Gluten free chocolate chip cookies, no egg either

These gluten free chewy cookies also contain no egg and very little ingredients. They do not last long in our house and are great for unexpected company because they are so quick and easy to make!

Gluten free chocolate chip cookies

Makes about 12 medium cookies

Ingredients

300 grams (3 cups) almond flour
90 grams (6 tbs) butter, room temperature
5 medjool dates, pitted
4 handfuls of chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C (350 F)
Put a piece of wax paper on a tray.

Mix flour, butter and dates in a food processor until no big pieces of dates remain.
Add up to 5 tablespoons water, one at a time, until the dough starts to form a ball.
Add the chocolate chips (you can add as little or many as you like which is why I didn't give a clear amount)
Mix the dough by hand until the chips are well spread.

Roll small balls from the dough, about the size of a golf ball.
Put them on the tray, pressing them down to about 1 cm (1/3 inch) thickness.
Keep in mind that these cookies do not spread or rise. What you make on the tray is what they are going to look like after you baked them.

Put the tray in the center of the oven (or if you can't put it in the center because you have a stupid oven just like me, put it above the center, not below).
Bake the cookies for 10 minutes.
Let them cool on the tray.

Try not to burn your tongue! (I always do, they are just too yummy to wait for them to cool!)

Let me know what you think!

Amazingly scrumptious chocolate pudding recipe almost sugar free

Oh my, I just made the most amazingly scrumptious chocolate pudding! It is based on this recipe by Joy of Baking but as has become my signature thing at the moment, it is almost sugar free. This by the way does not mean it is healthy like veggies or fruit. It just doesn't contain evil refined sugar... instead I have used maple syrup and stevia. Besides not being toxic, it is also dead easy to make! Yay!

Amazingly scrumptious chocolate pudding 

Makes enough for 4 people, it's very filling
Prep time: 1,5 hours including refrigeration

Goodness I need to learn how to make pics of food... Even mickey isn't looking too happy... It tastes much better than it looks, promise!

Ingredients:
- 2,5 tablespoons cornstarch
- 30 grams unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 100 ml maple syrup
- 1/8 teaspoon stevia (95% steviolglycoside)
- 3 large egg yolks
- 315 ml milk
- 100 ml whipping cream
- 40 grams of dark chocolate in pieces (choose chocolate of good quality)
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- 15 grams of butter in pieces


Mix the cornstarch with the cocoa and salt in a heat proof bowl. Mix it really well by scraping the back of the spoon over the side of the bowl until there are almost no lumps of cornstarch left. Add the stevia and the maple syrup and whisk well. Then whisk in the egg yolks until it's a uniform paste. Set aside.

Put the milk and the cream in a saucepan and bring up to boiling point. Take it off the heat and slowly whisk it into the chocolate paste.

Pour the entire mixture back into the saucepan. Cook until it thickens, keep stirring! When it has the thickness of pudding, which it will be really quick, take it off the heat and beat vigorously for a few seconds.

Stir in the butter, chocolate pieces and vanilla extract until well blended.

Pour or scoop it into a clean bowl, press a piece of baking paper over the top and refrigerate for about an hour. (The baking paper will keep it from forming a film and it won't stick.)

After the hour take the bowl out of the fridge, remove the paper and beat vigorously again. Your pudding is now done and ready to eat! Yay!

You can eat it right away or cover it and refrigerate again until needed.


Enjoy!

How to: Black and white Mickey Mouse/Disney cake pops

My mom ordered cake pops but gave me the choice of how they would look. Those are nice orders because I can try out ideas I have without spending too much money on it. Of course I did not charge her for the fact that they weren't all the same and much more work than your standard cake pop, so it's a good deal for both of us (in my opinion anyway). 

I wanted to make black and white Fab 4 cake pops (sorry to me that will never be the Beatles..) with a color accent. Unfortunately I didn't have green or blue fondant in the house so I kept those black and white. I actually like them this way too. I think Donald Duck is very recognizable, Goofy could use a green hat and maybe some ears though.

Mickey would probably have turned out better if his buttons had been red. Wouter didn't recognize him at all, even with Minnie right next to it... Minnie turned out great in my opinion. The heart shaped confetti worked great as a bow. 

I also made these pops with the intention of adding as little sugar as I possibly could. I therefore tried to stay away from buttercream and Candy melts, instead using a sugarfree cake recipe, ganache and chocolate.

It was a good try with fairly satisfactory results!

For those of you who are interested in a more thorough description of what I did, I added a how to here. Otherwise you can stop reading and maybe pin my picture for me :)

HOW TO:

(also check out the Mickey Mouse no-bake cake pop post)

The filling consists of Honey Ginger Cake. I found the recipe on Homemade Baby Food Recipes.com where they also have a lot of other great sugarfree cake recipes.

