Some gluten-free baking recipes

Posted on 13 September 2014

Just baked this afternoon: two gluten free baking recipes. Both turned out amazingly, so I had to document them for posterity!

Gluten-free nankhatai

These are almond biscuits spiced with a heavy dose of cardamon.

This is based on this recipe. It’s awkward because the ingredients are measured in cups, whereas I much prefer to measure by weight, particularly for baking.

Ingredients:

• 50 g gram flour
• 100 g ground almonds
• 10 g cardamom pods
• pinch of salt
• 75 g icing sugar
• 110 g butter
• almonds to garnish

For this recipe, I bought flaked almonds (ie thinly sliced almonds) and chopped them up in a food processor. This resulted in a delightfully irregular texture in the final product.

Grind the cardamom with a mortar & pestle, sift with the gram flour and add the ground almonds and salt. Cream the butter and sugar together, then mix in the dry ingredients and knead. Put in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Take the dough out, make into 16 small balls and put onto a greased baking tray. These balls will spread out during cooking so give them plenty of elbow room! Put a flake of almond on each and press gently. Put the baking tray back into the fridge for a further 15 minutes.

Bake at 150℃ for around 20 minutes, taking care to ensure they don’t turn brown. Place on a cooling rack for 10 minutes. They will still be very soft when you take them out of the oven, but they will firm up as they cool.

As you can see, we were stuck with a baking tray that was far too small and our nankhatai soon invaded each others’ personal space. It didn’t stop them being delicious though!

Gluten-free banana bread

For this, we followed this recipe but with two substitutions:

• instead of cherries and sultanas, we used figs
• instead of rice flour, we used gram flour

It worked an absolute treat – would definitely do again. It was good to have two recipes to use up the gram flour.