The Icing on the Cake

Ok, so I need to back up a sec. I started this blog to offer a sensible approach to clean eating and my first post was a decadent, sugar filled cake. Let me explain:

I have dieted and lost significant amounts of weight at least twice in my life and I need to do it again. Weight loss is such a personal, psychological.. even emotional experience.

The first time I starved myself was in junior high. I lost some weight starving myself when I was 12-13 and became anemic so I gave up on that approach. I tried Weight Watchers, exercise and in my late teens/early 20s I replaced food with partying and dropped to my lowest adult weight. By the time I was 23 I was back up to a size 18 thinking I could use to lose a few pounds.

Then, I got pregnant with my daughter and turned in to a baby nurturing machine. I ate so much wholesome food, now that my body was the host of another human being I was completely responsible for, that I gained about 75-80 pounds all told (not including baby).

My first exposure to raw food was in culinary school, I was 20. My good friend, Jen, fellow chef in training, introduced me to a local, San Francisco, raw food restaurateur we ran into at the industrial kitchen supply. He looked like a Greek god. Long flowing blonde hair and a button down shirt unbuttoned to display his chiseled abs. No one was complaining; I certainly wasn’t! He was (and likely still is) the picture of fitness; and that was 20 years ago! Here’s to your health, Juliano!

The next time I experienced raw cooking was close up from the back of the house (that’s what they call us kitchen folk in the restaurant biz). I was an office manager and cook for a private chef turned entrepreneur who delivered raw, vegan, organic food to Portland’s wealthy elite. There wasn’t a clear strategy for the business, but I learned to use cashews, avocados and coconuts in very clever ways.

That’s the basis for the icing on the cake:

Raw Vegan Ganache

Ingredients:

2 ripe avocados

1 ½ c. Coconut Butter (any nut butter would work here, depending on what you’re into)

¼ c. Honey, Maple, Dates or Agave ( I use dates when I’m being super clean)

¼ c. cocoa

½ c. Coconut milk (more if needed to thin)

½ tsp. Vanilla

Pinch of Salt

Procedures:

Cut avocados in half, removing the pit. Use a large spoon to remove the flesh, placing it into a Vitamix blender (there is no substation, maybe a Robot Coupe or Cuisinart… but Vitamix is the be all end all of raw cooking). Add the coconut butter, dates, cocoa and coconut milk to the blender. Puree to smooth, adding coconut milk to thin. Add vanilla and salt. Thicken with more coconut butter if the mixture gets too thin to spread.

Try this recipe. Even if you don’t put it on anything but a spoon; you will thank me later. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to hear from you!

Let’s Start with Cake

It feels good to indulge. However, often, when we indulge too much, our bodies pay the price… Why not find a way to feast and maintain a healthy lifestyle?

Let’s face it, organic food simply tastes better than conventional (and that’s my professional opinion). As a classically trained chef, I have made it a point to know my way around organic permaculture. Organic gardening was the inspiration behind my internship at Skywalker Ranch after my 18 month crash course in food service sanitation, fine wine, mother sauces, garde manger, meat fabrication, table service (don’t ask about the spect-accident that occurred while I was serving glasses of wine to a large prestigious table of guests…), numerous international cuisines and haute cuisine at the California Culinary Academy (CCA).

Having cooked professionally since I was 12, thanks to my aunt’s bustling catering business in the Berkeley hills during the late ‘80s, I grew up preparing, tasting, and serving immaculate combinations like five spice duck in tiny mushroom crepes with chives, fresh sheets of pasta stuffed, rolled, poached and sliced, chocolate dipped fortune cookies with the business info tucked inside… I would later learn that this was true culinary artistry. And that’s just my dad’s side.

When I was with my mom (roughly 50% of the time) every other week, I was fortunate to travel with her parents several summers during my adolescence. We toured toured and feasted on Western European culture – art, architecture, history and fine dining. As a child, I was given wine with dinner, watered down when I was really little, but wine labels were used as foreign language teaching aides by my psychology professor grandfather, guiding me through the basics of international communication. 

Food is a safe place. It’s the one thing that everyone needs, but few need to love; and those are my people. The sheer joy I experience when pleasing peoples’ palates with my cuisine is incomparable. So, when I finally discovered I am sensitive to one specific strain of protein (the dreaded gluten), I was crushed. Heartbroken, even. How could my body betray me like this?! No bread? No Pasta? No Croissants? No bagels?! I had trained under one of the most renowned bread bakers in the world at CCA, a Northern Californian monk who taught me how to grow my own sour dough starter from scratch using raisins and water… this was the ‘90s; before Food Network brainwashed us, but not before large scale agriculture ruined my guts.

Whether it’s genetic, the inundation of chemically raised and highly processed foodstuffs from the ‘80s, or both; there’s no way around the fact that when I eat wheat, or any highly refined or modified ingredients – I feel like I may actually die. Excruciating abdominal cramping and many other unpleasant physical side effects (blistering rashes and peeling scalp) are the tip of the ice berg… The worst part was, I had suffered through these symptoms my entire life with no idea that it was a problem. It’s all I knew, so I naively assumed everyone felt like I did and didn’t share because it is an embarrassing topic… so when I did finally give up grain for other, unrelated reasons, it was like a huge light bulb turned on and shined its glaring light on my soul.

Always an optimist, I leveraged my chefly skills to replace wheat, barley and rye in my diet to correct a lifetime of digestive distress and inflammatory destruction… The first few years were the hardest. Raising three children during the early 2000s in suburban Oregon made me into a monster! How dare I deprive these darling kids of cookies, pb&j sandwiches and brownies? How cold hearted I must be… it’s just one cookie, have a heart. They’re just kids.

Exactly. When I was a kid no one cared that I was constantly sick and deprived of nutrients that I should’ve been absorbing from my food. I realized when I was 28 years old that I had been sick my whole life.

So I set out on a mission to create delightful treats that would maintain a healthy, gluten free, lower sugar lifestyle, but taste like the decadent delights we would otherwise miss out on. The secret to ‘dieting’ is not feeling deprived, right? 

The first food I adapted to our new plan was cake. Birthday cake, to be precise. I learned to ‘liberate’ any recipe of gluten by replacing wheat flour with my own personal flour blend. This was in the early 2000s and there weren’t many resources for the gluten free people. Here’s a recipe I created:

Yellow (Birthday) Cake

Ingredients

2c. fine white rice flour

1c. tapioca starch/flour

1 T psyllium husk

1T baking powder

1/2t salt

1c soft butter (substitute coconut oil for vegan/df)

2 c. sugar (I use organic evaporated cane juice)

5 eggs

2t vanilla extract

1 1/4c. whole, European style yogurt (coconut or cashew yogurt)

Procedures

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and line two 8×2-inch (20×5-cm) pans. Set aside.

2. Sift together the rice flour, tapioca starch, baking powder, and salt.

3. Cut up the butter (or coconut oil) into 1-inch pieces and beat for 3 minutes on medium high with the paddle until the butter is light and creamy in color. Stop and scrape the bowl. Beat for another minute or so.

4. Slowly add the sugar, scraping the sides of the bowl occasionally. Add the eggs one at a time.

5. Reduce the mixer speed. Stir vanilla into the yogurt. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the yogurt. Mix and scrape the sides of the bowl, mix for 15 seconds longer.

6. Pour the batter into the pans and smooth the top.

7. Bake in the lower third of the oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until the cake is lightly brown on top and comes away from the sides of the pan.

I’d love to hear from you! Please take a moment to comment and share about your experience with gluten free baking and especially if you try this recipe!