I had some white chocolate ganache which I had taken out of the freezer the day before. After I crumbled the cake to pieces, I used this to stick it back together. The cake is quite moist on its own and I found that I probably could have rolled satisfactory balls without adding the ganache. Anyhoo... I rolled the mixture into balls which were way too big and then coated them with a bit of wholewheat flour just so they wouldn't be so sticky. I put them into a egg tray with plastic wrap over it and used yellow Wilton Candy melt to stick a lolly pop stick into them. (I used Candy melt because you cannot temper that small amount of chocolate.) I put the tray into the freezer for at least 15 minutes so the pops would be hard and easy to work with (hmmm sounds weird, hard and easy... you get what I mean right?)

While the pops were in the freezer I made the Mouse ears. I used chocolate drops and an apple corer. This made a nice round piece of chocolate that wasn't too thin. I also tempered white chocolate (don't know how? Check here).

I coated all the pops in white chocolate first. A quarter of the pops I put on a piece of baking paper, those were going to be the Goofy's and half I added ears to. Because the pops came from the freezer the ears needed to go on quickly, because the chocolate sets really fast. It's good though because you don't risk the ears falling off before it's set.

I wanted to use the gold balls as in the picture above for Mickey buttons. I had it all set up but then completely forgot to stick them on after dipping. When I remembered the chocolate had long since set. It beats having to draw them on though, so I would definitely do this next time.

After all the pops were dipped in white chocolate I put them in a pop holder thing and put them back in the freezer. Meanwhile I tempered dark chocolate.

Mickey, Minnie and Donald have their top half in dark chocolate and Goofy the bottom, though because his stick is on top what you're doing is the same.

Minnie got two heart shaped confetti candies on top her head and I made the spots on here dress with a lollypop stick dipped in chocolate. That's also how I made the lines on Goofy, though I think I'll use a brush for that next time.

Mickey's buttons are made from yellow Wilton Candy Melt, but as I said before I'll use the gold balls next time.

Goofy's hat and Donald's hat and bow are made from white fondant.

Make it beautiful!

How to: temper chocolate the easy way using a microwave and no thermometer

How to: temper chocolate the pretty fail safe easy way using a microwave and no thermometer.

Check it every 15 seconds and give it a good stir

So everyone always says that tempering chocolate is really hard, but it's really not.

First of all what is tempered chocolate?
It's when the chocolate breaks, like a chocolate bar does. It snaps. If you melt chocolate and don't temper it or don't do it right, it doesn't snap but bends like a gummy bear does when it's completely cooled and back to solid.

Secondly you need to understand what you're doing when you temper chocolate so you understand why you're doing what you're doing:
Chocolate in its solid state is like New York, buildings on a grid. When you melt it, it's like a big storm went right over New York and there's trees and cars and mess everywhere. When it starts to cool down, nothing happens to that big mess, it's fixable but you need something that is going to clean everything up and get everything back in place. For this you need solid chocolate. Solid chocolate knows how to be a grid, it knows how to be neat and orderly and it will tell the rest of that melted chocolate to clean up. That will get New York looking good again and your chocolate back in snapping instead of bending stage.
And by the way, if you overheat chocolate it's like a fire broke out and burned that entire mess... you're never getting New York back or your chocolate. You'll have to start over with new chocolate.

I'm sure a scientist would have a much better explanation but you probably get the concept, right?

So how to temper chocolate:

Break your chocolate into pieces. They don't have to be super small about half an inch squared.
Take 1/4 of the chocolate and cut or grate it fine. It doesn't need to be a flour consistency, just small enough to easily melt.

Put your 3/4 chocolate in a microwaveable bowl and heat it on half power (400 watt on mine) for 1 minute. Stir and heat again for 15 seconds. Take care not to coat the side of the bowl when stirring because the thin film on the side will burn.
Repeat the stirring and 15 seconds heating until only small clumps of chocolate remain in a yummy bowl of molten chocolate. Stopping when small bits remain will keep you from overheating and burning the chocolate.

Take your bowl out of the microwave and add the finely chopped/grated chocolate. Stir so everything is combined and leave it for a few minutes. Repeat until no pieces of chocolate remain. It can take quite a while to melt everything and the chocolate, even though it's liquid will feel quite cool.

If it just doesn't want to melt, or you want to reheat the chocolate because it's gotten too firm to dip or pour or whatever you want to do with it, just reheat it for 10 seconds. Don't reheat it too much or long because then it will be that big mess again and you'll need more solid chocolate to get it tempered again.

Any leftovers can be reused, and tempered again. 

And try not to drink the molten chocolate, that's not good for you. Really yummy, but not good.