Complete Protein Raspberry Muffins (Maximum-Plant-Protein) *Gluten Free and Dairy Free*

    Finally, this muffin recipe has been a long work in progress so I'm thrilled to unveil it! This is a COMPLETE PROTEIN muffin folks, not just high protein but a complete one. Many of us are misguided when it comes to protein. Some of us think that only meat provides us with the protein we need but this is untrue. It is true that meat gives us the most protein in one sitting, but it's not necessarily our only options. I've come to realize that I'm a protein-per-meal kinda girl, you know, like those Paleo folks, without the quack theory behind it. Yep, I think it's a quack diet, philosophically, but I do agree that proteins are essential, and are so at every meal. But here's the thing, I'm not going to consume animal flesh at every meal, how sustainable is that? We're not here to eat the planet out of all of the animal, can you imagine if everyone ate meat at every meal? That would kill all of the animals pretty quickly.

There is a solution: plant proteins. They have gotten a bad rap because they aren't 'complete' but you actually don't need to 'complete' them at every meal, they only have to complete each other throughout the day. Personally, I'd rather make sure that I'm eating complete proteins at every meal. Here's how: Nuts, legumes and grains, eaten in combinations together creates a complete protein. Most of us don't know that. It's as simple as eating a small handful of nuts along with a small bowl of oatmeal in one sitting. "Boom", your complete proteins are consumed! But, grains these days have also had a bad rap, and I agree, mostly. Grains are slightly poisonous eaten 'just as they are', but with some soaking, and sprouting, they become digestible, and healthy! Now most grain flours are not soaked but by heating these foods, most of your evil lectins and phytates (the bad guys) are roasted and gone. (Not all of them are gone, but a good majority are). I still restrict myself to only two grains: occasional rice and oats. I love oats, I simply can't get enough of them, maybe because they have the tiniest amount of gluten in them that most celiacs can eat them without any repercussion. Now that's an awesome grain. No gluten and I'm in love! So, combine my love of complex carbs of oats, with some high protein nuts and you've got yourself a complete protein muffin for snacks. Add in some raspberries and oh la la, I'm a happy lady.

 

 

 Complete Protein Raspberry Muffins (Maximum-Plant-Protein) *Gluten Free and Dairy Free*
By Suzanne

1 and 1/4 Cup Almonds
1/3 C. Coconut flour (You will not be able to taste this in the recipe)
1/2 C. Oat flour
1 and 1/2 tsp Baking Powder OR 1/2 tsp Baking Soda*
1/2 tsp Himalayan/Sea salt

In a seperate bowl, mix:

3 Eggs
1/2 C. Honey or Maple Syrup
1/3 C. Coconut oil, melted
1/3 C. Coconut milk, full fat (or greek yogurt or sour cream for dairy options)
3/4 C. frozen raspberries or strawberries or any berry you like!
1 tsp Vanilla

*If using Baking Soda, add 1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25-27 minutes.

Notes: -Not suitable for omitting frozen berries as they add moisture to the recipe. I'm working on a chocolate chip recipe that will be posted later.
           -I like to ground whole almonds in my blender rather than buying almond flour, so if using store bought flour, make sure to pack it in your measuring cup. You will get course meal in your blender but if you like the bran texture, you'll like it.
           -Scoop 1/4 Cup of dough into each cupcake liner.
           -Store muffins in air-tight container on counter. They will get more dense in the fridge.
        
This recipe makes 1 dozen large muffins!!



 

ENJOY!!

Ladybugs and Strawberries, It's a Birthday Party!

I love making birthday cakes! Correction- I love decorating birthday cakes. Baking is not so much fun, but decorating makes my blood come alive. This cake took me about four hours to decorate, mind you I do take my time! It's great to have a plan for each layer but do just go with the flow because it never will end up how you planned it.
For instance, I did not plan on making pink rosettes to frame the bottom of the cake, I did this to hide the big gap between the green icing and the cake from the plastic wrap that I had placed on the cake stand to protect it from getting too messy. You have to improvise when you're an amature.
Here are the steps to making a three layered birthday cake:

Bake all four layers of cake the day before the party.

Start in the morning! I baked two 9 inch round cakes for the first layer with my Lucky Vanilla Cake Recipe. DO NOT DOUBLE THE RECIPE! Bake cakes individually and separately. Always do this when baking from scratch. The cake chemistry changes when you double, in other words, it ruins them. I still had to serve it to my friends unfortunately, but hey, I'm learning more and more every time!

I baked one recipe of my Lucky Vanilla Cake for a deep 6 inch round cake pan (I used a cheesecake pan) for the second layer.

I used the remaining batter from the second 6 inch layer cake to make the ladybug cake. I formed a slightly smaller circle shape with aluminum foil inside of my 6 inch cheesecake pan.

