add coconut and mix until thoroughly blended.

3.  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, or if you don’t have any parchment just lightly grease your baking sheet with some of the grapeseed oil.  Scoop a little more than a tablespoon of the dough, roll it into a ball and place it on the baking sheet.  Make an indention in the ball with your thumb or fore finger.

4.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until slightly firm and brown on the bottom.  Allow to cool on the baking sheet for 15 minutes.

Note:  While it may be tempting, do not eat these cookies hot and fresh out of the oven.  They need some time to set up.  Be patient.  Take a walk around the block or YouTube some old Chris Rock stand-up while you wait.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that you won’t even notice that these cookies don’t have flour, dairy or eggs in them, because  it’s really quite obvious that they don’t, so you will.  What I will tell you is that you won’t care because they are very tasty little treats that can stand on their own without the “these-cookies-don’t-have-conventional-cookie-ingredients-in-them” introduction.  When you serve these cookies to guests, don’t feel compelled to mention that they don’t contain wheat, dairy or eggs; your guests will think you think they are stupid for stating what is so clearly apparent.

The only down side to these cookies is that they kind of look like miniature sausage patties.  Really.  I had some of these cookies in my pack recently when I was out for a day of back country skiing .  When my friend and I stopped for a snack I pulled them out and started munching away.  My friend suddenly stopped his munching, gave me a strange look and asked,  “Are you eating breakfast sausage?”

I tried taking A LOT of pictures of these cookies for this post and no matter what I did they still looked like sausage patties.  I’m sure a trained photographer could have made them look like cookies, but I’m a baker, not a photographer.  Here, see what I mean…

Jimmy Dean, eat your heart out!

This recipe was adapted from one that I found in the November issue of ‘Delicious Living’, you know, that free mag they give away at health food stores.

Alright folks, think fast – what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see the following picture?

If you said “Irish Car Bombs” then chances are you and I had very similar college experiences.  However, I must be maturing at a rate faster than I once thought, because now when I see Guinness and Baileys together all I can think about is cake (well, cake and that one really, really awful hangover from St Patrick’s day 2006) .

In my continuing quest to try new and creative cake recipes I stumbled upon this little gem that was just begging to be baked: Guinness chocolate cake with a Baileys Irish Cream frosting.  Go ahead and take a moment to wipe the drool from your chin.

The recipe is fairly simple and quick, the results are amazing and the very best part…

…you get to drink what’s left over from the recipe!  I know, the picture is blurry.  What can I say?  I’m a lightweight!

Melting the butter into the beer.  It may sound gross, but it actually smelled wonderful!

Adding sugar to the beer/butter combo.

Everything all mixed together.  I found the batter to be a little on the runny side.

Filling up the cupcake cups.

Finished product!

Verdict on the Good, Bad, Naughty Scale: Good + 4 (see bottom of ‘About the NLC Blog’ page for an explanation of the Good, Bad, Naughty Scale)

These little guys were so, so, so close to getting a Naughty rating.  The only thing that kept them from achieving Naughtiness-dom was that the frosting was a tad on the strong side.   I like the taste of Baileys and all, but  I was expecting more of a dessert and not a shot.  That, of course, can be fixed though by just cutting back on the Baileys in the frosting and substituting some milk or cream instead.  The cake was wonderful.  So moist, very chocolaty and just the slightest hint of Guinness flavor.  This recipe is a definite keeper.

I’ve been a whitewater kayaker for nearly 10 years now and I can honestly say that there are few things in life that have elicited more fear and simultaneous excitement in me than scouting a Class V drop.  That is until this last weekend when I catered my boss’s daughter’s 6th birthday party.  Talk about some pressure!

My mission: 2 dozen white cupcakes, 8 with chocolate frosting, 8 with vanilla and 8 with strawberry, a sort of Neapolitan theme.

