Category Archives: low fructose

I’m not all that sure what constitutes low fructose. I know it means wheat free and that most fruits and a lot of vegetables need to be avoided, but there seems to be a fair bit of difference between what people can and can’t eat. If I’ve categorised it as low fructose, that means that someone with fructose intolerance has approved the ingredients as being things she can eat, but you should probably check for yourself, in case you are more sensitive.

Recipe: Egg-Candy Easter Quail Eggs

Posted on March 31, 2013 | 5 Comments

I have to admit, given that March has been something of a hell-month for me, I’d rather decided that I would let the March Vegetarian Challenge slide quietly into oblivion. But then the fabulous Johanna of Gourmet Green Giraffe made the most stunning Easter Egg pizza (really, you have to go and look at it, because it’s quite something), and before I knew it, three more people had joined the Easter Egg bandwagon, and here I was, the hostess with absolutely nothing to show for the month.

So, rather belatedly, I’m going to post two recipes, one today, and the other either this evening or tomorrow, depending how I go, for some creative interpretations of Easter Eggs.

Today’s recipe, I admit freely, is more than slightly weird, and not even a little bit vegan. I blame the Spanish nuns. (No, really – that’s where this recipe originated. Apparently, the Spaniards liked to use egg-white in their mortar, so the yolks went to the nuns, who obviously got bored with making custard tarts and started experimenting…) But who can resist an Easter Egg recipe made from real egg? Not me…

This recipe comes, almost in its entirety, from Gaitri Pagrach-Chandra’s fabulous book, Sugar and Spice, with only a few very small changes from me. First, I have doubled the lemon, because I am constitutionally incapable of using the zest of only half a lemon. Second, I have made the sweets themselves much, much smaller – these little morsels are unbelievably rich, rather like an extra-thick version of lemon curd. Finally, I let the sugar syrup go a little further than recommended, from thread stage into firm ball. This was partly by accident, because I couldn’t find a candy thermometer that would behave for me today, but actually, I rather like the results, which are much firmer than my first attempts at this candy, and thus dip a lot better into the white chocolate coating.

If you were much cleverer and more patient than me, I’d recommend the possibilities of tempering your white chocolate, so that your egg-shell would crack nicely. But I just melted mine, and that worked too. You could also decorate the eggs in a much tidier fashion by using a piping bag, rather than using a fork and dementedly flicking coloured chocolate all over the kitchen, but I was in a hurry, and the results were actually strangely appealing even with the flicky method, so I can recommend that, too.

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6 egg yolks (wondering what to do about the egg whites? Fear not – I have it all planned! Just put them aside in a bowl in the fridge for now, and you can use them in tomorrow’s recipe!)

zest of 1 lemon

125 g white sugar

45 ml water

50 g ground almonds

approx. 175 g white chocolate (Cadbury’s white melts are actually surprisingly good, and I used them here)

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Posted in confectionery, dairy-free, gluten-free, low fructose, Recipes, vegetarian

Tagged dairy-free, eggs, gluten-free, lemons, low fructose, vegetarian, white chocolate

Recipe: Simple Mint Syrup / Mint Cordial

Posted on March 12, 2013 | 2 Comments

This recipe is a very simple one, born out of the fact that my husband really, really loves mint. I thought it would be nice to make a fresh, minty drink for these hot days. Though, having made it, I can’t help thinking that it would be gorgeous added to a rich hot chocolate drink, too. Or drizzled over berries and ice-cream, for that matter. Or frozen and churned into sorbet.

Or just eaten with a spoon. Why bother freezing it first?

Your Shopping List (makes about 2 1/2 cups)

35 g fresh mint leaves – this would be the leaves from one nice bunch of mint, or from two dodgy bunches of mint, which is what I had.

1 1/2 cups white sugar

2 cups water

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Posted in Basics, dairy-free, drinks, egg-free, low fructose, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged dairy-free, drinks, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, mint, nut-free, recipes, sugar, syrup, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Pink Scones!

Posted on December 7, 2012 | 4 Comments

Today was our work Christmas Party. We went to the Zoo. Which was mostly a gallery of sleeping animals, but I’m here to tell you that the meerkats are the cutest and most active animals in the zoo, and that the seals are very good at explaining the importance of not littering…

Today was also a landmark achievement in my culinary life: I made more scones than my Division could eat. I actually didn’t know there was an upper limit on how many scones my scientists could consume, so I feel rather pleased with myself about this…

(Also, I now have a lot of leftover scones. A lot…)

I’ve been muttering about scones ever since we went to the Grand Hyatt for yet another work Christmas Party (the advantage of my job is that I get to go to pretty much all the Christmas Parties… the disadvantage is that by the last couple of weeks of December I have to start turning them down be cause I can’t keep up with my actual work). I was fairly vocal at the time about the general awfulness of their scones and the stinginess of their portions. Also, the discussion at our table turned to lemonade scones, which instantly made me realise that I needed to try making lemonade scones with other soft drinks.