Make all icing the night before the party! And color all of your icing. Measure at least 3 cups of icing/buttercream for green, 2-3 cups for pink, 1 for red. A tiny bit for white and I bought a disgusting pre-made tube of black icing for the ladybug details.

I layered the cakes with fresh strawberries and jam the night before and wrapped my cakes thoroughly with plastic wrap and left them on the counter overnight. Do NOT refrigerate~ at least that's my opinion anyway. It makes the cakes denser, I like it fluffy.

Measure your dowels the night before to be ready to assemble your cake first thing in the morning. Plan for four hours before the party to focus on the cake, otherwise, do it the night before.

I made a sugar free icing for the cake that I'm pretty proud of, but it's not quite ready to go public yet..it will come soon!

It was such a fun party and I loved organizing it!

Here are a few other things I did for the party:

 

Cake Pops!!! Is it a toddler party without cake pops? Honestly, I hate them, I hate making a million of them, but they're cute after all. 

 

And Ladybug pins- These were really cute and it was fun to make with my mom and friend. I don't think I would have made them without their entertainment and help. I also made some ribbons that my daughter really liked.

 And of course, it's not quite a party without a few decorations. I made these while watching a movie, so it didn't seem to take much of my time. Gluing the letters on ribbon with hot glue was really fast and easy. I will probably do this again.

Well, I'm glad to be back after such a long absence.  I'm looking forward to all of the wonders that 2013 has to offer~ Happy New Year!!

Butterfly Cake Decor on Lemony Hell Cake

Decorative Cake Decor on Lemony Hell Cake

I call this the lemony hell cake only because it was pure hell trying to make a lemon flavoured italian meringue buttercream. I will probably not make this icing again, but aside from this, this cake was fun to make!

My sister loves butterflies so I decided to use it as the cake motif for her birthday.

 

Decorative Cake Decor- homemade!

-Draw the butterfly/image you want to make on regular paper with a black marker.
-Place a piece of wax paper on top of the image.
-Melt about 1 cup of wilton's white candy melts then put the chocolate mixture into a piping bag with a medium sized round tip.
-Squeeze the liquid candy melt onto the wax paper, tracing the image. Do it quickly.
-As soon as you are done, let the white chocolate solidify slightly, but not too much, just enough so you can bend it without breaking and without having the chocolate drip. I waiting maybe 10-20 seconds before placing it inside a hard covered book to let cool completely.

Let sit for a good 10 minutes, then gently peel off waxed paper (be careful, it breaks easily)- and then Voila!

For a nice lemony flavoured cake follow my Lucky Vanilla Cake recipe and add 2 tbs squeezed lemon juice. Reduce vanilla to 1/2 tsp. For best results, wrap cake in plastic wrap and airtight container overnight on counter. I prefer to not refrigerate this cake, it looses it's spongeness in the fridge.

Enjoy!

Lucky Vanilla Cake and a First birthday Party (Gluten-Free)

I promised myself I would make birthday cakes much simpler ever since my Elmo cake saga. Though this experience was simpler, it still was A LOT of work. But I keep learning and every time I make a new creative cake, I learn ways to make it easier for the next time. This time around, I finally made a cake frosting I can be proud of, a sugar-free birthday cake buttercream frosting!! The icing you see here, in this picture is completely sugar free. It's made with honey and stevia and NO, it does not taste like bitter stevia nor does it taste like the distinct honey taste. It's sweet and smooth, just like your ordinary American buttercream frosting. I also finally, after a year of trial and error, nailed my gluten free vanilla cake. So, this post is special. Two special recipes to share with you. Although I might post my buttercream frosting recipe in a couple of weeks when I have more time to show you more examples of what it can do.

Gluten Free Cheesecake and Chocolate Cake Pops for a Wedding

I made these cake pops for a wedding. It was my first large-scale cake pop making so I was a bit nervous, but I'm so glad I did it. The experience was worth it all.

It was a crazy Sunday when I was thinking up crazy schemes. This particular Sunday I decided that making cake pops as a side business would be a great idea. I then thought of the wedding I was going to a month later and what gift I would get. I put those thoughts together and out came my idea. Make cake pops for their wedding! It would give me experience making a lot of cake pops for someone else and it would be a nice gift since I knew they would appreciate gluten free cake pops. To my lucky surprise, the bride went for it! Ask, and you shall receive I tell you! 100 cake pops, here I come!

