GF three ginger honey apple cake

Jewish New Years is traditionally celebrated with apples and honey, for a sweet and fruitful new year. For bakers, there’s always a quest for a good honey cake — something that is surprisingly uncommon.

Last year, I found a gluten free honey cake with potential. This year, I decided to play with the recipe; I craved a honey cake with apples, and then decided that it needed ginger flavours as well. And so a GF 3-ginger honey apple cake was born.

The cake has a fine, tender crumb, is moist, and disappears from the serving plate!

Note that the cake is dairy-free (parve), gluten free, nut free, but does have eggs. Bake it a day ahead so the flavours can meld and get better with age. Store wrapped in plastic (whole) or sliced and in plastic container.

Books that resonate

A meme is going around asking people to list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. You’re supposed to do it off the top of your head, but I went home and looked at my favourite books. Oops. 

So suddenly I had a list of more than forty books. I had fun remembering them — but it was excruciating trying to narrow it down to just ten! How does a bookworm who’s easily read over 500 books for fun, narrow it down to just ten?! The only way was to do a blog post on the full list. 

No-compromise Brownies

Brownies are a classic North American casual cake, and everyone who bakes has to have a good recipe on hand. I had my mother’s recipe, until I had to go gluten free. My favourite GF cookbook has a really good basic chocolate cake recipe, with fabulous texture, so I knew it had potential when I tried the brownie. But one thing was clear: her cakes aren’t chocolatey enough. I had to modify the recipe.

These brownies are great: your wheaty friends will dive in, your GF friends will dive in, everyone will love them. An entire panful disappeared in less than 30 minutes at one party, and when I gave my cube neighbour one, he was practically humming over them– and those are wheat-eaters! Kids will take slices, and teenage boys will eat half the pan. These brownies are moist and tender, fudgy, rich but not greasy, with a great texture. They aren’t gritty, they aren’t dry, they aren’t crumbly: they are not your typical gluten free baked good. Even rarer for gluten free: they’re perfect the first day, they’re perfect for two or three days unrefrigerated (yes, you read that right), and they will actually last a week refrigerated (just taste a bit stale.. but the men won’t care). Non-moulding GF baking!! Oh, and they’re delicious eaten semi-frozen.

Once they love it, shock everyone by telling them it’s not only gluten-free but is also egg free. It even can be made dairy free (I use real butter, but the original recipe uses non-dairy ‘butter’ and non-dairy chocolate chips). In fact, I don’t always tell people these are gluten free… they are so good, wheat eaters can’t tell.

If you want to want instant marriage proposals, serve these brownies while still warm from the oven: they are truly incredible.  I served them for a family dinner with home-made ice cream and the moans of pleasure were enough to make any cook swoon.

There recipe’s also consistently good – summer, winter, in a hurry or not.

I’ve now made it enough that I’m seriously considering pre-measuring out several batches’ worth of dry ingredients so that I can whip it up even faster when I have a last-minute need for a dessert. I tried keeping some in the freezer to have on hand and… that’s how I know they’re delicious when still frozen!