July 30: Gluten-free Cake Truffles!

This one wasn't a challenge, but merely born out of curiosity and boredom, but it was fun!

As usual, a rich chocolate desert - but it would work with any cake, this is just a lovely, rich dairy-free and flourless cake. For the record, the cake would be FABULOUS on its own - it's a prize of a fudge cake.

For the bottoms:
2/3 cup chocolate chips of your choice of chocolate


For the cake:
1/3 cup margarine
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 tsp vanilla
2/3 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp baking powder
Two pinches salt
A little less than 1/3 cup cold water

For the covering:
1 cup chocolate of your choice
1/3-1/2 cup milk (I used nonfat Lactaid)
Vanilla extract to taste

To make the bottoms:
For the bottom, melt your favourite kind of chocolate and pour onto parchment paper in small semi-rectangular spots, a bit bigger than the cake cubes. Freeze to harden.

To make the cake:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Grease a cake pan - the larger, the better - you want the cake to be about an inch, maximum, in the end.
In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla (and a dash of almond extract if you like it), and beat well. Combine the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt separately and add alternately with the water. Beat well. Pour the batter into the pan/s and bake until a toothpick inserted in various points comes out clean. Let cool completely.
Once cooled, cut into medium-small cubes (just under an inch) and then place them on the bottoms and cover them (see below).

To make the covering:
Melt and mix. Pour over the cake and freeze it all to let it set.

Refrigerate - the chocolate covering melts.

July 24: Gluten- and White/Brown Sugar-free, Dairy-Free Chocolate Fruit Tartlets!

This one is done as per the request of my friend Nikki!

My friend Leslie came over to bake this one with me. We were going to try to not make this one chocolatey, but we're having trouble thinking of a non-nut flour alternative to wheat that isn't cocoa.

Note: Make sure to grease your tartlet pans! Otherwise they will yield delicious brownies that are impossible to remove.

Filling:
18 very small strawberries (6 regular size strawberries), smashed to a pulp
Juice of 1 1/2 lemon
12 lemons, zested (Note: if this is too much, as it may be, you can mess with the strawberry/lemon ratio. More strawberries is delicious too!)
3/4 cup coconut
1 cup honey
Strawberries for garnish

Tarts:
1 cup honey
1/2 cup cocoa
A pinch salt
2 egg whites
1 tsp vanilla

To make the tarts:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a medium-size bowl, using an electric mixer, mix together honey, cocoa, and salt until thoroughly mixed. Add egg whites and vanilla and beat until mixed. Do not over-mix - the egg whites will stiffen. Fill up tartlet pans halfway and bake for 10 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the tartlet comes out clean.
Remove and let cool in tartlet pans; after a few minutes, remove from pans and let cool on a rack.

To make the filling:
Mix all ingredients but strawberries over heat and stir until they all stick together. Add strawberries and make sure they are thoroughly mixed in. Once at the desired consistency, remove from heat and let cool.

To put together:
Poke or scoop and indent into the tartlets once they have cooled. Put in the desired amount of filling and garnish with strawberry slices. Enjoy!

July 23: Egg-, Gluten-, and Dairy-Free Chocolate Shortbread!

My first dare: bake something without eggs and wheat, and preferably without dairy, too.

Um, what?

I'd made two flourless desserts in my life before, and one had cream and the other was a meringue cookie.
So, I set out with my trusty Google and found...nothing that didn't require nut flour.

Since I'm trying to do this all with common ingredients that pretty much everyone has in their kitchen, and I was doing this with 3 hours to go until I had to head to work with the cookies, I wasn't about to do that.

Instead, I found a basic shortbread recipe - a recipe I already knew was eggless. From there, it was a few easy modifications to get to the delicious, four-ingredient cookie that takes less than an hour to get from the bowl to your mouth!

About to go in the oven!

I made them soft and chewy, but they can be made any level of crunchiness - just leave them in the oven for longer. They're incredibly rich, so much so so to be described as "an emotional journey" by one of the other actors (there were barely even any crumbs in the container by the time I left the rehearsal).

Here's the recipe!

1 cup margarine (butter if you are OK with dairy, but it's interchangeable)

2 ½ cups cocoa

¾ cup brown sugar, or to taste (I prefer my cookies very, very cacao-rich; if you like yours sweeter, add more sugar)

1 tsp vanilla extract or to taste

Preheat Oven to 325 degrees.

Cream margarine, brown sugar, and vanilla together until very, very creamy. Add cocoa and mix until completely mixed. At first, it will get very fine, almost like a thick flour. Keep mixing - it takes a couple of minutes. It will eventually start getting into thicker and thicker grain, then it will pebble, and slowly clump all together. By the end, it will be a very, very thick batter – you will probably have to poke it out of the mixer. Use an electric mixer for this – it’s far too thick to do it by hand.

Roll out dough on parchment paper and cut into whatever shape you want and place on a parchment-paper lined baking sheet and bake.

The cookies will begin to get very soft, and then will firm up slightly. Take them out only once they have begun to firm up  for them to be nice and chewy. Let cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.

Makes upwards of 2 dozen cookies, depending on size and shape of cookies..