Join us on a realistic baking journey as we navigate the challenges of gluten-free baking and share tips for delicious, alternative recipes.
Navigating the Challenges and Triumphs of Gluten-Free Baking
In December, the hustle and bustle of baking can be overwhelming, as illustrated by the experiences shared by a dedicated baker. The festive season is a time when baking projects seem to multiply, even for those who may have stepped back from selling baked goods. The joy of creating delicious treats persists, leading to busy days filled with various baking endeavors.
The baker reflects on the challenges faced during this hectic month, emphasizing the importance of managing time effectively amidst a flurry of culinary activities. With the holiday spirit in full swing, the passion for baking remains strong, showcasing the enduring allure of this craft. It’s a reminder that, regardless of external commitments, the love for baking continues to thrive, revealing the creativity and dedication inherent in the baking community.
Whipping Up Wonders: My Delicious Journey into the Gluten-Free Baking World!
Hi it’s Ashley from sweet dreams bake shop and welcome back to my channel where I make a lot of cake and cookie decorating tutorials as well as give a lot of baking business tips and I am well aware that it has been a while since my last long form video today is just a good old-fashioned day in the life of a baker this is going to be a.
Very honest and really not fancy baking Vlog so I hope you guys enjoy it this was taken during the winter holidays when things were chaotic and I was trying to get a lot of things done at once and I believe it was actually taken over a span of a couple days so first I was separating out my egg whites because I knew I was going to make macarons and.
Whenever I have a long baking day I know that that’s the first step that I want to do just so those egg whites can come to room temperature here’s a little baking tip if you know you’re going to be doing a lot of baking and you don’t have time for these little steps like Browning the butter which brings your sweets to the next level by the way then.
Definitely Brown it in advance and you can always keep it in the fridge I had some brown butter in the fridge for a couple of weeks and it was totally fine to use now I’m not going to lie to you guys cooking for people or baking for people that have some sort of food restriction is really really hard especially because I just never had to.
Do it before so holiday baking this past year was not as fun as it normally is the way that I approach baking now for a big crowd is a little bit different because now there are a lot of people in the family that can’t eat gluten so for the most part I make gluten free options and then there’s a few things here and there that I’ll make that are glutenous.
Or gluten as my son says you can kind of see their hands there in the background they were helping me out with the first few cookies and you’ll see eventually they lose steam anyway when I’m usually baking for a crowd I stick to what I know and then I’ll do variations based on what I already know is going to taste delicious but in this instance because I.
Was really jumping into the gluten-free world I was trying out all of these different types of cookie recipes and I was really nervous that they weren’t going to work out in my experience with gluten-free baking so far I’ve discovered that some things just turn out really really dry and although the flavor is great the mouth feel is just.
Off I find gluten-free cakes can get really really close to just the regular cakes that I’ve been used to baking but cookies are a little bit trickier especially something like a classic chocolate chip cookie I still haven’t found one that has that Right Chew to it the flavor was there but it did just taste a little bit Sandy and a little.
Bit gritty although it did have a slight chew so keeping that in mind I decided to go with cookies that are supposed to kind of have that type of textural profile so I went with these snowballs which are supposed to be melt in your mouth I believe that I was supposed to add pecans to it but instead I added cashews because that’s what I had on.
Hand and these turned out absolutely delicious now one little tip if you are making cookies like this you have to really make sure that you’re not overbaking it at all I overbaked a few of them and then it made it really really difficult to roll them in this icing sugar also I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to look this pasty when it came.
Out of the oven but I assume so because the oven temperature was so low and we want these to look white so in the end it tasted really really good and I also made that cookie first so that I didn’t have to clean out my bowls I am always doing everything to avoid double cleaning things and because that was such a simplistic recipe and I’m really.
Not caring if anybody is allergic to nuts sorry family but I just didn’t I decided to go right ahead and start on the next cookie and these were going to be an espresso shortbread now this time around I didn’t use any fancy flour blend of any sort I figured a shortbread cookie in its Simplicity wouldn’t be as suceptible to having any weird textural.
Problems and in the end I was correct however I will say these did not bake up properly at all you guys if you are Avid Watchers of my channel you probably saw the short where I had to fix that issue I don’t really know what happened but flavor-wise and texture-wise it was great but the look of them was not all that pretty I feel like I’m kind of.
Going in an ombre order I started with the white cookie then it was a little bit of a taned color and now we’re going straight into the dark chocolate color these cookies made me the most nervous out of all of the cookies because honestly this looked like a batter to me I was not confident that I was going to get an actual cookie out of this because.
There was also no mering portion it wasn’t like I whipped the mering it seemed very very loose so I only baked one cookie at first but TAA it turned into one of the most delightful cookies with a really great texture because it was primarily melted chocolate throughout all this baking chaos I also organized all of our snacks and did some.
Grocery shopping and then I came back and then I was ready to make these ginger molasses cookies that were glutenfree and I love ginger molasses cookies so I was so so hoping that these were going to work out after grating the ginger though I realized that I needed to get the dough ready for those shortbread cookies so I decided to roll.
Those out to give it time to chill because you know with baking everything is about chilling and rest time so you can see here I’m making these beautiful rectangles and they cut out so beautifully but it turns out so wrong that in video world we can just make that problem go away for a little bit and revisit it later because to be.
Honest all of those cookies have been consumed now so any mistake it’s all good and moving along I started making the ginger molasses cookies and I did a little mixture of the gluten-free flour that I had as well as the blend that I made earlier I didn’t want to use the the full blend because I didn’t have all of the ingredients for the full blend.
That I had made previously so I just kind of topped it up with the gluten-free flour that I already had and it ended up working out perfectly also you might be thinking man those are some big chunks of Ginger and they are but I really loved the textural experience that it added to the cookie obviously if you don’t like that definitely just go.
