As I write this first post, I am munching on a gluten free cinnamon sticky bun. It's fairly delicious, but could certainly be made more so with some tweaking. In any case, it's a good start. Before I delve into the recipe mutterings of the day, let's establish what my intentions are here...
This blog will not be a healthy lifestyle instructional. Your lifestyle is your making, and every person's "healthy" differs from the next person's. One person's tummy may love whole grains, another person can't eat oatmeal unless it's purely for chewing practice (and really, you don't even have to chew oatmeal). One male endurance athlete performs well on a high carbohydrate diet, another female endurance athlete is useless for a week each month unless she keeps a close eye on protein and iron intake. We all have different needs, different cravings, different lifestyles, and the quest for health is lifelong and dynamic, changing as we change. I am strongly against formulaic, blanket, cure-all eating plans that do not take into account gender, age, and activity level, to name a few things. Those types of plans discourage individual thinking and self-discovery, in my opinion the two most important first steps along the path to health.
I do not suffer from celiac disease. I am not allergic to wheat; I eat wheat in moderation. My gluten free baking quest is part curiosity and part necessity. I like to share what I bake with the ones I love, and my partner's choice to exclude wheat from his diet means that if I want to share a home-baked dessert with him, or make chicken 'n dumplings, it has to be gluten-free. I'm ok with that, since I enjoy pretending I'm a mad scientist in the kitchen anyway, and having 14 different flours just means I have more props to help me keep up my charade.
Whatever food choices you make, whatever dietary habits you are working on, your food should taste good. Eating healthfully does not mean eating bland, dry food. It does mean a bit of experimenting if you are leaving out certain ingredients. And experimenting means figuring out how and why your ingredients act the way they do. The more you know about how your ingredients act, the more you'll be able to make whatever you decide you want to eat, no matter your food exclusions.
Now that we've gotten all that out of the way, on to the cinnamon buns!
I will admit, they were a mix from a box. I have baked from a box one time in the last 5 years. And that was just to use the mix as an additional layer to a cake I made from scratch. I do not generally bake from a box. This box intrigued me though because not only was it a gluten free boxed mix, it was also, technically speaking, grain free (more on that later). I expected to find the 907 ingredients often found on gluten-free foods (many of them various types of binders), and founda total of 4 or 5 listed, and only one type of flour: tapioca. Tapioca flour makes for a very moist crumb, but can taste a bit tinny particularly with the addition of baking soda, so I was curious how this would taste. The only additions I was to make were to add 2 eggs, 3 tablespoons of oil, and 2 tablespoons of milk, along with crumbling 1/4 cup brown sugar, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, and 1 tablespoon of softenend butter. Oh! And I needed a measly 1 tablespoon of softened butter to spread on the rolled out dough.
Well, incapable of completely following a recipe as I am, I had already decided when I bought this box-o-baking that I would coat the baking pan with a caramel-like layer as for Cranberry Upside-Down Cake (more on that later). It was easy (1/3 cup light brown sugar, 2-3 tablespoons butter - melt over low heat until liquid and pour into your pan, tilting to coat), and would add more buttery lusciousness to these very tame rolls. I prefer melted butter to oil when cinnamon is involved, so I melted 2 tablespoons of butter, let it cool, and added 1 tablespoon of walnut oil to the butter. Then I mixed it all together, adding half and half instead of milk. The dough was marvelously pliable but still dense. It was quite possibly the easiest dough I have ever rolled out. For the filling I slathered the (at least 2 tablespoons) of softened butter on the 8x12 (give or take) sheet of dough with my fingers (it was fantastic fun! If you have little ones they'll love this step.) and then crumbled on the brown sugar/cinnamon/butter mixture as the box instructed me. Then I rolled tightly, sliced, and set the coiled dough nubbins cut side down in my caramel.
After 10 minutes of baking they looked like coiled rocks in molten poo. After 15, they puffed encouragingly. After 17, I could faintly smell burning sugar so they came out, ready or not. I did my usual poking: the dough sprang back, but felt a bit too soft. I did my usual smelling: no burnt smell detectable. I did my usual cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof tasting too early when it's still too hot: pretty good. Though with oil instead of butter, the called for amount of butter instead of my generous slathering, and without my caramel, they would have been quite different.
The moral here is that even with boxed baked goods, you still have to be creative to get truly delicious results. Anyone can make something good. We're here to make it lusciously crave-able.
SK
