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| 2014 For the Win |
Let me warn you, this is probably the most self-deprecating holiday baking post you may ever read. So before I begin, let me say that all the recipes discussed below ended up tasting great and all who tried them seemed to greatly enjoy them. However, I take holiday baking very seriously and not one single treat I tried to make this season came out the way I wanted or envisioned. Last Christmas, I killed it - I made a different holiday treat every day for something like twelve days, culminating at my first and most-excellent attempt at a Buche de Noel; I actually made two near-perfect Buche de Noel last year. I guess I set the bar too high and should have allowed myself a handicap for the paleo hurdle, but alas I am disappointed with my performance. What's worse is that I don't have the time or money to redo any of the recipes right now. If I had wrecked some regular Christmas cookies, I would have no problem buying a new bag of flour for $1 and making some more. No way I'm sacrificing any more of my $9 potato starch than necessary. So all I can do is share lessons learned and tell you that next Christmas I WILL turn out a perfect paleo Buche de Noel (someone remind me).
I bought a new paleo cookbook that almost exclusively contains desserts - Vanessa Barajas' Clean Eating with a Dirty Mind and immediately wanted to make the chewy ginger cookie recipe in there. However, the next day Primal Palate posted a Ginger Snap recipe and I came to an impasse - chewy or crispy? Instead of trying to decide or leaving it to a flip of a coin, I went with both. I didn't really mess anything up with these, unless you count making both (which we will for the sake of added self-deprecation) because the Ginger Snaps were definitely the winner. I found the chewy cookie recipe to be almost grossly sweet and if I make them in the future will definitely be cutting back on the sugar.
Two good points did come out of the chewy cookie recipe though: 1. I added macadamia nuts, yum. 2. I am dying to make some pumpkin ice cream and stick it between two of these for a yummy ice cream sammy.
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| Ginger Snaps (left) v. Chewy Ginger Cookies (Right) |
Reese's Squares
Pre-paleo Christmas is synonymous with one thing, Gay Fleming's Reese's Squares. Gay Fleming, is my grandmother's friend and she has perfected what was once and may always be, my favorite Christmas treat. So much so that no matter where I was living or how old I was, there would always be a stash of these for me. Not to have Christmas ruined, I got the recipe and set to work.
Now, these are also something that you should never look at the recipe for. Immediately, I started trying to count how many hundreds of these I must have gorged on in my life. I am no longer shocked that I have high-insulin resistance marking me for pre-diabetes - these are probably the precise reason. I also won't share the exact quantities so that Gay Fleming can go on being the master of all things Reese square. However, the ingredients are peanut butter, graham cracker crumbs, butter, confectioner's sugar and chocolate - aka I had my work cut out for me.
Vanessa Barajas of Clean Eating with a Dirty Mind made my attempt possible with her Graham Cracker Crust recipe in her cookbook, but you could also use Kinnikinnick S'moreable Gluten-Free Graham Crackers. I followed the tip for making graham cracker crumbs and they worked perfectly in my recipe. For the peanut butter I actually subbed an almond/cashew butter mix and then blended in some ghee (as another Vanessa Barajas tip for a peanut butter taste). Then, I subbed ghee for the butter, maple sugar for the confectioner's sugar (because it is really fine) and for the dark chocolate, I just used my regular dairy-free, soy-free, gluten-free dark chocolate. Yet the real key to the festivity of the Reese square is the red and green M&M's Gay uses to decorate them. THIS I did successfully solve - goji berries and pumpkin seeds did well to lend a bit of Christmas cheer.  |
| There is such a thing as too much chocolate |
I'm sure this also sounds delicious and you are like, how could you possibly have gone wrong? Again, by not listening to my intuition. I knew that I should make the filling, freeze it for 30 minutes, melt the chocolate in a double boiler and then spread on top. Instead, I followed the recipe and put the chocolate on top of my filling and sent it into the oven all together to melt. The chocolate wasn't spreading on top and I became worried that I hadn't put enough chocolate - so I added more. There was PLENTY of chocolate in there, it had just sunk down into the melted filling. Consequently, the ratios were all off. I made chocolate squares with a hint of graham and nut-butter flavor instead of heavenly peanut butter filling encased in a perfect layer of chocolate.
I still ate all but one - and would have eaten them all except that I promised to save one for my grandmother for her assessment of their likeness. She kindly said they topped the perfected Gay Fleming Reese squares, but I think she was just being gratuitous.
These will be remade eventually and I will get them right. I know you really want to make them yourself and am wondering where the instructions are. However, I want to perfect these and be the master of this recipe so I'm keeping it a secret. This actually just means that I can't remember the ingredient allocations and didn't write them down. Oops.
Chocolate-Cherry Coconut Cake
This was to be my pièce de résistance - seriously, I had been planning a four-layer coconut cake with a cherry compote filling and chocolate ganache for weeks, maybe a whole month. Add-in sleep deprivation, cake layers stuck to the bottom of the pan and over-cooked cherry compote and the result became a dozen mini-cakes with a container of coconut-cake-mixed-with-chocolate-ganache in the freezer. It's a crushing blow - I, the queen of cakes, messed up on my final cake of 2015. Now, this didn't prevent me from eating three mini cakes the night I made them, my family from enjoying them or me having another the next night and another the next night. In fact, they are rather tasty, either warmed or cold and the cake base itself is darn right fantastic. Yet, they are not magical and Christmas cakes should be magical. Alas, we will take it piece by piece and I will confess where I went wrong so that you don't make the same mistakes.
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| Into the oven |
Coconut Cake - I actually almost made a recipe without changing anything! In hindsight, this was one aspect where I went wrong... but whatever. The only substantive changes I made were adding in 1/2 tsp of almond extract to the batter a la non-paleo coconut cake recipes and reducing the amount of Maple Syrup to 1/2 c. The change I should have made was to not take the recipe at its word that some coconut oil was going to be sufficient to grease the pan. I know better and knew better and ALMOST used shortening, tapioca starch and a strip of parchment paper to help remove it. Instead, my cake was glued to both pans and not budging. I googled tips for removal and guess what, the "sure-fire" wet cloth around the pan method does not work. Did I want to cry? Yes, but I really didn't have time for that. Instead, I pulled out the biscuit cutters, cut out circles from the cake, removing the excess until I could use a spatula to get the circles out. The intention here was to make 6 double layer mini cakes...but I only cut 11 circles - ONE LAYER CAKES IT IS. Sigh...onto the next disaster.
Cherry Compote Filling - 1 bag frozen cherries, juice of 1 lemon, 1/4 c honey. This was all to reduce down into a vibrant red compote. Well, it just didn't seem to be thickening, so 20 minutes came and went and I let it go for 20 more and added in some gelatin. Well, you know how the browned bits of onion or bacon are delicious when you scrape them from the bottom of the pan? Not so with browned bits of cherry compote - something about burnt cherries doesn't jive with the sweet flavor profile you are aiming for. I stopped scraping once I thought better, so only a couple had the misfortune of being "Chocolate-Toasted Cherry Coconut Cakes." Oh also, that gelatin did its job and the whole thing thickened right up in the fridge...to the point of making spreading difficult. Still, the cakes had cherry compote on them.
Chocolate Ganache - I mean, hard to mess this up, some coconut milk and some Enjoy Life chocolate chips, but I no longer had a top layer to spread it on. Consequently, my chocolate ganache very un-festively sat right atop my cherry compote.
At the end of the day Coconut + Cherry + Chocolate tastes pretty great, no matter how it is assembled, but these were a far cry from my snow-white and red layered cake I had in my mind. 2016, I will do better.
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