Apricot and almond cookies

I used this apricot and nut recipe as a base for these golden cookies.  They are crisp, light and fluffy with a complex sweet flavour and small nuggets of chewy apricot.  I have iced some with a mixture of icing sugar and Amaretto liqueur.  Makes about 28 six cm cookies.

You can make the dough and keep it in the fridge for a while, or in the freezer and slice and bake as needed.

Fan oven 175C (after mixing and chilling)
Four baking sheets lined with parchment paper, or do two at a time.

Ingredients
50g almonds, slivered and toasted
25g pine kernels (or more almonds), toasted.
200g ready to eat dried apricots (partially rehydrated), chopped
100g butter, soft
100g sugar
200g self raising flour (40& urid, 40%tapioca, 20% cornmeal)

Toast the nuts and pine kernels lightly in the oven or a dry pan.  Don't put them in at the same time as the pine kernels will burn before the almonds change colour.
Mix butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Stir in egg
Stir in flour
Stir in fruit and nuts

Roll into a log on clingfilm, wrap and chill in the fridge for a couple of hours.  You can just dollop the dough onto the baking sheets which will give a less regularly shaped cookie.

Bake for 12-15 minutes until browning. Take care not to let them burn - the fruit at the edges has a tendency to go black before the rest is golden.

Cool on a rack.

If you want to ice them take two tablespoons of icing sugar and three or four teaspoons of amaretto, mix together until you have a sloppy icing.  Drizzle over cooled cookies and leave to set.

Caramelised apricots and caramel frozen yogurt - lactose free

More adventures with my Channel Island yogurt where I pre-treated the milk with lactase.  This time a simple caramel frozen yogurt, made with a couple of tablespoons of soft brown sugar, cooked gently until it just began changing colour, a desert spoonful of Pineau des Charentes, picked up on a visit to some friends in western France, and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Let the caramel cool before adding the alcohol or it will evaporate, leaving a pleasant taste but not retaining its anti-freeze qualities.  Cool, mix with 500g yogurt and freeze in an ice-cream maker.

I bought some reasonable looking apricots but they were not as sumptuous as I wished - apricots really need to be picked ripe off the tree in the sunshine.  Cut each in half, sprinkle more of the brown sugar in wide pan and place the cut apricots on the sugar.  Cook gently on both sides.  The juice from the apricots will give the caramel sauce a lovely zingy flavour.

Serve with a scoop of the frozen yogurt and a little of the caramel drizzled over.

I only have white crockery - terrible for photographing very pale ice-cream!  I should have put this in a glass and photographed against a coloured background, but I ate my desert before I put the photos on the computer.  Tastes much better than it looks.

gf bread without tapioca - first tests

I started testing bread recipes using a flour mix that has no tapioca in.  For a long time I have used a standard flour mix with urid lentils, tapioca and cornmeal that gives very good results.  However, my step-daughter seems to be unable to tolerate the tapioca, and I know that some people do find this flour difficult.

What with my travels, catching up on normal life and then wrenching my foot badly my planned experiments took a back seat.  However, I tried a plain loaf and a fruited loaf the other day using one third each of the urid lentil flour, brown rice flour (which I just bought from the supermarket so do not know what kind of rice) and yellow cornmeal.  To 600g of this mix I added 1.5 tsp yeast, a tbsp of agave syrup and sufficient water to make a batter ( I think about 800ml).  I also included 30g of potato protein, which helps gf breads not slump, but this is not yet available to domestic consumers.  In the past I found that provided I kept breads below 5cm/2inches and didn't let them rise above the tin they were fine without this.

I poured the batter into the tins, left them to rise in a warm moist oven, and when they nearly reached the top of the tin put the oven on.  The loaves were baked for 50 minutes at 175C, the little rolls baked in muffin tins were baked for 25 minutes.  Remember that this includes the time taken for the oven to get hot.  I find that it is better to leave a gf loaf for longer than you think necessary rather than have an inadequately cooked middle, so if you don't feel sure the bread is done take it out of the tin and put back in the oven for a few more minutes.

The plain loaf did slump a little but does not have a layer of gluey dough.  It is ok to eat plain - just a bit more crumbly than my usual loaf.  I made good croutons with some diced bread, a squirt of oil and some garlic, baked until crisp.  Any left over bread can be turned into breadcrumbs and kept into the freezer until you want to crisply coat something.  Two days later it is still easy to slice without crumbling.

The second loaf and the buns were made from the same batter but with added ingredients.  As this was a first test, and my foot still wouldn't bear my weight, the recipe was an informal and unrecorded handful of this and that.  I added more sugar, some vanilla, a bit of cocoa, about a cupful of chopped dried apricots I had cooked with water to go with breakfast pancakes, some dried blueberries and cranberries.  I also added a tablespoon of oil.  This mixture made a smooth loaf with good  holding qualities.  Two days later it still slices well and is moist without being cloying.  It is sufficiently good that I will work up a proper recipe.

The basic loaf needs a bit more work, but it is promising.  I found that tapioca gave a smooth chewiness to baked goods, whereas rice tended to give a gritty texture.   I always disliked Doves Farm flour for anything other than pancakes and choux pastry because things fell apart and had a lousy rough texture, and thought it was due to the rice.

I am hoping to create a bread mix as tasty and well-behaved as my usual lazy seedy bread. I think next time I will add buckwheat for the additional flavour a well as seeds.

Apricot and almond bites

I wanted to make some cakey cookies - a little like flapjacks but not so sweet and buttery.  I wanted to use apricots for their high iron content.  The almonds, eggs, quinoa and urid make these a high protein snack.

Ingredients
120g almond butter
2 eggs
100g dried chopped apricots (mine are sulphite free so brown rather than orange) blitzed in blender with
100g flour (40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% cornmeal)
65g  dried apricots, chunks
100g quinoa flakes
50g flaked almonds
50g sugar
25g flaked almonds for topping

Method
Mix the almond butter and egg to a slurry.
Blitz the flour and 100g apricots in blender so that you get a brownish powdery mixture.
Mix flour mix into egg slurry, stir in remaining ingredients except the final 25g almonds.  I added the sugar after tasting the mix - you may want to add more or less sugar/sweetener to meet the taste of your eaters.

Put blobs onto parchment paper/silicon baking sheets, press the final flaked almonds on top.

Bake at 170C fan for about 12-15 minutes.  If you make them thick they will need longer.


I am not too sure about the use of the quinoa flakes.  Quinoa can have a sharp unwelcome flavour from the saponin coating, which the plant uses as an insect/bird repellent.  This is best dealt with by rinsing before use.  If I want flour I tend to use whole quinoa and rinse it well, dry it in the oven then grind it to be sure to remove all of this taint.  With the flakes this rinsing was more difficult to do.  I think I would stick to quinoa flour or cooked quinoa (well rinsed) in future.