With the ground ginger and ground ginger alone you’re going to get a really really powerful Ginger flavor this particular cookie honestly tasted just as good as any other ginger molasses cookie that I have made anybody that has eaten gluten their whole life could not tell that this was a gluten-free cookie and those that were gluten-free were so.
Grateful to be able to have a cookie that just tasted like the regular cookies that they remember most of my family have been diagnosed with an intolerance or they’re actually Celiac much later on in life so this really is very new for them in the past couple of years they’ve had to make a lot of changes remember those egg whites that.
We separated for those macarons well egg whites means that there’s going to be lots of egg yolks and my family on one particular side absolutely loves my creme brulee so we’re going to do a lot of creme brulee today very recently I ended up buying a whole bunch more ramkin because I never had enough to actually feed my entire family I also.
Didn’t really realize how much they loved creme brulee so I decided to go big this Christmas and and make as many as I possibly could I don’t use a Stow top method for my creme brulee I just find it takes way more time and yes you do get a little bit of a different textural experience with that but this is the lazy easy way to do it and to get.
Rid of any chunks and to avoid any egg curdling I always like to run it through a SI the key to getting an even bake with these is just to keep that temperature a little bit lower at 325 deges Fahrenheit and make sure that it’s in a water bath that is sufficient if you don’t do the water bath it’s just going to explode and it won’t be very.
Good while those were in the oven I rolled all of my ginger molasses cookies and the crem bruet came out of the oven and while that was happening I decorated all of these cookies for my staff I have a completely separate video of me doing that I was very tired and then I also made some cupcakes didn’t show the baking process because you guys have.
Seen me do that lots of times and then I made some Italian mering buttercream and I frosted these and if you’re next question is when did you find the time to sleep in December the answer is never I felt like I was baking nonstop and I wasn’t putting out any content because I was baking nonstop I couldn’t tell you how did I make all these really super.
Fancy treat boxes last year and keep up with all of the baking that I normally do for my kids for their school cuz I I just don’t know but this year I just felt so exhausted we got off school really late too this year it was pretty much all the way up until the 22nd so I really felt like everything was just crammed all into a few days all right.
Enough of me lamenting about the time that I lost during the holidays this year let’s talk about the toppings on these cupcakes these were not gluten-free and they were topped with that Italian ring buttercream like I had mentioned as well as a little bit of my chocolate chip cookies that I made that I did not show in this video but I did.
Make them earlier and I crumbled some of them on top and my whole premise for this was kind of like Santa’s cookies and milk and then I ended up garnishing it with a little piece of peppermint candy cane do you know that I have been duped by so many fruity candy canes I am not into the fruity candy cane life I need it to be peppermint anyway then I.
Moved on to the gluten-free chocolate cupcakes which is why they don’t look as perfect as my chocolate cupcakes normally do but you know what you put a little bit of frosting on there and it’s all good and I ended up using American buttercream actually for this frosting after that first round of creme brues were done I decided to make another.
Batch because I did not want to run out and this time I added some espresso powder now truthfully the espresso crem bruet are actually my favorite I just love how that espresso note hits and it really tones down any level of sweetness and after a really gigantic meal like the type you have at Thanksgiving and Christmas I feel like a little bit of a.
Bitter note is a good thing again a little baking tip when it comes to making creme brulee you do want to let this set in the fridge for as long as possible so if you make it the day before it’s actually going to turn out a lot better so there won’t be a panic if you don’t have that option obviously you should probably make it as early as.
Possible in your baking day finally now those egg whites have come to room temperature and it is time time to make the macarons I know it seemed like we did so many things in between that time but it is now time to make those macarons I’m doing all the classic macaron things really making sure to sift that my macaron teacher said if you.
Don’t sift it you’re going to end up with lumpy macarons now a lot of recipes call for you to sift ingredients I’m going to let you in on a little secret I skip it like 90% of the time but in this instance I never skip but because I do want my macarons to be nice and flat and beautiful and I decided to go with this kind of swirly look I don’t know how.
Worth it this color combination was if I could go back in time I’d probably choose something different but honestly these were devoured within minutes anyway so it really didn’t matter what they looked like also I was saying in a short how I tend not to turn the batter as many times as I used to before however I will say that this batter here.
Probably could have done with a few more turns just so that it would flatten out just a bit more by the time I get to the end of my batch it flattens out pretty nicely but that’s the finicky thing about macarons and yes I always use a Sil Pat when I’m baking my macarons and yes if you see a topping on my macarons it’s either a stylistic choice but more.
Than likely it’s because I don’t like the way that the top looks so I’m just trying to mask that and trying to cover it up with pretty things like sprinkles or Sparkles at this point I was rushing a little bit so I’m sorry for the chaotic filming of these creme bruay you can see the color difference between the classic ones and the espresso ones these.
Needed to set for a little bit so I obviously decided to make another recipe because why not we have so few on the go anyway so I decided to make some classic Christmas crack now I did make a gluten-free version and a non-g gluten-free version honestly the gluten-free version tasted better and I don’t know why I think though it’s.
Because I ended up not having enough caramel sauce to cover on the non-gluten free batch I don’t know how that happened because I doubled the recipe but clearly my skills of spreading were not as even and as equal as one would have hoped but this is one of those simple recipes that I just really don’t make that often I really only attempt it.
Around Christmas time eventually I made it work I got the macarons all baked and I believe that I do end up filling them the next day because that was a lot of baking for a couple of days and here is how everything turned out there’s the espresso shortbread the ginger molasses cookies and I was very tired in this shot see look how sleepy I am thanks so.
Much for watching guys don’t forget to like share and subscribe so you can be part of the sweetie fam and right now I’m uploading when I want to upload so be sure to hit that notification Bell so you know when I upload next bye
