Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

Many (good) gluten-free recipes require expensive almond meal, quality gluten-free flour, or a myriad of ingredients like brown rice flour, sorghum flour, xanthan gum, potato starch … not ingredients found in your average kitchen pantry!

So when the request came to make a gluten-free treat, I turned to this peanut butter cookie recipe from Joy the Baker’s blog. With my own addition of dark chocolate chunks, this recipe uses only six ingredients: peanut butter, brown sugar, white sugar, an egg, baking soda, and chocolate.

They taste delicious – and you can’t even tell they’re gluten-free!

Recipe: http://joythebaker.com/2009/04/flourless-peanut-butter-cookies/

 

Labour of Love: Chocolate Caramel Cake

So it was my friend Nicole’s birthday last weekend. And it was an honour to make her a cake. The requested flavour? Chocolate. And Caramel. “Intense” was my first thought. Nevertheless, I fossicked through a few different recipes – sans the ones with creamy fillings (I’m not really a fan), and looked for a cake robust enough to survive a few modes of public transport. (Is there a limit to love??). I finally settled on this recipe from Astoria in Lambton Quay, Wellington.

With three glorious layers (chocolate cake, caramel, and chocolate ganache) this cake is semi-high maintenance. Production requires good ingredients, time, and patience. There’s nothing instant about this cake (the only things store-bought are the raw ingredients).

However, if you use quality ingredients from the start, you’ll taste that quality in every bite of your final masterpiece. So of course the chocolate I used was 70 percent cocoa (not compound) and the eggs were free range.

The result is a rich cake that goes the distance. This cake served 10 guests, with a quarter remaining. The recipe says it serves 16, but I guess it depends on who you’ve invited to dinner …

Dinner Party Series: Our House

A short while ago, we hosted round three of the dinner ‘competition’ that I’ve been invited to join.

The theme for the night was Mexican-fusion. Not so much a ‘formal’ theme, but definitely fun. We decided on the following menu items: spicy black bean tostadas; pumpkin, feta, and pine nut quesadillas; and chocolate coconut molten lava cakes.

The menu was shaped in part by our guests’ dietary requirements: vegetarian; and also onion, coriander, and chilli free. A common juggle amongst today’s dinner hosts! To cater to our party’s needs we also made variations of a few of the menu items, or omitted some of the original ingredients altogether.

I think we fared well and I was particularly pleased with our entrée and dessert dishes. The tostadas were a novel introduction to the night, and the molten lava cakes were too inviting to refuse. Our guests seemed happy!

Peanut Butter Cookies – with Manuka Honey

Preparing for a weekend away always involves baking treats to share. For this last trip, I decided on peanut butter cookies (with chocolate of course!). I used Curtis Stones’ recipe, which also includes honey (I used Manuka).

The result was a melt-in-your-mouth, moorish cookie – with a luxurious top note of honey. The hint of honey sets the recipe apart from your standard cookie recipe and really does finish the cookie off. I’ll be using this recipe again!

Recipe: Peanut butter cookies with chocolate chunks