Baking! Oh How I love thee.

I personally love baking, decorating, inventing and adjusting to make the yummiest treats possible. Here's the kicker...I try and make the most tasty treats that are also the healthiest. So I begin with recipes in books or from the internet and then I adjust.

I must admit as healthy as I like to be there are some recipes I do not mess with. Some from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook are too delectable to try and be overly healthy! Like Grandma's Sweet Potato Pie and Cream Cheese Fruit Tartlets. Oh my!

I often substitute applesauce for oil, I use only the best eggs and high quality ingredients whenever possible. Even though sugar can be found unprocessed and in its purest form, too much is not so good. I try to reduce the amount of sugar in my recipes but not sacrifice flavor by using almond extract instead of vanilla. Just some tricks I picked up trying different things and sharing my creations.

I have created a gluten free chocolate cake recipe that when iced tastes to me just like a chocolate glazed Dunkin Donuts donut. Only without all the excess fat, gluten and the sugar I use is high quality, unrefined sugar.

I always seem to have enough batter to make a loaf pan cake and 6 extra large cupcakes each time!

Amen to loving the art of baking!

I am hoping that once I get consistent results each batch, that this gluten free recipe will become so popular people will pay me to bake for them!
I cannot wait to begin planning for Christmas cookies. I had so much fun last year! I think I made about 8 different types of cookie in a frenzy one day but they were baked with joy and love and I know those who ate them felt it! Awesome.


We had a bake sale recently at my church, and I baked an Iced Banana Carob Chip Loaf. It was so good! I've never used carob in a recipe before and I was so pleased with the way it tasted with the banana.

I also have some baking pumpkins ready to cook up and make some stock for pumpkin pies and breads!

Ok...so today Wednesday Nov. 2nd, I decided to make my fabulous cupcakes! 2 dozen mini cupcakes. Perfect for bite size treats, iced or not, totally great recipe! I use almond extract for both the cake batter and icing giving them a little nutty sweetness. It is one of the easiest recipes to remember, follow and whip up whenever needed. I will share it in it's own blog...now!



I use Bob's Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Baking Flour to replace the regular flour when I bake these days. I put this into my Simple White Cake recipe and found that it worked pretty well. I think it changes the consistency which can be addressed using Xanthan Gum apparently. I think I would also add a little applesauce. This is a wet ingredient and would require adding an approximate amount of dry ingredient to equal it out. I would probably say I will try a 1/4 cup of applesauce and an extra 1/4 flour. I am going to get the Xanthan Gum to try to work on maintaing that fluffy cake form!

All in all these were good cupcakes! The icing was the same and still complimented the recipe nicely.