This makes a pink frosting that tastes like jammy strawberries and can easily be made vegan. Adapted from Katarina Cermelj's Baked to Perfection.

Ingredients:

28 grams freeze-dried strawberries (about 2 cups)
265 grams powdered sugar, sifted (about 1¾ cups, measure and then sift)
310 grams salted butter (or firm vegan butter), softened (11 oz)
1-2 drops of food coloring (optional, for a stronger color)

( recipe )

Questions? Ask 'em!

This Honey Cornbread from Minimalist Baker is very easy to put together and bakes up tender, fluffy, and sweet. The honey flavor really comes through, so be sure to use one you like. It was nice next to some chili, but it was also fantastic under some strawberries as a dessert.

I used Trader Joe's unsweetened almond/cashew/macadamia milk, avocado oil, Bob's Red Mill medium grind cornmeal, and Minimalist Baker's GF flour mix, which is something you can just throw together yourself. I used math and made just enough for this recipe.

Gluten-Free Flour Power - Bringing Your Favorite Foods Back to the Table, by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot: A gorgeous cookbook with lots of color photos and not one, not two, but THREE custom flour mixes. One is like an all-purpose flour and is mostly starch (cornstarch, tapioca starch, white rice flour, brown rice flour, nonfat milk powder, potato flour, xanthan gum), one is closer to a whole wheat flour (arrowroot, sorghum flour, white rice flour [or millet], brown rice flour [or sorghum], potato flour, milk powder, guar gum), and one is a low-allergy blend (tapioca starch, sweet rice flour, arrowroot, sorghum flour, potato flour, golden flaxseed meal). And now that I type that out, they're all pretty starchy, as it's the first ingredient in every mix. They're going to give different results, but the authors claim you can use any of the three flour mixes in the recipes.

The recipes have measurements in volume and weight (grams). They're sweet and savory and cover the basic to the very fancy. I mean, the authors pulled out a loaf pan with dimensions I'd never seen before in my life. They also think you have the time, resources, and energy to cold-smoke masa harina. Don't ask.

The font choices are kind of annoying, but it has a useful index, and if I hadn't already hitched my gluten-free wagon to America's Test Kitchen's custom flour mix, I might have given this a try.

This review appeared on my journal in a slightly different form.

Katarina Cermelj's The Loopy Whisk is one of my favorite recipe blogs, but for some reason the latest posts haven't been showing up in my RSS reader, so I created a feed to follow here loopywhisk_feed. I thought I'd share in case any of you wanted to follow along with me.

Are there GF blogs with RSS feeds you'd like to follow on Dreamwidth? If they don't already have a feed here, you can create one on the Feeds page.

The Elements of Baking: Making any recipe gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free or vegan, by Katarina Cermelj:

A beautiful cookbook and an excellent reference for free-from baking. It contains a framework for adapting recipes to be gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, vegan, or gluten-free vegan, and explains how to mix and match if you follow more than one of these diets. It has case studies that demonstrate how Kat came up with these rules—and they are rules rather than vibes—as well as dozens of individual recipes that fit each category.

I was a bit skeptical at first because I wasn't sure who this book was for with this wildly variable free-from approach, but I know now, it's for me, and maybe for you if you love baking and are gluten-free plus something-else-free or have friends and family with multiple or overlapping sensitivities, as I think we're likely to get the most out of it. For everyone else, I recommend checking it out of the library first. (I did check it out of the library because that's always my first stop, but I just ordered my own copy from bookshop.org to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day.)

I'm eager to try out Kat's system for adapting gluten-free recipes to be dairy-free, not just the ones in this book, but also those in her first book Baked to Perfection, which is all gluten-free, but only incidentally dairy-free. I also have the option of taking the dairy-free recipes in this book and making them gluten free, and, if I really want to get into it, I can even try the gluten-free vegan recipes because I trust Kat and if anyone can take the eggs and dairy out of a gluten-free recipe and still have it work, she can. Except for the vegan cheesecakes (yes, plural), because, I'm sorry, but at some point it stops being a cheesecake, and I think it's once you've removed the eggs and the cheese.

I want to call this impeccable, and it nearly is, expertly presented and arranged, with lots of flowcharts and gorgeous color photographs, but I don't think she spends enough time considering what it's like to have multiple food sensitivities. For instance, she almost exclusively uses dairy-free products to replace dairy products, and dairy-free products often contain ingredients people with multiple sensitivities need to avoid, such as soy or tree nuts, so they're not a universal solution. Instead, I would have liked it if she considered neutral oils as a substitute for melted butter, or shortening in place of solid butter. There is some of that, but I think she could have gone further. There's no reason why you can't use oil in a brownie instead of butter. I do it all the time, but she never mentions the possibility. But that's a me problem. I recognize that a cookbook can't be all things to all people. Still, it's a small disappointment in an otherwise fantastic book. I've made four recipes from it so far and will keep going until I run out.

Highly recommended for those of us who can't buy anything at the grocery store without thoroughly examining the ingredients, and who sadly scroll away from recipes when they include a dealbreaker. The only thing Kat's system won't work on is gluten-free breads—because gluten-free breads be crazy—but she does include recipes for several gluten-free breads, including a base recipe for a simple white bread and one for an enriched brioche. Both can be adapted into more complicated bakes if you're feeing adventurous. Or you can peruse her gluten-free bread category on her blog, which I also highly recommend. Her gluten-free breads are the best I've ever made.

If you have any questions about the cookbook, recipes, or ingredients, just ask!