So on went the saga of making gluten free cake pops from scratch, for a super elegant event. Yikes! I was in over my head but with some test batches and an eye, or mind for baking, it was pretty straight forward. The hardest part of it all was coating them with the chocolate candy coatings and making the stripes. Once I figured that out it seemed easy as pie. It's not complicated making cake pops but it is very time consuming when making everything from scratch. And if you're making it for someone who has Celiac disease you have to make sure you do make everything from scratch and to read your labels! I thought it would also be nice to make it all from scratch for a wedding because there's something more 'classy' when making it that way rather then from a tub of crappy frosting with 30 unknown ingredients. So off the the chocolate shop I went...

For the Chocolate Cake pops: (I made two cakes to ensure I had extras)

-2 cakes of my I love you chocolate cupcake recipe. I added sour cream to the batter to make it more moist. (about 1/2 cup per cake). Bake the cakes, let cool completely then crumble with your hands or electric mixer.

-Since taste was of utmost importance (being a wedding and all), I made and ol' fashioned American Icing. I then added about 2 cups of icing to the cooled, crumbled cakes.

- I melted a dark chocolate bar of high quality from a health food store, making sure it was not made in a wheat facility. Like Green & Blacks for example. I poured it into the cake pop mixture and blended it by hand.

-Scoop 1 tablespoon of the dough then roll into a ball. Do that 50 times. Or however many you want. Remember that 1 cake will make about 45-55 cake pops. I only doubled the recipe to ensure I had enough to make plenty of mistakes! So if you want to make half the recipe, remember to also cut my icing and melted chocolate amounts.

-Refrigerate until ready to dip.

-Melt you chocolate waffers in a hot water bath or double boiler. I prefer this over microwaving it. Also, I prefer to get waffers from a specialty chocolate shop over the wilton brand candy waffers. I find the coating to be smoother with the higher quality products.

-Dip the end of your lollipop sticks into the chocolate then poke it in your cake ball about 3/4 of the way. I like to measure a stick to my freshly made cake pop to see how far into the cake ball it's in. I made the mistake of making 50 cake pops too shallow. The balls fell off the stick when I tried to coat them, so make sure to put them in 3/4!

-Refrigerate for about 10 minutes, not too long. Dip balls into your chocolate, then rest into a foam block (poke bottom of lolli stick in foam so the ball is straight up to dry). If you want your pops to rest straight up, place your almost dry pop on parchment paper (on top of cookie sheet) to mold a flat bottom.

And voila! you're done. Unless you have sprinkles or other decorations you want to make.

For more detailed information on making cakepops, go to Bakerella's website. She's the inventor of these cute little party favours.

I wish I took pictures during the making of this baking project, I was just too busy and my battery was dead. It would have been nice to show you pictures of them all in rows on the cookie sheets. Anyway, this is what I have for you, the finished product.

I also made a cheesecake cakepop, which was my favourite one. It was covered in white chocolate coating. I first tried using only cheesecake filling like other recipes have mentioned but I found this to not work at all. So I decided to stablelize the cheesecake filling with spongecake which worked like a charm. I added graham cracker style cookies to make the cakepop taste like you have the whole cake in your mouth in one bite. Here's how I make it.

For the cheesecake cake pop: (makes 100 cakepops, easy).

-make a 9" gluten free cheesecake without the crumb bottom.

-make a gluten free white cake. I used my infamous vanilla cake that i've yet to post...

-crumble 10 S'moreables (Gluten-free) and about half the white cake into the frozen cheesecake filling. blend all with your hands and roll into balls.

-Refrigerate, then coat with chocolate.

I'm thinking of possibly starting a little side business, like I mentioned before, but i'm not sure if it's worth it yet. It took so much time making this. Of course, I was figuring things out but still, it might not be worth my time for the money these little suckers are worth, but i'm thinking about it. If you're ever looking for someone to make you some gluten free cake pops in the Vancouver area, send me an email. I might just want to take it on.

It was really nice to have Husband M and I working together. Sure I did almost all of the work but he was a great helper. Especially with tying little white bows.

And of course, I wish all the best to the beautiful couple who had an amazing wedding. They definitely were radiating the love all night and I know they will have an amazing future filled with love, happiness and adventure, cuz life is nothing but a crazy ride.

Suzanne

xo

Dairy health, myth or fact?

I am absolutely determined to have a better day today. Yes, it's early. A little too early but that's okay because Smiley Baby is still sleeping and Lovely Toddler is playing somewhat not-too-noisely by herself. Awesome. This is a really good start to my day. Yesterday was not so good. I woke up to two screaming kids wanting to get out of their jailhouse rooms. My god I can't stand that wake-up call. But today is better, I can feel it! I might take a day off of obsessing about food and just enjoy what the day has to offer. Hmmm. Now I have Lovely Toddler whining for my attention. Gotta go! So to write this up quickly:

Here's what I thought I should share with you today. The Big Milk Myth. I came across this and need to share it. Why? because I've been suspicious of milk pretty much my entire life. I never cared for it as a child, teen or adult. And as an adult who does research in the health food world you'll see that almost every single Naturopath and associated websites will say it's not good. Some people can tolerate it, but most of us can't. Research shows that countries who consume less milk than countries that do have less cases of osteoporosis. (Now that's a mouthful of consonants!) Also, if you've seen the movie Food Inc. you might want to think twice before drinking milk from those cows who just aren't in the best physical and mental shape. I've read a lot of supporting research but I never collected them so now I'm left with my opinion with no back-up ready for you, except for this one article linked below. It's easy to find information on the internet, but this is the one that I wanted to share with the skeptics..

