Allergy Free Dessert

Allergy Free Dessert Audra: We all love desserts but for some people that suffer from food allergies being able to enjoy the treats is a little bit harder but luckily Rhiannon is in the kitchen with one food pro who’s showing us how to make a delicious and allergy free dessert all in today’s Better Bites. Rhiannon: Thanks Audra I’m here with Elizabeth Gordon allergy free food expert, baker and author of the new cook book Allergy Free Desserts. It’s now in your new cook book, your sharing recipes that had no gluten, no dairy, no eggs, no soy and no nuts. Now can they possibly still taste good? Elizabeth: Well it’s a secret and I’m going to share that with you today. Rhiannon: That’s great how many recipes are in your new book? Elizabeth: There are about 88 recipes with 44 color shots of all of them in the book. Rhiannon: That’s great and we’re going to do a pineapple upside-down cake Elizabeth: Yes. Rhiannon: A lot of people favorite recipe we’re going to show the easy way to do it. Elizabeth: Yes. Rhiannon: Okay so first of all, you’ve already prepared this pan, what’s in here? Elizabeth: I melted some organic palm fruit oil shortening in the bottom of the pan to substitute for butter and then coated that with some dark brown sugar to make it nice and flavorful and syrupy when it bakes and then I’m going to have you if you wouldn’t mind make the traditional lattice work with the pineapples and cherry’s and— Rhiannon: Let me do the work I love it okay so you just put the pineapples in here. Elizabeth: Just like that and then the cherries in the center and while your doing that I’m going to make what I would call my buttermilk substitute. It’s just rice milk. It mixed with a ¾ of a teaspoon of cider vinegar and we do that so that it activates the lemoning agent that we’ll talk about in 1 second an then in addition to that I’ve also before we started I made an egg substitute which is flax seed meal mixed with 3 tablespoons of water. Rhiannon: Now what is flax seed? Elizabeth: Flax seed is actually really, really good for you, it’s full of omega 3 fatty acid so it’s great for the heart great for the skin and when mixed with water the ground flax seeds become really this sort of like an egg white so it’s a great replacement in baking now you can’t use these to make scrumble bags but it works really well in a cake. Rhiannon: Okay. Elizabeth: So here we go we’ve got that so now before we get started I also prepared all of our dry ingredients and my mixer bowl and I mixed it with some organic palm fruit oil shortening. The dry ingredients that we’re using today in place of traditional flour are garbanzo bean flour, tapioca flour and potato starch and I’m going to mix those together with the most important ingredient in gluten free baking which is damp and gum. Rhiannon: And what is that exactly? Elizabeth: This takes the place of gluten and you know in a gluten free recipe and it’s going to make the cake develop a nice crumb and be fluffy whereas if we didn’t even use it instead it would be kind of goopy. Rhiannon: We don’t want to do that? Okay so we’re going t mix all this up together. Elizabeth: Yes we are. Rhiannon: So now we have the buttermilk, the fax seed mixture vanilla and mix it all up for about 2 minutes. Once this is all on here spread out how long do we want to bake this and what temperature? Elizabeth: We’re going to bake it 350 for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean just like any other cake. Rhiannon: Easy enough, okay and so this is the finished product. Elizabeth: When it comes out we have to remind people you know it’s an upside down cake so you got to flip it. Rhiannon: We have already flipped this one and I’ going to try this but as I’m trying this I want to know for people that do not have allergies to nuts or eggs or dairy will they still enjoy these recipes? Elizabeth: I think they will you know I made this last night for my husband and he took a bite and he said you know I could actually eat 12 of these cakes this is really good and really I tested all the recipes with my friends to make sure that they would even have to. Rhiannon: That’s a hard job. Elizabeth: And I thought you know if you past the friend test then I think the general public will like them too. Rhiannon: Well thank you so much it tastes delicious. It tastes just like a normal pineapple upside down cake if you can believe that and Audra, Elizabeth says these are great recipes to make through your child’s school just in case me and the kids have allergies. Audra: It looks delicious and Elizabeth wants to remind people that just because it’s allergy free it doesn’t mean it’s calorie free. Your taste of desserts require a portion control just as much as the regular kind I do and if you want to try the pineapple upside down cake recipe you can go to our website BetterTV.com and if you want a stockpile of recipes check out Elizabeth Gordon’s book allergy free desserts which is available on amazon.com.