I wasn’t going to do that for today, since I was being given money and the morning off to be the official main caterer, but when I mentioned to the two postdocs who sit near me that I had decided against red lemonade scones on the grounds that Weird Experimental Scones were probably not what I was being paid to make, they both looked so sad at the prospect of no pink scones that pink scones became inevitable.

That meant, of course, that I had to make ginger beer scones, too, as I had promised this to LePetitPrince. And then I had to make cheese scones, because one of our PhD students really doesn’t like sweet things. Which meant that of course I had to make Hungarian Paprika and Celery Salt butter to go with them. And then I had to make plain scones, of course, because what if people didn’t like the weird ones?

In retrospect, making nearly 130 scones for 32 people was possibly a little excessive. But how was I to know that the pink scone batter would make so *many*?

Anyway, these scones are basically your lemonade scone recipe, but with red lemonade. Or ginger beer, if you prefer. They taste pretty much like scones, though they do have a faint reddish-raspberry sweetness to them. And they are pale pink. They are also ridiculously easy to make, so you should give them a try.

Your Shopping List (makes about 30 scones)

1 kg self-raising flour

500 ml red lemonade (room temperature!)

500 ml cream (room temperature!)

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, Food chemistry, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged breads scones and quick breads, cream, dairy-free, egg-free, nut-free, recipes, red lemonade, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Roast Potatoes with No Photos (Because we ATE THEM ALL)

Posted on October 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

No, I didn’t eat the photos. I haven’t even eaten these potatoes all that recently, which is a tragedy, because they are possibly my favourite food in the world. And, actually, I probably do have photos of these potatoes somewhere, which I will add at a later date. But this post is a bit ad-hoc because I have become involved in Surprise Last-Minute Opera this week, and so my blog has been rather neglected (and probably will be for a few more days). I wanted to write something, at leastt so that you didn’t think I had run away to join the… opera… hmm…

(Actually, the opera thing is fairly exciting – I got this email on Monday that some singers from Opera Australia were putting on a small production of Tosca this weekend and needed a few more people for the chorus, so I duly put my hand up, had rehearsal on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will be singing tonight and tomorrow night – just two choruses, but hey, it’s a chance to see Tosca and sing some Puccini, neither of which are things I’ve done before. And it’s going to be a good and rather intimate performance, too – 5 soloists, ten or so people in the chorus, and all performed in a smallish church, so that the audience will really feel in the middle of things rather than at a distance.)

Anyway, recipe! Everyone always asks me for my roast potato recipe, and it’s not really a recipe, but since I can make it in my sleep – which, coincidentally, is about how I feel right now – here goes! These potatoes should be golden and crispy on the outside and nicely soft inside, with a happy garlicky rosemaryish personality. They go with everything. Personally, I like them with a tuna salad, because then I can pretend I am being healthy. Or alternatively, they are great as part of a whole collection of roasted vegetables which you might serve with meat or stuffed mushrooms, but could just as easily serve as their own meal, with a big bowl of pesto or salsa verde or garlicky white bean dip or aioli on the side. Yum. Why aren’t I having this for dinner tonight?

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(Oh dear. I really have no idea how many potatoes I usually use!)

750 g potatoes. Maybe. Really, use however many you would normally use for a roast potato side dish. Do not use new potatoes – pick all-purpose or floury ones

2 red onions, sliced in the wrong direction so that they are little half moon shapes

3 tablespoons of olive oil. I am totally making this quantity up.

a teaspoon or two of dried rosemary, or three sprigs of fresh rosemary

2 teaspoons or so of garlic powder. Yes, I know it’s disgusting, appalling stuff, but it is the best way to get the garlic flavour through the potatoes.

salt, black pepper

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Posted in cooking with vegetables, dairy-free, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, Recipes, side dishes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged dairy-free, egg-free, garlic, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, olive oil, potatoes, recipes, rosemary, side dishes, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Jasmine and Orange Blossom Cupcakes for Sensitive Souls

Posted on October 2, 2012 | 9 Comments

Another day, another fundraiser at work (and another cupcake recipe on this blog), and since I am now officially She Who Bakes Allergy-Friendly Foods, I had to come up with something gluten-free and vegan that my friends could eat…

The fun part about this recipe is that I actually don’t like these cakes much at all. But everyone else did, so I have concluded that perhaps I just don’t like jasmine tea very much. You might think I would have checked this before going off and inventing a recipe based on it, but no. You see, I’ve never drunk jasmine tea – I don’t actually like tea, though I have tried very hard to do so – but I love the smell of jasmine tea. Love it.

