Baking Day!

I love baking days! The holidays just passed, and we only made one batch of cookies. ONE! It was sad. I haven’t been baking nearly as much as I used to since I’ve been grappling with my diet changes. It was intimidating enough to switch out my REGULAR cooking supplies with all things gluten free, dairy free, soy free, and – what I thought at the time – flavor free! I literally sat down and cried in the grocery store the first time I went after adopting all of these new things.

Unfortunately, I was forced into this by my health. I have Hoshimoto’s Thyroiditis, which is an autoimmune disease that attacks the thyroid. I won’t get too into it in this post, but basically, there a ton of foods that aggravate the disease and actually HELP it attack my body. Not great, obviously. So, I changed pretty much everything I ate, and in the beginning, that meant cutting out almost every kind of baked good. I basically just couldn’t figure out how all the gluten free flours worked. There were so many of them! Quinoa, corn, almond, coconut, the list went on and on, and I had ZERO clue about any of them. And not only that, gluten hides behind SO MANY different names, it’s crazy! It was just easier for me to avoid everything until I learned what was okay and what wasn’t. I found a bunch of recipes on Pinterest and various paleo diet blogs, but they just scared me more with their warnings and everything. I didn’t want to buy a bunch of stuff that would sit in my cupboard and never see the light of day! Who really has the money for that? I know I don’t. Eventually, I found Bob’s Red Mill, a company that makes all gluten free products, including an all purpose gluten free flours!! Hallelujah! Finally, something I recognized!

I started out by implementing my new found best friend into my cooking. It took a bit of getting used to, since the different flour changed certain cooking times, but slowly I got the hang of it, and now I can (somewhat) confidently say that I a comfortable with using gluten free flour. Onto my next challenge: Baking with it.

The girls have always loved baking. What little kid doesn’t love freshly baked cookies? And getting to lick the spoon is, in my opinion, the best part of the whole thing. I felt like such a terrible mom for cutting out all baked goods for as long as I did, but I honestly just couldn’t do it at the time. And my self control was so thin, if I had made a batch of cookies, or pie, or any kind of sweet, there was no way I wasn’t going to eat it! This was a very crazy holiday season for us, since we had almost no idea where we were going to be living, so a lot of our normal traditions got set aside, much to everybody’s dismay. Today, however, we decided to just go for it and bake a huge batch of one of my favorite holiday treats: pizzelle cookies, or as I used to call them flower cookies (because of the design).

A little hesitantly, I used my trusty Bob Red’s Mill all purpose flour, then just followed the recipe that came with my pizzelle maker.

As you can see, my first two came out a little darker than I like. Don’t get me wrong, they still tasted yummy! But I like mine a light golden color, so I adjusted the setting on my iron, and voila!

Perfection 🙂 The flour I used was a quinoa base, so it gave it a SLIGHTLY grainier texture than regular pizzelles, but taste wise they were spot on! I even added a bit of nutmeg and cloves, along with the vanilla that the recipe calls for. It was like Christmas all over again!!