Sunday, September 23, 2012

Week 27: Tart - Lemon Tart

I do not own a traditional tart pan but I did not let that stop me.  I bought a wonderful box of meyers lemons from costco (I am my mother's daughter!) and a lemon tart was perfect for this challenge!  I also got to use my fabulous new (well, newish) food processor for the whole thing.  I took this gem over to my friend's house and we enjoyed it with a bottle of red wine and lots of fun play time with her wonderful daughter.



 I used the tart shell recipe from Smitten Kitchen.  It was a little laborious, but it turned out fine. 



After freezing the dough as the recipe called for, I rolled it out and baked it.  


The sides fell which was disappointing.  I was using a 10 cake pan rather than a tart pan (again, I do not own a real one) so that may have contributed to the problem.  I didn't worry too much about it and just proceeded. Needless to say I didn't take any pictures of it cause it was not pretty. 

I moved on to the filling while it cooled. The filling recipe is also a Smitten Kitchen recipe and calls for the use of entire meyer lemons, rind and all. 


A little butter and sugar for good measure.


Then lots of eggs and a good beating!


The quantity was perfect to fill the 10" pan. 


It almost ended up being more like lemon bars rather than a tart.  Maybe being in a proper tart shell would have tricked me into it feeling like a real tart. Or perhaps we just fool ourselves a lemon tart is actually lemon bars!


Oh, who cares!  It is delicious either way! Yum!


Saturday, September 22, 2012

Week 26: Gluten Free - Pumpkin Cake

I haven't ventured into the gluten free world too much but I do have several friends who have a variety of levels of gluten allergy so I am sorta in tune to the fact that good gluten free baked goods can be hard to come by.  I wasn't too optimistic but ended up very pleased with this endeavor!  I even received high marks from both gluten-sensitive friends and those who just like tasty pumpkin flavored stuff ! 



I found this great recipe on Gluten Free Goddess. First this was to mix the pumpkin with the eggs, sugar oil and vanilla. 

In a separate bowl I mixed the dry goods.  I don't keep pumpkin pie spice on hand so I mixed the following spices together: 1tsp Cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 tsp ginger, 1/4 ground cloves.


I slowly added the dry to the wet and created a pretty perfect looking batter.  I would not have been able to distinguish this from a glutenized recipe. 


Because I knew I wanted to be able to give some of this away to different friends, I greased 5 mini loaf pans and set them on a baking stone to cook. 


The loaves cooked up nicely and I decided to forego the icing so that I could eat these more like bread and not feel guilty for eating them for breakfast.


Although they came out kinda lopsided , they looked like normal pumpkin bread/cake.


I sliced this while it was still warm and it was pretty easy to devour a whole mini loaf between A and myself.  The crumb was nice and the loaf wasn't too dense at all.  It was fluffy and totally delicious.  If I were to remake this recipe I would definitely try it with the maple frosting and I would double the pumpkin spices.  While it tasted like pumpkin pie, it wasn't very strong and I like spicy pumpkin flavored things.  Also, adding nuts or even chocolate chips would be fantastic in this!