I’m always buying Andrew jasmine tea so that he can drink it, because Andrew can generally be relied upon to steep his tea for ages, and then forget about it and leave it around the house somewhere, and then reheat it, and then decide it’s too hot, and leave it to cool, and then forget about it… which may sound like a terrible thing to do to tea – I don’t know, I don’t drink tea – but it does mean that the whole house winds up smelling of jasmine for hours. Which is a win for me. I’m not sure about whether it’s a win for Andrew, too.

(Andrew says I’m exaggerating about his tea-drinking habits, but that’s what it looks like from the outside. And until he gets a blog of his own, he’s just going to have to live with my version of the story, ha ha!)

Anyway, all of this prompted me to look at the matcha tea cupcakes in my Vegan cupcake book and decide that they would be *even better* if I totally changed the technique and made them gluten free and, oh yes, used jasmine tea instead of matcha tea. People who like tea tell me that they are indeed even better.

But sadly, I have once again failed to like tea. Even jasmine tea. Even in a cupcake. But if you do happen to like jasmine tea, then these cupcakes are probably for you.

(I may not like eating them, but I do like the way they smell…)

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2 tsp jasmine tea (loose leaf), + 1 tsp for the icing

2 cups almond milk (rice milk is fine if you can’t eat nuts)

2 tsp raspberry vinegar

1/3 cup canola oil

1 1/3 cups sugar

1/2 cup margarine

1 3/4 cups rice flour

1/2 cup potato starch

1/4 cup cornflour (the squeaky kind)

1/4 cup tapioca starch

2 tsp guar gum or xanthum gum

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp bicarb of soda

a pinch of salt

1/2 tsp orange flower water

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

40 ml boiling water

2 tsp butter

24 raspberries, or marzipan flowers if that floats your boat

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Posted in cakes, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged almond milk, cakes, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, jasmine tea, low fructose, orange flower water, raspberries, recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Pasilla Chilli Chocolate Cakes with Hot Chilli Ganache and Smokey Chilli Mousse (incredibly allergy-friendly)

Posted on September 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

These cupcakes are a bit of a shock to the system. I freely admit to being a chilli wimp, but even I thought the original pasilla chilli cupcakes were a bit too mild.

So I decided to spice them up with an injection of hot chilli ganache to the centre. And then I decided to add a chipotle chilli mousse, which was the point at which I discovered that I could only eat a few bites of them before reaching chilli overload.

My chilli-head friends, however, fell on these cupcakes with cries of joy, and since there is something to be said for the notion that if one is going to make a chocolate chilli cupcake, one might as well make sure that the cupcake packs a good strong punch of both, these cupcakes should do the trick. Please bear in mind, though, that the amounts of chilli are very much suggestions, and somewhat vague ones at that – I’m operating rather from memory here.

For anyone who is interested, the main cake recipe is slightly adapted from my Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes for Everyone from a couple of months back, and the amazing chocolate and tofu mousse is adapted from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, though adding chilli to it was entirely my idea…

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For the cakes:

1 1/3 cup rice milk

1 1/2 tsp white vinegar

1/2 cup sunflower oil

2/3 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 cups gluten free flour mix (if you don’t have a mix, use 2/3 cups brown rice flour, 1/3 cup each of white rice flour and potato starch, 40 ml tapioca starch and 3/4 tsp xanthum gum. Or use plain flour if gluten isn’t an issue for you)

1/2 cup cocoa

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp bicarb of soda

3/4 tsp ground pasilla chilli

1/4 tsp ground red chilli

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp cinnamon

pinch of salt

For the filling:

150 ml rice cream or rice milk

100 g dark chocolate

1/4 tsp red chilli, or to taste

For the mousse:

250 g silken tofu

40 ml rice milk

20 ml maple syrup

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp ground chipotle chilli

225 g dark chocolate

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Posted in cakes, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged cakes, chilli, chipotle chilli, chocolate, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, mousse, nut-free, recipes, vegan, vegetarian, wedding cakes

Recipe: Fructose-Friendly Fresh Ginger Cakes with Rhubarb and Hibiscus

Posted on September 28, 2012 | 3 Comments

Another recipe from the wedding cakes I made for Rhiannon and Reed a few weeks ago! This one was designed, with the help of the lovely Emily, to be low-fructose and dairy-free, and was thus also gluten-free and, by chance, nut-free. I considered trying for vegan as well, but this is a soft cake at the best of times, and I’ve learned that soft cakes can generally be *either* veganized *or* rendered gluten-free, but not both, without a lot of changing. If you want the vegan version, I recommend popping over to my Vegan Fresh Ginger Cake recipe, and making it as cupcakes with the shorter cooking time below.

