I made 2 recipes from Coeliac Australia’s Recipe book, Pistachio & Zucchini Cake and Banana Bread.

Here are the recipes for you to try.

Pistachio & Zucchini Cake

Cake Ingredients:
Melted butter for greasing tin
2 tbsp gluten free self-raising flour mix or desiccated coconut
Rind of 2 limes, finely grated
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla bean paste
2 medium to large zucchini, roughly grated
1/2 cup pistachio kernels, finely chopped
3/4 cup almond meal
2 cups gluten free self-raising flour mix, sifted
2 tsp ground cardamon, sifted

Glaze ingredients:
60g butter
Juice of one lime
1 cup gluten free icing sugar, sifted
Extra 1/2 cup pistachio kernels

Preheat oven to 170 degrees. Brush a ring tin with melted butter. Dust with gluten free flour mix or desiccated coconut.
Put the rind, oil, sugar, eggs and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Whisk until the mixture combines and thickens. Add pistachios, almond meal, flour, cardomon and zucchini and mix using a wooden spoon.
Spoon mixture into prepared tin. Smooth the surface. Bake in pre-heated oven for 55 minutes or until cooked. Stand cake on wire rack for 10 minutes before turning it out to cool.
To make the glaze, put the butter and lime juice into a pan. Stir over low heat until butter is melted. Remove from heat. Add icing sugar, stir to combine. Return to heat and stir for 1 minute. Remove and stand for 15 minutes.

Pour the glaze over the cake and serve.

I have never made a cake with zucchini in it before so was quite curious to see how this would turn out. It was actually really nice and refreshing. A tip if you’re making this, it cooks quite quickly – mine didn’t need 55 minutes – so make sure you check on the cake so it doesn’t burn.

Banana Bread
Ingredients:
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed banana (about 2 large)
1 tsp fresh lemon juice
2 cups sifted gluten free self raising flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp gluten free baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 tbsp sour cream
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 175 degrees. Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl. Beat in eggs. Blend in bananas and lemon juice. Re-sift flour with baking soda, baking powder and salt.
Gradually add dry ingredients to creamed mix alternatively with sour cream, beating well after each addition.
Stir in nuts. Turn into 9 x 5 inch loaf pan. Bake until tester inserted in centre comes out clean (about 40-45 minutes). Cool in pan for 10 minutes before turning out on a wire rack.

The photo above doesn’t look amazing as banana bread is not the most attractive thing in the world, but cake turned out nicely. Love a good banana cake in the afternoon with a cup of tea!

What does one do with lots of blood plums from a friend’s plum tree? Why not make an upside down down cake?

Here is a nice easy recipe that I use regularly from my favourite dessert cookbook – Donna Hay’s Modern Classics Book 2, adapted slightly to be gluten free.

You can use any stoned fruit for this recipe – plums, apricots, peaches…

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups plain gluten free flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 eggs
1 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g butter, melted

Topping:
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
75g butter
12 blood plums (or any stone fruit), halved and stones removed

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees. To make the topping, place the sugar and water in a saucepan over low heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Increase the heat and boil until the syrup is a golden brown colour. Remove from the heat and stir through the butter. Pour into a well greased 24cm round cake tin.

To make the cake, sift together the flour and baking powder three times and set aside.

Place the eggs, sugar and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for 8-10 minutes or until thick and pale. Sift the flour and baking powder over the egg mixture and gently fold through. Fold through the butter. Place the plums cut side down and very close together in the caramel. Spoon over the cake mixture and bake for 1 hour 5 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer.

Allow to stand for 5 minutes then invert the cake into a plate.

Make a nice cup of tea and enjoy your work!

Do you love nuts? We hope so – gluten free, healthy, yummy…what more do you need?!

The lovely team at Nuts for Life are giving away a $50 nut hamper to the best gluten free recipe (that includes nuts of course)…so get your nutty cooking hats on and send your recipe and photo to info@glutenshmooten.com.au

For some inspiration check out the Nuts for Life Recipes section

Competition is open to anyone in Australia

Merry Christmas everyone! Hoping you have a great time with friends and family and if you’re lucky enough to get a break that you enjoy it!