I spent all of Friday night baking and trying to perfect the strawberry frosting which turned out to be the crux of the job (I finally figured it out after throwing away the first 2 batches).  I delivered the cakes early on Saturday morning before heading to my “real” job at the kayak shop.  I spent the entire day at the shop consumed with worry; what if they thought the cake was too dry?  What if they thought the frosting was too sweet?  What if the wind blew the pastry racks over before the party started?  All my fears were laid to rest later in the day when I received an email from Cheryl, Tanner’s mom:

“Great time had by all. EVERYONE LOVED the cupcakes! Great frosting! We sent one with a card home with every mom! Thanks again! -Cheryl”

Whew!  Sweet, sweet success!

Lovely little cakes fresh out of the oven.  Note that they didn’t fall in the center!

One of each: chocolate, vanilla & strawberry…

Tanner’s extra big, birthday girl cupcake…

The pastry racks I decorated for the party with the not so discreet NLCC advertising on the top.

Party set up…

Check out the little blond girl in the back.  She’s already got her fingers in the frosting.  Too cute!  The birthday girl is front and center in the white shirt and brown pants looking shy.

Dad is lighting the candles…

Tanner getting ready to devour her cupcake…

10 little girls diggin’ in…

Who loves cake?  Everyone loves cake!

Cheryl – thanks for hiring me to do the job and thanks for taking some great pics of the girls enjoying my cupcakes!  Hope I get to do it again for Tanner’s 7th!

Pay attention, I’m about to to blow your mind.  I have in my possession quite possibly the world’s very best chocolate chip cookie recipe and I’m going to share it with you (insert pause for dramatic effect here).  I know what you’re thinking: “Yawn.  Chocolate chip cookies are so boring”, right?  WRONG!  If you think that, then you’ve clearly never met a chocolate chip cookie of this caliber and you’ll have to find it in your heart to forgive you mother for this crime at some point.  These cookies are good.  Really good.  These cookies are so good they can’t even be ranked on the Naughty Scale.  They are so far beyond naughty that naughty blushes when these cookies are in the room.

How do I know these cookies are that good?  Well, because every time I make them inevitably one of the recipients will find it necessary to trap me, for several minutes, in a totally one-sided conversation about how these are the very best chocolate chip cookies they have ever had.  I already know this, but I usually let them continuing speaking out of respect for the fact that it’s not everyday someone has the opportunity to see God in a chocolate chip cookie and I kinda feel like I need to honor that experience for them.  That’s how.

Ingredients–

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 large eggs
  
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 1/2 cups whole oats, blended into a semi-course flour in a blender.  Be sure to measure out the 2 1/2 cups BEFORE blending instead of after.  Very important.
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 12 oz of semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 4 oz dark chocolate bar, grated
• 1 1/2 cup chopped nuts of your choice (but really, why would you want to destroy good chocolate chip cookies by adding nuts?)

Directions–

Pre-heat over to 375 degrees.  Cream together butter, both sugars, vanilla and eggs in a large bowl.  Set aside.  Mix together flour, oat flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in a medium sized bowl.  Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix until just blended then add chocolate chips and grated dark chocolate (and the nuts if you’re just hell-bent on ruining this recipe).  Roll dough between your hands to form inch-ish sized balls, place on cookie sheet and bake for 9 minutes.  *Baking note:  you’re gonna pull these cookies out of the oven after 9 minutes and think they don’t look done yet.  Trust me.  They’re done.  After cooling on the counter for a few minutes they’ll set up beautifully and be just perfect.  If you’re one of those crazy people who likes a crispy cookie (then perhaps you should consider baking biscotti) you can go ahead and leave them in for an extra minute or so.

Whala!  The best chocolate chip cookies ever!  The secret is in the blended oatmeal and the grated dark chocolate: the blended oats give the cookies a wonderful, hearty texture without all the bulk and density of a whole oat while the grated dark chocolate ramps up the chocolate flavor making for a small, yet intense, cookie orgasm in your mouth.  All joking and bragging aside, I really do believe these are the best chocolate chip cookies ever.  Hope you enjoy them!

