Crackly, crunchy French bread

MAN.  This bread.  Seriously.  I made it flawlessly 3 times, making it a little more my own each time.

Then, I bought a French bread pan, so I could stop making rigged French bread pans with tin foil.  THEN, I accidentally filled my white rice flour container with sweet rice flour.  Then it was fail after gooey French bread fail.

I wasn’t sure if it was the pan, making the baking needs different, the starchier sweet rice flour, too much xanthan gum or the devil making it gummy, but gummy it was.  So I decided to tweak all of it.  Including kicking the devil out of my oven.

And I think I got it now.

Making gluten-free pizza

The first time I ever made a gluten-free pizza crust, the mini-series that preceded the show The Starter Wife was on, and we were watching it idly.  It annoyed me.  The commercials for the series that followed drove me up the wall and significantly dampered my appreciation for Psych and Burn Notice. 

The pizza crust was a mix from ‘Cause You’re Special, that was extremely delicious.  And so sticky, that after trying to spread it around the pan for an hour and literally yelling at it with rage and frustration that the Pants – for the first and ONLY time – took over making the pizza crust.  With the grace of waxed paper, olive oil and a wooden spoon, he got it all arranged in the pan, we had pizza and holy cow was it delicious.

I do wonder from time to time whether it was this freaking crust incident that made me have such disdain and annoyance for The Starter Wife, but then I realized that no, it was just that bad of a show.  So it was cancelled, and I found a pizza crust recipe from scratch that I love and have tweaked it to my liking.  All’s right with the world.

Meyer lemon buttermilk layer cake

I’ve discussed my passion for lemon cake before.  If not on the blog, which I’ve got to admit I’m too lazy to check, probably in person.  On my birthday, I’ve baked my own lemon cake from box mixes for years, with homemade lemon icing.  Imagine my delight to find a guy whose favorite cake was also lemon cake with lemon icing…  

At first, it was whichever cake mix was on sale at the grocery store, then when the foe protein gluten was eliminated from my kitchen, I used the ‘Cause You’re Special (which as a company name? Sigh…) lemon cake mix which was really good.  But I wanted to make a homemade cake.  So I went to Laura’s hibernating food blog to get a starting place.  Because she’s awesome.