This recipe is adapted slightly from two recipes by David Lebovitz in his book Ready for Dessert. This book, along with his ice-cream book, The Perfect Scoop, is possibly the most dangerous dessert cookbook you can own, and I highly recommend it. Absolutely swoon-worthy, and yet another set of cookbooks I must review sooner rather than later.

What’s interesting about this recipe is how hot the ginger turns out. In the large version of the cake, the longer cooking time mutes the heat of the ginger and mellows the whole thing out, but there is nothing mellow about these cupcakes! They are, in fact, perfect winter fare. The filling is a blood orange and rhubarb compote that I gelled with a little bit of pectin, and I’ll be honest with you right now – I have no idea what I wound up doing for the icing. I’m pretty sure it was a vegan buttercream, so that’s the recipe I’m providing, but I had a lot of trouble with the icing on the day, and I may have got muddled. I will say that if dairy is an option for you, whipped cream would be the ideal topping here.

The wild hibiscus flowers are, of course, purely optional, but if you can get them (they come in jars of syrup and can be ordered here), they both look beautiful and complement the flavours of the ginger and hibiscus very well – they have a sort of rhubarb-berry flavour that really works here.

Your Shopping List

For the cakes:

150g fresh ginger, chopped as finely as possible (the food processor is your friend!)

1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

1 cup treacle

1 cup canola oil

2 1/2 cups low-fructose flour mix (obviously, you can use plain flour if gluten/fructose are not issues)

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp cloves

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 cup water

2 tsp bicarb of soda

2 eggs

For the filling:

1/2 cup blood orange juice (zest it first, for the icing)

50g sugar

175 g rhubarb

1/2 tsp pectin (any kind you can get is fine – you want a jammy consistency, really, but if you end up with jelly that still works)

For the icing

zest of 1 blood orange

1/2 cup tofutti cream cheese

2-3 cups icing sugar

1 tbsp of blood orange juice or water, optional

wild hibiscus flowers in syrup, glacé ginger or glacé orange, to decorate

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Posted in cakes, dairy-free, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, Recipes, vegetarian

Tagged blood oranges, cakes, dairy-free, ginger, gluten-free, low fructose, nut-free, rhubarb, vegetarian, wedding cakes

Recipe: Gluten-Free Flour Mixes (including self-raising)

Posted on September 21, 2012 | 4 Comments

I don’t know if this really counts as a recipe, exactly, but since I’ve been doing a fair bit of gluten-free and fructose-free baking recently, I thought I’d post a couple of my preferred gluten-free flour mixes. In all honesty, my favourite gluten-free things are often the ones where one uses a lot of nut meal to replace the flour. I tend to think of these as ‘naturally’ gluten-free, because one isn’t trying to make some arcane chemical mix to replicate what one isn’t using.

Given that a lot of these mixes involve multiple types of flour, many of which need to be sourced from health-food shops, I find the best approach is to mix up a batch of about 12 cups when I am first doing some gluten-free baking, and store whatever I don’t use (ie, most of it) in a large airtight container for any gluten-free cooking I will be doing in future. These mixtures are thus all very large. (You can, of course, mix the leftovers from one mixture into a new mixture without any difficulties – just don’t forget that if one mixture has nuts or cornflour in it, this will render the whole lot unusable for anyone with an allergy to one of these ingredients.)

Most of these mixtures also convert rather well into self-raising flour – the trick to self-raising flour, incidentally, is that you need 2 teaspoons of baking powder for every cup of plain flour. This may possibly be the most useful culinary fact I ever impart on this blog, so do take note of it, especially if you are like me and tend to forget to check that you actually have self-raising flour in the house before starting a recipe that calls for it.

And if you don’t have any baking powder in the first place, just mix 2 parts cream of tartar with one part of bicarbonate of soda (also known as baking soda), and you are sorted.

