Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Bake day!

Yesterday it was nice and cool outside, which means it was cool inside too! So after I got the laundry out on the line I decided that it would be a good day to do some baking. Mommy had been at the store on Monday and had picked up a GF mix for pumpernickel bread from The Mix Company so that was first on my list of things to bake. I generally stay away from mixes because they are trickier to alter to suit my needs and they are expensive, but mommy had picked this one up so I had nothing to lose.  And, I'd never had pumpernickel bread before.  It was simple enough to make and I only had to make one substitution and that was for eggs.  The mix required two eggs, so I made up some Ener-G egg replacer, equal to the amount of 4 eggs (I have found it works best just to double it from the get go, or use another binder such as fruit sauce or xantham gum).  I mixed up the mix and put it on a tray to go in the oven...it kinda looked like a blob of brown stuff, so I didn't get my hopes up to high.  It held together quite well in the oven (I had visions of it losing its wonderful round form and being a flat mess by the time it was done)  After the bake time I pulled it out of the oven and tada!
He doesn't look as beautiful as the ones from the store, but he is gluten free, dairy free, egg free, etc, etc, etc. Having never had pumpernickel bread before I wasn't quite sure what to do with him so we just let him cool on the table until mom came home from the mill.  Then we had him with supper and he was tasty!  There was some left over and I used it for sandwich bread for my lunch today.  Also yummy.  But, at $7 a loaf, he won't be gracing my kitchen too often. 
Next on the list was cheese crackers. I'd been wanting to try them for some time now, but the milk thing had been problematic.  However, on Monday I was cleaning out the freezer and found a part bottle of goat milk left over from bottle feeding alpacas last summer.  It was almost exactly the amount I needed to make cheese crackers, so substituting goat cheese and goat milk for regular cheddar cheese and regular milk, I set out to make cheese crackers. Amazingness.  They were super easy to make and extremely yummy, almost addictive.  So yummy that I left a tray of them on the counter when I went out to get the mail and this is what I found when I came back in:

The dog had come with me to get mail, this left Reuben and Isaac in the house...in their defense, I had given them permission to sample, provided they did up dishes from lunch and they did do dishes.  

After the definite success of the cheese crackers and the tentative success (we hadn't tried eating it yet) of the pumpernickel I decided to try my hand at dinner rolls.  The only substitution I had to make was to use goat milk (I found more in the freezer) instead of regular milk.  I had high hopes for these rolls.  Maybe too high.  The dinner rolls looked fine, but when I ate one for bedtime snack, it was about like eating a soft rock.  I had another, sliced in half and toasted and slathered in chocolate, for breakfast this morning and decided that texture wise it was about like a bagel (which lead to having to explain what a bagel was to Isaac), or at least like any bagel I've ever had.  So I think my dinner rolls will be relegated to the breakfast table as toasted somethings.  Either that or soaked in soup....
There's still some goat milk left in the fridge and the cheese crackers are almost all gone (there are approximately 3 left) so more will likely get made later this week or early next, since the weather is supposed to stay cool.

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