The batter:

Delightful little cookie dough balls:

Stacks ‘o cookies:

The cookie that soon found a home in my belly:

One note in the interest of full disclosure: I baked these cookies for Evan, my special man friend, who doesn’t like dark chocolate (don’t hold that against him, he’s a very likable guy beyond that) which is why you don’t see the lovely little flecks of dark chocolate peppering the cookies in these pictures that you will definitely see in your cookies if you choose to prepare them according to the recipe (you’d be a fool not to).  Normally I don’t indulge Evan’s dark chocolate aversion becuase it’s never seemed to stop him from enjoying them before, but this time things were different.  You see, Evan left yesterday for the Wrangle Range in Alaska.  He’ll spend the next month there climbing and skiing big mountains and doing the general adventure thing.  I figured since these cookies will act as fuel on his tour de awesomeness I would make them just the way he likes them – no dark chocolate.

Good luck and be safe up there baby.  Counting down the days…

I’ve been experimenting with lots of cake recipes of late, but I’ve yet to score a ‘Naughty’ on any attempts at basic chocolate cake so far.  I really didn’t expect chocolate cake to be the test piece that stumped me, but perhaps I entered into the challenge a bit over confident (strange, sooo out of character for me).  I’m beginning to realize it’s the super basic cakes that I’m struggling with the most.  I have some theories on why this might be…

• Basics like yellow, white and chocolate cake are so fundamentally simple that there is no covering up a job poorly done.  There’s just not enough going on in them to mask a mistake.

• I already have an idea of what a the perfect chocolate cake tastes like in my mind, so I’m immediately judging the cakes I make against something that is quite nearly impossible to duplicate.  When I whip up something unconventional, for example ginger-pumpkin cake with ginger-cream cheese frosting, it’s hard to have expectations on how it will taste because, up until recently, I had never tasted it.

• I am my own most critical and demanding customer (this is going to be a tough one to over come) .

All of the above may be what’s keeping me from creating the perfect chocolate cake or it could be that I just haven’t stumbled upon the right recipe yet?  For the sake of my sanity I hope it’s the latter.

When I spoke to my friend Katie (who I should note is a bad-ass kayaker, fantastic mom not to mention an aggressive baker) about the problem she offered up one of her favorite recipes for me to try.  It is as follows…

Ingredients–

• 4 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped
• 2 cups plus 3 tbsp sifted all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 pound butter (2 sticks) at room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups plus 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 eggs at room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups plus 2 tbsp buttermilk well shaken

It should be noted that this recipe is specifically designed for baking at 7,000 feet (hence the odd measuring amounts).  I live at 8,2000 feet, but what’s a a thousand-ish feet, right?  I decided I had nothing to lose other than time, money and the ever dwindling confidence that I could bake a decent chocolate cake.

Instructions–I’ve modified some of her original instructions to accommodate for the baking of cupcakes.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.  Prepare 2 1/2 muffin tins with baking cups, set aside.  Put chocolate into a double broiler and set on simmering, stirring occasionally until smooth.  Remove from heat, set aside. In a medium bowl whisk together flour through nutmeg, set aside. In the large bowl of an electric mixer cream together butter and sugar, about 1 minute. Beat in vanilla and then the eggs, adding them 2 at a time. Beat well to blend. With the mixer on it’s lowest speed alternately add the flour mixture and the buttermilk. Stir in melted chocolate until batter is an even color and no longer streaked. Bake for 18 minutes or until a cake tester inserted into the center of several cupcakes come out clean. Allow cakes to cool before frosting.

Okay, here we go.

I ran into a problem almost immediately as I don’t have a double boiler (mental note: add double boiler to the list of things I want).  Using some quick thinking and my ghetto-kitchen style I came up with a pseudo double boiler; chocolate in a pot – pot in a deep pan filled with water – boil water – BAM! You got yourself a double boiler (kind of anyway).