If you don’t have cream of tartar, of course, you really do have a problem. I mean, quite apart from anything else, how will you make playdough without it?

One final caveat – these flour mixes are designed for cakes, biscuits, cookies, and similar. I haven’t tried them in pastry, so I can’t make any promises about that, and I definitely would not expect any of these mixtures to work for bread – too low protein, and I have no idea how you usefully replace the gluten, this being an aspect of gluten-free baking that has not yet come my way. Though now I’m getting curious…

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Posted in Basics, gluten-free, low fructose, Recipes

Tagged almond meal, cornflour, flour, gluten-free, low fructose, potato starch, quinoa flour, recipes, rice flour, tapioca

Recipe: Somewhat Sicilian Fennel and Orange Salad

Posted on September 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

Another quickie, but I made this last night and it was lovely, and I thought it was worth sharing. It’s a very refreshing salad, good for cutting through a rich meal (in this case, Rosa Mitchell’s insanely good pasta al forno, of which more later), and rather nice for winter weather, when there isn’t much around by way of salad greens. This recipe is inspired by her orange salad, which is even simpler than my version – to me, fennel and blood oranges were irresistible additions at this time of year, and I was right…

It is a bit fiddly to make, at least in my view (I’m sure there are people out there who can segment oranges efficiently, but I am not one of them), but very much worth it.

Your Shopping List

2 blood oranges

2 navel oranges

1 large fennel bulb, or two small fennel bulbs

1/2 tsp chilli flakes

4 tbsp olive oil

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low fructose, low glycemic index, nut-free, Recipes, side dishes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged blood oranges, chilli, dairy-free, egg-free, fennel, gluten-free, low fructose, low GI, nut-free, olive oil, oranges, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes that everyone can eat

Posted on August 9, 2012 | 11 Comments

Hello again! And hello new people who wandered over from Broadsheet Melbourne, which I gather wrote lovely things about me yesterday. I am ridiculously flattered and delighted by this! (So lovely not just to get a review, but a review that basically says that I am succeeding in doing exactly the things I am trying to do).

You may recall that I promised an exciting vegetarian / vegan friendly recipe about a week ago, and completely failed to deliver. Why? Because, I regret to say, my nettle pie with olive oil pastry turned out to be less than delectable when I tasted it. To be blunt, it was awful. I think perhaps nettles are a bit on the bitter side for my taste, though this may be just a case of the bad cook blaming her ingredients. So no nettle pie recipe for you, sorry. (And this, I regret to say, was also a major reason for the week-long hiatus from this blog – I was sulking for days because clearly this pie was proof that I Can’t Cook At All. Hey, I never claimed to be logical…) I do intend to buy nettles again sometime and try them in a different recipe, so we’ll see what happens.

Instead, my dear readers, you will have to cope with a recipe I am developing for a wedding cupcake tower next weekend. This one is gluten, nut, soy and fructose free, and also vegan, which you would think wouldn’t leave you with much to work with, but there is always chocolate! And chilli! The spice level has been scientifically tested (I sent an email around to my scientists this morning looking for volunteer tasters), and deemed to be acceptable to all – which is to say, the true chilli heads claim it needs more chilli, but everyone else liked it. Feel free to adjust the chilli level to suit your taste (but be aware that these cakes taste much spicier fresh from the oven, just in case you were planning to serve them as puddings with a chocolatey sauce).

These cakes taste warm rather than hot, even when they are at room temperature, and the chilli does stay with you a bit afterward, but is not burny, even if you are a complete wuss about chilli, as I am. I have not yet developed the perfect icing for them (translation: something went horribly wrong with my usually fail-proof rice-milk ganache last night), but something with the personality of a chocolate cream-cheese icing would be about right. I’ll add a link to that once I’ve figured it out.

Enjoy!

Your Shopping List

1 1/3 cups rice milk (or other non-dairy milk of your choice, depending what you are trying to avoid and what you have in the cupboard, but probably not coconut milk)

1 1/2 tsp white wine vinegar

1/2 cup sunflower oil

2/3 cup caster sugar

1 cup brown rice flour (supermarket or health-food shop)

1/4 cup potato starch (definitely health-food shop, but cornflour would work in a pinch)

1/8 cup tapioca flour (also in supermarket, may be disguised as arrowroot)

1/8 cup cornflour (supermarket friendly – yay!)

1 tsp xanthum gum (health-food shop, no two ways about it)

1/2 cup cocoa powder – dutch process if possible, and fair trade if you can find it

1 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp bicarb of soda

1/2 tsp ground chilli