Saturday 8 January 2011

Gluten free pizza dough



I haven’t blogged in the past week or so as we have actually been enjoying really plain food in the aftermath of rich Christmas fayre! and as this past week has been so busy with both back to school and back to work chaos I haven’t really had time to bake, but I got back into the swing of things today.
So it was Ian’s birthday today and I decided to cook us a spicy chilli con carne for dinner, typically my children won’t eat chilli (though they do eat quite a hot curry - go figure?!) so I made them all homemade gluten free pizza instead, pizza is a bit of a Saturday night tradition in our house!
I have experimented with many ready made gluten free bases and pizza dough ready mixes and non of them quite cut it for me (Juvela ready made bases are about the best of the ready made out there) so I began to play with my own dough recipe. I have honed this down now to what I believe is the best and most authentic gluten free pizza dough possible but am always open to suggestions!
Here’s my recipe for gluten free pizza dough, it makes enough for two large (enough to feed 4 children with some left over for snacks the next day) pizzas:

500g gluten free strong white (bread) flour
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of quick yeast
1 tablespoon of sugar
large pinch of salt
350ml of water

mix all ingredients well (my 3yr old likes to do this with her hands!), leave covered in a warm place for about 10 minutes and then either roll or stretch out onto a large (lightly oiled) pizza tray (the type with holes underneath) and then drizzle a little bit of Olive oil on top.
 We top ours with simple tomato puree (my children don’t like chopped tomatoes and passata makes it too soggy) and some herbs, lots of cheese and a bit of pepperoni and pop them into the hottest oven you can muster (mine goes up to 250 degrees) for about 10 minutes and hey presto – tasty gluten free pizza!



Gluten free birthday cake

My little boy, Rafferty, turns 6 on Wednesday and we are celebrating with a party at our local soft play centre tomorrow. The playbarn cater food as part of the party package but couldn’t help with gluten free options so I’ve packed up a little lunchbox of gluten free “party” goodies (Asda own brand hula hoop type crisps are gluten free for any coeliac children missing hula hoops) for Seb and will add a ham roll tomorrow morning (Tescos fresh gluten free white rolls are amazing) along with some carrot batons.



 For those of you who haven’t come across honeybuns (http://www.honeybuns.co.uk)  you really need to check them out – Seb absolutely adores their chocolate tinker cookies (as shown in my picture), chocolate brownies and Rudolph’s Reward crispy cakes, all gluten free and in great child appealing packaging, I bought Seb a tin of their minis for Christmas and he’s already asked for another for his birthday!
We are also taking along our own gluten free party bags:



Lastly we’ll be taking along our own gluten free birthday cake. I’m still recovering from the stress (and copious baking!) of Christmas so wimped out here and took the easy option! At Rafferty’s request the cake is a simple gluten free Victoria sponge with strawberry jam, covered in standard white regal icing, rather than crafting a topper myself I took the cheat’s way out and bought a personalised rice paper (gluten free!) topper and finished the whole thing off with some wide red satin ribbon. Rafferty is Cars mad so is more than happy with the result which I think cost around £5 in total to make: