Banana Bread Muffins [Gluten-Free]

For last week's hallway dinner, we had a theme of American food. I had originally planned to try making a sweet potato pie, but as my cousin L had opted for sweet potato fries, I left the few sweet potatoes we had for her to use.

I was a tad short on time, so I fell back onto a much-baked classic: banana bread. I found to my happiness that it fit the theme perfectly. So I made one of my usual loaves of banana-topped banana breads (baked many times before). Then I settled down to make a few samples of a gluten-free version for a neighbor that can't have gluten.

Since it was only for one person, I made 1/4 of the recipe, which yielded 4 muffins. I used a precision scale (that goes to 0.01 g) to make the measurements.

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RECIPE (yields 16 cupcakes)

  Ingredients

• 3-4 ripe bananas
• 158.96 g gluten-free flour of choice (I used buckwheat flour)
• 28.4 g glutinous/sticky rice flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup (100 g) sugar
• pinch of salt
• 2/3 cup (146 g) oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• cinnamon, to taste
• nuts or dried fruits (optional)
• I typically use walnuts and dried figs. In this case only dried figs as I ran out of nuts.

  Procedure

1. In a mixing bowl, mash the bananas.
2. Add sugar, oil, and vanilla. Mix well
3. Fold in the dry ingredients, sifted.
4. Fold in dried fruits and nuts if using.
5. Bake at 180˚C for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
6. Cool and enjoy~

Mini Strawberry Crostata (Gluten-Free)

New semester, new batches of hallway dinners! This year, the whole end of the hallway changed, as the seniors graduated and new freshmen come in. The new hallway as a whole became a bit more complicated in terms of food. In all, we have vegetarians, lactose intolerants, gluten, soy, and nuts allergies...

This made baking for an Italian-themed dinner more difficult. I therefore opted for the simplest thing I could think of, which was crostata. Crostata are jam tarts, usually covered in a lattice of some kind. The challenge, this time, was working with gluten-free flour (buckwheat flour in this case).

I came across a recipe for buckwheat flour pastry from pep's Free from Kitchen, which I used with a flax egg. The filling is simply strawberry jam from the supermarket, to which I added lemon juice to cut through the sweetness. I used a pastry cutter to cut the strips of dough to make the lattice on top, which all threatened to break left and right. All in all, it resulted in a pastry that I felt was a bit dry.

Tang Yuan

Last week, we had an Asian-themed hallway dinner. I decided (like always) to make dessert. But which one?

After some Internet lurking, I settled on Tang Yuan, also known as rice dumpling soup. It's a common winter dessert, most often known to be eaten during Chinese New Year.

This is a sweet, unfilled version that was made with a ginger soup. I went with roughly 1/3 pink dumplings, and 2/3 white.

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RECIPE

  Ingredients (makes ~4 servings)

• 1 cup glutinous rice flour
• 1/2 cup water 
• food coloring (optional)
• ginger, as desired
• brown sugar

  Procedure

1. In a mixing bowl, mix the flour and water until a smooth dough is formed. If it crumbles, add some water. If it's sticky, add some flour.
2. Divide the dough into the number of colors desired. Knead food coloring a drop at a time until the desired color is reached. 
3. Cover the dough with a damp towel. Roll into balls of desired size.
4. Cut ginger into slices, then pound it with the flat of the knife blade.
5. In a pot, put water and ginger slices. Cook until a ginger tea is made.
6. Add sugar until desired sweetness is reached.
7. Bring another small pot of water to boil. 
8. Dump in rice flour balls. They are cooked when they float.
9. Put the balls into the sweetened ginger soup, and boil some more.
10. Leave soaking for a few hours for the sweetness to enter the balls.
11. Enjoy warm.

Mini Tiramisu

For the last hallway dinner of the semester, I volunteered to make dessert. To feed 9 (+ my cousin), I either had to make a large cake, or a bunch of mini-desserts.

Our hallway is funny: we have someone who's slightly lactose intolerant, someone allergic to gluten, and someone who's vegetarian (me). So I decided I would try to make tiramisu, and minimize the amount of lactose in it.

The first thing I did was bake a batch of gluten-free spéculoos. I am not used to working with gluten-free flour, and although I was mentally prepared (by Google) for extra stickiness while making the dough, it wasn't anything I could have prepared for without experience. I ended up having to add a lot more flour to make the dough possible to work with, which may have been the reason why the flavor wasn't as prominent as in all my other versions. I used a cleaned tomato concentrate can to cut out the circles, though the shape didn't need to be regular, since it would all collapse after a good coffee soak.

Then the usual soaking in coffee, layering with cream mix (whipped soy cream, ricotta, sugar, and a dash of coffee). I have 12 silicone cupcake molds, and seeing how there were 9 of us to feed, I figured making enough for 2 per person would work best. I used clear glasses and small jars to make up for the lack of recipients, but filled each about the same amount as I filled the cupcake molds.

Then simply the usage of a cut-out template to dust chocolate hearts on top of the tiramisus. I messed up the few first ones, as my template wasn't very good and I had to fix it, so I just covered those completely with chocolate powder.

Isn't this a nice view?

I took a picture of the one with the neatest heart.

And here's one with the heart after the chocolate dissolved a bit.