Pear Pie Take II (vegan, gluten free)

I wrote before about the pear pie with great filling and crumbly dough. With some tweaks, it came out quite good and was gone within a few hours 🙂 Here is the upgraded version, including the filling from before:

Ingredients:

Crust:

1 1/4 cups Tami flour or other Gluten free flour substitute
1/4 cup almond butter
50 ml oil
pinch of salt
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
cold water
(My SIL suggested adding some baking powder and baking ahead of time with some beans inside so it doesn’t rise too much, but I haven’t tried it yet)

Filling:

8-10 small pears, unpeeled, cut into halves, seeds scooped out with a spoon, sliced
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tbsp Conditor flour (cornflour)

Instructions:

In the food processor, mix all the crust ingredients except the water. It will form a ball pretty quickly. Pulse until it falls apart again. At this point, start adding water slowly, mixing thoroughly before adding more water, until it forms into ball again. It will be sticky to the touch.

Put in a bag and refrigerate for 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 180°C.

10-15 minutes before taking out the dough, deseed and slice your pears and mix gently with the rest of the ingredients. Let rest for 15 minutes.

Halved

Scooped

Sliced

Mixed

Press the dough into a pie dish. Refrigerate for 10 minutes.

See? Sticky.

Pour the pear mixture into the crust, including all juices. Flatten.

Before Baking

Bake for 55-60 minutes, until the filling has set (might be a little jiggly in the middle still).

Eat!

Now that’s pie!

Bon Apetit!

Read Full Post »

Glass-Half-Full Pear Pie

I had a humongous amount of pears – the sweet kind that go soft after about maybe 5 minutes? My kids won’t touch anything if it even has a slightly different colored spot on it, so they refused to touch them 🙄 So I searched for pear pie recipes, that would be non dairy (as I planned this for dessert for a meat meal) and gluten free. I quickly gave up and searched just for non dairy pear pie. I have Tami flour, that is supposed to be a 1:1 gluten free flour substitute and I figured I’d use that. I went for this recipe. I skipped the liqueur (we had Druze guests for that meal, Druze don’t drink alcohol), and used yet another flour substitute for the filling. Whew!

The result? Depends on your outlook (hence the title). The pear filling was excellent. The crust left much to be desired, being very crumbly. But it looked great!

Wow!

Investigator, as usual, ate it with gusto, the others didn’t touch it. I’m definitely keeping the filling part of the recipe, and I’ll continue searching for a gluten free crust that’s worth making (and eating!).

Do you have any good pie recipes? Post them below!

Ingredients:

Crust:

1 1/4 cups Tami flour or other Gluten free flour substitute
1/4 cup almond butter (maybe more will make it less crumbly?)
50 gr margarine (maybe oil would be better?)
1/4 tsp salt (too much for a sweet pie, using a pinch next time)
1 tbsp dark brown sugar
ice cold water

Filling:

8-10 small pears, unpeeled, cut into halves, seeds scooped out with a spoon, sliced
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 tbsp Conditor flour (cornflour)

Instructions:

In the food processor, mix the flour, the sugar and the salt. Add the margarine and the oil, and process until large crumbs. Add the ice water a tbsp at a time until dough comes together (maybe more water?). The dough came out with a great texture, which just made the result even more disappointing 😦 I’ll go for sticky next time 😀 Put in a bag and refrigerate for 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 180°C.

10-15 minutes before taking out the dough, deseed and slice your pears and mix gently with the rest of the ingredients. Let rest for 15 minutes.

Halved

Scooped

Sliced

Mixed

Press the dough into a pie dish. Refrigerate for 10 minutes.

Does look crumbly, now that I  look at it again… definitely more water.

Pour the pear mixture into the crust, including all juices. Flatten.

Before Baking

Bake for 55-60 minutes, until the filling has set (might be a little jiggly in the middle still).

Smell that pie!

Eat!

Have a great weekend!

 

 

Read Full Post »

What are friends for?

A friend of mine needed to bake a dessert without eggs. I gave her the recipe of my oil based chocolate cake, and she did something absolutely amazing with it:

Yup, that’s the same recipe 🙂
She used chopped up bittersweet chocolate instead of chocolate chips and used a piping bag to make cookies. After they were baked she  made cookie sandwiches with icing. Absolutely detectable! Go Talya, you rule!

Do you have any delectable tweaks? Shabbat shalom!

Read Full Post »

Magic vanilla chocolate – chip cake

I posted before about my basic chocolate oil cake. Now I present the vanilla chocolate chip cake – no eggs, no dairy, no margarine. And universally approved.

Magic!

Ingredients
1/2 cup spelt flour
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour (I’ve used up to only spelt flour, it still comes out great, just more dense)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
One heaped teaspoon baking powder
Pinch salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips or to taste
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla (I like a lot, a tsp is fine too)

Preheat oven to 160 degrees.
Sift flour into a mixing bowl. Add sugar, salt and baking powder. Add chocolate chips and mix.

All dry ingredients mixed

Add water, oil and vanilla and mix until combined. Pour into 25×25 cm baking dish.

Before baking

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

wait until I take a photograph!

still some left here...

Bon apetit!

Read Full Post »

Apple Bites

I really, really wanted cake. Or muffins. Or whatever. In addition, I was going to visit a pregnant friend of mine with two kids, so I had the perfect excuse to make muffins. A lot of muffins. I also had a jar of unsweetened applesauce that I needed to finish, so the muffins would even be healthy! 😛

I searched for applesauce muffins that are quick and easy. Also, my friend is slowly going towards being vegan, so I thought that non dairy would be a plus. I stopped cooking with margarine, so I needed an oil-based muffin. Jeez, it’s getting more and more complicated, isn’t it?

I found a great recipe here. It’s egg free and dairy free, quick and easy… perfect! What would I do without the Internet? 🙂

My husband has been trying to convince me we need a tablet, so that I could use recipes from the Internet without printing recipes (waste of paper) or going back and forth from the kitchen to the computer, or using a laptop for this (my laptop is usually at work, my husband is usually working on his laptop). Also, I like reading books online in onread or epubbud, and this way I would be able to read in bed or in the kid’s room and not only in front of the computer. So he brought a tablet from a friend for a “test drive”. I opened the recipe in the tablet and brought it to the kitchen. It certainly saved time and trouble. On the other hand, I used to claim that I could eat the sweets I made because I lose calories going back and forth making them 😉 Yet another excuse gone…

Tablet with recipe

I made mini muffins in small paper muffin liners. Each muffin came out to be 2-3 bites. They turned a great, with a strong apple taste. So… Apple Bites!

Ingredients

1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 1/3 cup applesauce (I put an extra tablespoon, finishing the jar. It was still great)
1 cup spelt flour
1 cup white flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon (my kids like it in small amounts only)
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

Preheat oven to 180C. Mix sugar, oil and applesauce together until smooth. Add the rest of the ingredients without mixing between each ingredient. Mix only when all ingredients have been added, until just combined.

The mixture – half gone…

Put 1/2 tbsp in each muffin liner. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean (or with big crumbs, that also worked great!). Let cool and eat!

First batch

Mmmm…

My kids loved this, and so did my friend. And so did I! Maybe I won’t wait again until I’ve got applesauce to use up 😉

Bon Apetit!

Packed and ready to go

Notes:

1. The original recipe had raisins or similar. My kids accept chocolate chips, but nothing else, so I just did without.

2. Tablet update: It is impossible to read online on these sites with a tablet. It might still be good for pdf ebooks, but not online reading. Not worth the expense.

3. Recommended reading on onread.com: I just finished reading “The Witness” of Nora Roberts. Spectacular!

Read Full Post »