I’ve decided that authors of recipes that call for things like double boilers only do so to make people feel inadequate for not having luxury cooking accessories.  I think my pseudo double boiler worked just fine, but then again, I’ve never actually used a double boiler so I suppose I don’t really know what I’m missing and as per usual I probably don’t really know what I’m talking about.  But, I digress…

Here’s the batter pre-chocolate…

Getting ready to do some homogenizing…

Blending…

Blended.  I know this is going to make me sound like a gigantic dork, but I thought this cake batter was really beautiful.  The consistency was exsactly what you think of when you think of cake batter (cause everyone thinks about the consistency of cake batter, right?).

Cakes post baking.  Every cake collapsed just a little bit in the middle like this.  Guess I need to make some additional high-altitude adjustments (apparently a thousand feet does make a difference, who knew?).

I topped these cakes with a simple, yet wonderful, creamy chocolate frosting (2 3/4 cups confectioners’ sugar, 6 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder, 6 tablespoons butter, 5 tbsp evaporated milk and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Mix. Awesome.)

Verdict on the Good, Bad, Naughty Scale: Good + 4  (see bottom of ‘About the NLC Blog’ page for an explanation of the Good, Bad, Naughty Scale)

These were some really, really, really good cupcakes.  Why not a + 5 then?  Well, they could have been just a hair more chocolaty.  Everything else about them was perfect though.  Thanks to the buttermilk the cake was moist, but not greasy.  The texture was just dense enough to keep the cake from crumbling after the first bite.  While I can’t be sure, I think the nutmeg may have helped cut the sweetness of the cake ever so slightly.  Honestly, if I hadn’t known there was nutmeg in it, I would have never guessed.

With a little work I think think this might be the chocolate cake recipe.  Of course I’ll need to continue to tweak it for altitude and I’d like to increase the chocolate content to make for a more robust chocolate flavor.  I’m thinking next time I’ll use chocolate pieces AND cocoa powder.  With these small changes I may have a real deal naughty on my hands!

Carrot cake as always been my personal favorite.  As a kid I think I liked it cause the idea of vegetables going into cake was silly.  I nearly always requested carrot cake for my birthday as a child.  As an adult I like carrot cake because it’s the easiest cake to justify splurging on.  I mean, for the love of all things sacred, it’s got vegetables in it people!!  It’s the next best thing to eating a salad or taking a vitamin, right?  It’s health food!

I have a tried and true carrot cake recipe that I LOVE and have faithfully used for the past several years (I hereby promise to share this recipe at some point in a future post), but in the spirit of experimentation I decided to branch out and try something new.  I came across a carrot cake recipe that used oil instead of butter.  Wha wha what?  Oil?  I was intrigued.  Never baked a cake with oil before.  Apparently, according to the recipe’s creator, using oil in cakes rather than butter “allows you to serve the cake cold without it hardening like a cake made from butter”.  Right, ok, I’m sold.  Let’s give it a go…

Ingredients–

• 2 cups shifted all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• ¾ cup canola oil
• ¾ cup well shaken buttermilk
• 3 eggs
• 1 8oz. can crushed pineapple
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups grated carrots
• 1 cup unsweetened, grated coconut
• 1 cup chopped nuts of my choice.

Directions- Mix, bake @ 350, blah, blah, blah.

I made my go-to Cream Cheese frosting to top the cakes (this frosting is amazing and, again, I promise to share the recipe at a later date).

Verdict on the Good, Bad, Naughty Scale : Good + 1 (see bottom of ‘About the NLC Blog’ page for an explanation of the Good, Bad, Naughty Scale)

Clearly, I wasn’t impressed.  I thought the cake was too oily, shocking, I know, since it was made with oil.  Maybe it’s just because I was raised on cakes made with butter, but I didn’t like the texture of the cake on my tongue and my fingers were all greasy-disgusting when I was finished.  I also thought the cake was fairly bland.   I should have listened to my gut and thrown in some more spices like nutmeg, cloves and ginger.

Oh well.  Can’t win ‘em all when you’re experimenting I suppose.