I just never liked milk and I don't care to push it onto my children either. I much prefer to give them unsweetened Almond Milk, or water. I sometimes will buy organic Cow's milk, but not often. I tried to give Lovely Toddler some cold herbal tea but it didn't go over well but that was over a year ago so maybe I should try it again. Also, Trader Joe's also has a new coconut milk in carton so I will have to try it out (assuming other ingredients are healthy). And now that Lovely Toddler is growing up a little, I'm also starting to occasionaly give her some not-from-concentrate, no-sugar added,organic blueberry juice. I do give her lots of yogurt, yes, it's dairy, but it has loads of beneficial bacteria for the gut and a lot of people who are lactose intolerant can tolerate yogurt. And I love cheese. Damn it's so good. I wish it wasn't soooo tasty. I eat it. BUT, me and my hunky husband M are soon going on a 'leaky gut' diet to try to heal some of our symptoms so cheese will be cut right out as it should be but I do need to have that goal in order to sacrifice such a delicious food. I can cut out chocolate easy, but cheese and tomatoes are almost impossible! Anyway, to get back on track...

This is a huge topic and I know I'm not covering it well, but here's the article I wanted to highlight: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/harvard-to-usda-check-out-the-healthy-eating-plate-201109143344

What I think is amazing is that there's someone credible out there ready to say "Milk is not necessary" for a healthy diet. Now I have to say, not everyone can tolerate all those grains either, but hey, it's a good start!




What do you think?

Deviled Easter Eggs and a Late Lunch

Deviled Easter Eggs

I love Easter but every year, a week before Easter, I forget that. Then about two nights before the Big Day, I'm reminded how I love to stuff plastic eggs with fun sugar-free treats, wrap them in crepe paper, tie and curl ribbon, stuff baskets and hide it all. It's sooo fun! And super rewarding. It might be a lot of work to wrap all 20 eggs, but hey, my kid is only going to be two years old once. I stuffed the eggs with what ALL toddlers adore: stickers. I also stuffed a few with strawberries and wrapped some dried fruit bites in coloured candy wrappers. I added markers and small toys in the baskets. My grandma and mother both sent a box of puzzles, cuddly toys and balls for the kids so I wrapped them up too and added it to the loot. (I'll post about alternative egg hunt ideas in further detail next year.)

After a super morning, my In-laws and friends (well my cousin and her boyfriend to be exact) all came over for a mid-late afternoon Easter Lunch. It was sooo much easier to prepare a cold lunch than hot turkey dinner, and almost just as enjoyable. I prepared my platters the day before except for my fruit and veggies. Not pictured are the sandwhiches and spreads I prepared. Here are a few pics of the days edibles:

Simple yet effective veggie and fruit platter.

Gluten-free Tinkyada Veggie Spiral Noodles in a Pasta Salad

Deviled Easter Eggs.

I was colouring eggs with my Lovely Toddler when this idea struck me, real easter eggs, deviled. How fun! These are coloured with natural dyes that you can buy at your local health food store or online. Follow your favourite deviled egg recipe and add colouring. Make sure to use white eggs instead of (healthy) Organic Free Run eggs for a whiter palate for your food colouring. This is a rare occasion where I suggest using a food that's not the best choice in order to achieve the look. I'm sure you could use the free run eggs, just note that the yolks will be darker so your end results will be darker. I love these! It's definitely a new party trick I'll be using more often.

I simply added about 1-2 big soup spoons full of mayonaise, a small squirt of mustard, one chopped green onion, salt and pepper. Easy.

Mmmm...I've also been tinkering in my kitchen with new raw chocolate recipes and decide to serve my guests with my latest test batch. I still haven't mastered my recipe yet so i'm not ready to share it but I will as soon as i'm confident in my experiment. It's been a real pleasure playing with chocolate, I mean a bad batch is never really THAT bad, all chocolate is edible after all :-)

I bought these cute molds at the chocolate shop and will keep using them all year. Chocolate bunnies are yummy and cute anytime of the year.

I also wrapped a few in colourful foil.

Again, Easter is fun!!

Hope you had a great one this year!

Suzanne

xo