Christmas Baking

Today is Christmas Adam, or Christmas Eve Eve if you're boring. Which for me is a very exciting day as you get all the excitement for christmas without the wrapping/cooking/last minute panic shopping (happens to the best of us) stress of Christmas Eve. And every year we have drinks/dinner/some kind of celebration with our various neighbours (one of whom came up with the genius name of Christmas Adam) and usually watch Love Actually and it's just all very christmassy and lovely :)

Anyway, obviously Christmas is a key time for baking and although I rather disappointingly didn't get round to making a gingerbread house I have done rather a lot of Christmas baking. 

I made gluten free christmas cupcakes for my school bazaar using this recipe and just piped melted white chocolate into shapes, left them to solidify on greaseproof paper and put them on top:

We do secret santa at my school and I got my friend Molly, who is one of those people that is extraordinarily tricky to buy for - especially with a £5 budget. I therefore decided my best option was to make gingerbread men and wrap them in a nice box, and they went down very well :)

I used this recipe and then used mixed icing sugar and water into a reasonably thick paste, divided it into bowls and using liquid food colouring dyed each amount a different colour. I piped it onto my biscuits using a small plastic bag with the corner snipped off, although you could also use a piping bag with a small nozzle.

I was asked to make pudding for my friends christmas dinner, and as no one actually likes christmas pudding I thought a yule log was a pretty good plan. However I've since been told that what I made is actually a roulade, not a yule log as it doesn't have icing or branches so, here's the recipe for my very easy christmas roulade:

Gluten Free Chocolate Cupcakes

Wait! Don't stop reading just because you read the words 'gluten free.' (unless you're coeliac in which case read on!) I know it's tempting, but I promise these are nothing like the gluten free cakes you buy in shops. They're rich, moist (ew) and really quite delicious - almost more brownies than cupcakes.

I'll admit, the challenge of making a gluten free cake scared me at first. I did a ridiculous amount of googling/recipe book trawling before stumbling across what I thought was the perfect recipe. The pictures looked delicious and the reviews were great. However I then read the ingredients.... 'xanthan gum' 'tapioca flour'... these unfamiliar words did make me question what on earth I was letting myself in for but I decided to just go for it.

This attitude changed considerably after discovering that you could only buy said unfamiliar ingredients in health food shops and I'd left it a little late to be health food shop trawling. So after about an hour of near hysteria in Holland and Barrett I did some emergency googling and found a much easier, flourless chocolate cupcake recipe.

They were really easy to make, deliciously fudgy and very well received by gluten-free people and gluten eaters alike.