Here are a few tips to help with having a very merry gluten free Christmas!

If you’re making a traditional Christmas turkey and need a good GF stuffing recipe, check out Gluten Free Girl and the Chef’s stuffing recipe – they even have a video with instructions.

You know you’re turning domesticated when you start picking up the recipe books from Coles and Woollies – well I’m proud to say I’m turning quite domesticated! The Coles Christmas booklet has a few good marked GF recipes, like Gluten Free Mince Tarts.

Everyone seems to have online Christmas recipe options this year too – check out Coles’ one here.

The Woolworths booklet, whilst it doesn’t specifically mark out which recipes are gluten free, has a lot of GF options – like Margaret Fulton’s Fresh Cherry Pavlova which looks amazing!

It wouldn’t quite be Christmas without gingerbread now would it? Check out this cool gingerbread house my friend Adelle made for our Christmas get together

It wasn’t gluten free but here is a cute gluten free one from Gluten Free Shop that you can order online.

Another option is making some gluten free gingerbread men or gingerbread cookies, here’s a tried and tested recipe that is really easy and really yummy!

360g gluten free flour
1 t ground ginger
2t cinnamon
1t bicarb soda
125g brown sugar
125g butter ( melted)
2t treakle
2 small eggs
Pinch of salt

Sift flour with ginger, cinnamon and bicarb soda. Mix in remaining ingredients and knead into a smooth dough. Roll into required shapes. Bake for 10-15 minutes at 200c. Cool on wire rack

Whatever you decide to make and/or eat for Christmas here’s to enjoying it!

I went to an engagement party recently – one side is Indian, the other side is Greek so as you can imagine the food was amazing! All home made food, my plate was the oddest mix of dolmates, meats, curries, biryani…and the nicest discovery was a very simple eggplant dish that I fell in love with and have since tried to re-create.

Ingredients:

Eggplant, sliced

Parsley, chopped

Salt

Olive oil

Garlic, crushed

Mix the garlic and a few glugs of olive oil together in a shallow bowl, add a pinch of salt. Thinly coat the eggplant slices on both sides with the garlic olive oil mix. Place all the eggplant on a frypan on med – high heat, you won’t need to add additional oil to the pan there should be enough on the eggplant already. Cook on each side for around 3-5 mins or until soft.

Plate up by sprinkling parsley over the eggplant and drizzle a bit of olive oil on top.

This is a great entree or side dish and you can vary how strong / weak you want the garlic flavour to come out. Mine didn’t taste quite as amazing as the original but I’ll soon perfect it…

I’ve recently started to love alfalfa. Yes, alfalfa. It still reminds me a lot of the 1908s, Peter Peter Russell Russell Clarke (I’m not sure why) and alfalfa hair on sandwich faces

With the recent sudden heatwave in Melbourne the last thing you want to do is cook something hot on the oven for dinner, so I’ve been having a salad sandwich for dinner with a combination of salads, cheeses, tuna, salmon…yum! And it only takes a few minutes to put together and you don’t have to sweat it out over a hot stove.

Alfalfa is a great substitute for lettuce to give that crunch to a sandwich, it’s also high in vitamin C and K and folate so very good for you! Throw some into a salad, stir fry, rice paper roll, sandwich…how do you like your alfalfa?

I love a good soup recipe – this one is from Nigella again and is using one of my favourite ingredients – Pesto! This is a good way to use leftover pesto if you’ve made a pasta, just put the leftover pesto in the freezer and use when you’re ready for the soup.

Ingredients

750ml water

375g frozen peas

2 spring onions, trimmed but whole

1/2 teaspoon table salt

1/2 teaspoon lime juice

4x15ml tablespoons fresh pesto

The quickest way to proceed is to fill a kettle first and put it on to boil. Put the water you need into a saucepan and add the frozen peas, spring onions, salt and lime juice and let everything bubble together for 7 minutes.

Discard the spring onions and blitz the peas and their liquid with the pesto in a blender.

Pour the soup into a thermos for a nice picnic or into bowls to eat straight away.

