Some misadventures in baking....

I started last week with gusto, I was pumped and excited to make myself some Gluten Free treats and had looked up a few delicious recipes.

 After being tempted at work with cream puffs I decided I needed to make them myself. I  spent a good chunk of my Sunday looking for good Gluten free choux pastry recipes and found two the looked like they would work, one with a rice flour blend and the other with a corn flour blend. I decided to try the rice flour first as it looked similar to the original method.  When I was a kid I remember staying up with my mother as she baked for the holidays, she would make chocolate eclairs for Easter and I simply loved being the taster. If she made bigger puffs, after they baked she would cut them open and scrap out the insides to make room for the filling and this warm, moist, pudding like stuff would be scraped into a bowl. It really was only flour, butter, and egg but I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world and would gobble it all up. The rice flour recipe started out well, even looking like the gluten version through most of the steps. I was really beginning to get excited, then came time to put it in a bag and pipe it on to the baking sheet.
It was runny, but I had hopes it was just because it was Gluten free and Gluten free recipes tend to be moister than those with wheat flour.

I was wrong.

They flattened out into disc shapes and stayed there. I let them cool and tasted one, and it tasted pretty good, but was dense. My optimism  shoved the disappointment aside and I began to start on the second recipe I found.  As I cooked up the next test subject I could see it had a thicker consistency to it  and would hold its shape when I piped it out and sure enough I piped them out on the baking sheet and they didn't droop. I baked them and crossed my fingers that  I would soon be enjoying delicious cream puffs. Busy with other things I let them cook five minutes longer than called for and quickly pulled them out of the over, a little dark but not ruined. I pricked them with my knife to let out the steam and met only crunch, I then tried one, It was crunchy, and solid. Even if I had taken them out 5 minutes sooner they still would have been solid, crunchy and tasting like a tortilla chip.

 I decided that cream puffs were not happening that day and moved on.

Next on my list of things to try were Beignets. A sweet doughnut like treat you fry and dust in powdered sugar. It called for Gluten free vanilla cake mix which I happened to have, I thought it was fate. After doing the first few steps of the recipe, it called for you to put the 'dough' on a floured surface and knead in the rest of the flour until it formed a nice ball....This is what happened.



I ended up adding more flour to it than the recipe  called for. I never did get it into a ball, but I kept on going.

This was as close to a ball I could get it and I moved on to the next step, covering and refrigerating for at least 12 hours. 12 hours later it looked more like a dough ball and I rolled it out and cut it into pieces and got my oil nice and hot.

It broke into pieces if i tried to flip it over and cook the other side. In the end this is what I ended up with.

After reading through the recipes I decided that  with the cream puffs my liquid could of been off on both of those, but I think the recipe for the Beignets wasn't my fault for not turning out, or at least not for turning out as bad as it did.

I was done with trying to make sweet things and went back to something I had made before.
I was going to make chicken pot pie for dinner using that cracker recipe, remember? I made it omitting the salt completely and adding more chicken bouillon. I cooked up everything for the filling and rolled out the dough, It didn't want to cooperate and stay together when I moved it into the pie dish so I just mushed it in there and rolled the top portion out on wax paper and after filling it I plopped the top crust on and  pressed it down to seal it.

Not the prettiest but I felt triumphant.  I baked it until  it was golden and the inside was done.

Beautiful if I do say so myself, and it was tasty, the perfect tasting crust but when I went to cut into it.....

It was extremely  brittle and crumbled when I cut into it, I need to work on it a bit more  so it's more pie like but it turned out way betting than my attempts at baking sweet things Gluten free. When I work out the kinks you'll get the recipe :)