This recipe was so ridiculously easy to make and tasted beautiful!

I’m usually a bit hesitant with supermarket recipes but thought I’d give a Curtis Stone recipe from Coles (one of the “feed your family for under $10″ ones) a go this week – Cauliflower and Spinach Dahl. I’m still very unclear on how you could buy all the ingredients for this and still only spend $10 – oh that’s right – they use “actual portions” so you have to make sure you have most of this in your pantry already!

In any case, this is a pretty easy dish to make. I did have a few issues though…

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil

1 small brown onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tbsp peeled and finely chopped ginger

1/2 teaspoon tumeric

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

10 fresh curry leaves

500g yellow split peas, rinsed

2 1/2 litres water

300g cauliflower, cut into small 2cm chunks

2 cups (50g) spinach leaves

4 chapatti bread to serve (these are not gluten free so leave out)

Heat the oil in a heavy based saucepan. Add onions and cook until soft for approximately 2 mins. Add garlic, ginger and chilli and cook for 1 additional minute. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Add tumeric, cumin, corriander and curry leaves to the pan and heat through for 2 minutes stirring constantly. Place split peas in same pot and stir to coat. Add water and increase to high heat. Bring to the boil. Reduce heat, and simmer, partially covered, for about 25 minutes until split peas are nearly tender and the mixture is a soupy consistency. Add cauliflower and cook a further 10 minutes (should be consistency of a puree). Check for seasoning. Remove from heat and fold in spinach.

My main issue with this recipe is the timings – it took over double the suggested time to cook the split peas – at 25 minutes they were still half raw, so make sure you taste a bit to see if they are cooked and keep an eye on the water level to make sure you don’t run out. The seasoning was also not as nice as I was expecting, I had to add extra to give more of a kick to the flavour.

Overall though this was a nice recipe – I’ve never made a dahl before and will happily experiment with some other recipes now that I know how easy they are to do.

I am so incredibly behind in the Cookbook Challenge, but I’m determined to finish it even if it’s really late! So…week 37 of the Cookbook Challenge and the theme is Hearty. For me there is nothing more hearty than a good, thick soup, so I cooked a nice Pumpkin Soup from one of my soup cookbooks.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon sunflower oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 large onion, sliced
675g pumpkin, peeled and cut into large chunks
450g potatoes, peeled and sliced
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
good pinch of freshly ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon
2 1/2 cups milk
1-2 teaspoons lemon juice
salt and ground black pepper

Heat the oil and butter in a heavy pan, add the onion and cook for 4-5 minutes over a gentle heat until soft but not browned, stirring frequently.

Add the pumpkin and sliced potatoes, stir well, then cover and sweat over low heat for about 10 minutes, until the vegetables are almost tender, stirring occasionally to stop them sticking to the pan.

Stir in the vegetable stock, grated nutmeg and tarragon and season to taste with salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer for about 10 minutes, until the vegetables are completely tender.

Leave the soup to cool slightly, then pour into a blender or food processor and process until smooth. Pour back into a clean pan and add the milk. Heat gently and then taste, adding lemon juice to taste and extra seasoning, if necessary.

Yum!

The Irresistible Gluten Free Show is on again this year in Melbourne on the 2nd and 3rd of October and Gluten Shmooten is very lucky to have 5 double passes to giveaway!

With information sessions, cooking classes, product and service displays and more, this is the perfect opportunity to plan a healthier lifestyle – from shopping for gluten free products to cooking gluten free meals the whole family will love to share.

Discover hundreds of prepared gluten free foods including breads, pasta, biscuits, cakes, small goods, ice-cream, ready-to-eat meals, confectionary, breakfast cereals, cook books, snack ideas and more

Click here to check out the website and all the exhibitors

To be in the draw to win one of 5 double passes just post a comment below telling us what you’re most interested in seeing at the show! Make sure you comment by the 26th September at the latest to be in the draw.

If you don’t win you can still pre-purchase tickets from glutenfreefoodshow.com.au and enter the code ‘GLUTEN’ to save 20%, or you can get tickets at the door (but they will be full price).