Sofia's first birthday cake, sugar and flour free chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and chocolate soil

First birthdays are so special. For me it's about celebrating the child's life, acknowledging the little person as they transition from babyhood to childhood, and a whole community comes together to show their love.

I feel that a first birthday cake should be special too. But its only fair the baby can eat her own birthday cake, so it has to be free of processed flours and sugars. I've searched long and hard for the perfect recipe, and finally I found it.

It's a GAPS recipe, which is inherently free from junk, but I was able to change it slightly to meet my cake fantasies! The changes rendered it no longer strictly GAPS, but it was still flour and sugar free. 

The original recipe came from the wonderful Eleanor at petite kitchen. I fell in love with her delicious spiced date and ginger cake the first time I baked it. It was nice and high, so it presents well. It was quick, easy and thermomix friendly, but most of all it was versatile! Perfect birthday cake qualities!

Once I had played with it a few times I came up with the following recipe alterations to render it a chocolate cake. 

2 cups ground almonds (I use whole organic almonds and grind them in the thermomix)

1 cup pitted medjool dates, soaked 2 hours

5 eggs

1/3 cup raw cacao (or more if you like it really chocolatey)

1/3 cup rice malt syrup 

2 tsp vanilla paste
1 tsp baking soda

Pinch salt

So all I've done is swap the honey for rice malt syrup and add raw cacao. I used rice malt syrup because many of our guests are fructose intolerant, so I needed a glucose based sweetener, however if you want you could use maple syrup. I find honey a distinctive flavour that doesn't marry well with chocolate.

The ingredients are blitzed in a blender and baked at 160 degrees for about 45 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

I baked this recipe 3 times to make Sofia's cake, because I wanted to layer it up with cream cheese frosting and carve it into a flower pot shape. Sofia loves the garden. She thinks soil is delicious! I thought it'd be funny to bake her a flower pot cake with chocolate soil and see her scoop up a fistful, the way she tries to eat the real thing! (the chocolate soil was made with sugar free dark chocolate, raw cacao and medjool dates, whizzed together in the thermomix til it looks like soil.)

Here is the result of our efforts, a flour and sugar free chocolate flower pot cake, frosted with cream cheese and rice syrup frosting, coloured with raw cacao and natural food dyes.

 

 

 

 

My Tea Habit

Isn't it a wonderful relief that Summer is finally over! Three solid months of 35 degrees plus just isn't fair on a pregnant chick! But now it's cool at last. And that means I can drink tea again!




Antonio cultivating his tea habit

His favourite is chamomile













Herbal tea drinking is a habit I cultivated. My family's tea habit is a traditional Irish addiction to very strong cups of English Breakfast many times a day! While I don't object to a 'propper' cup of tea, I found it much more useful for me, health-wise, to cultivate a habit of drinking herbal teas. It's a perfect example of how to choose a health enhancing option over a health degrading one. (There are many stories floating around about how wonderful tea is for our health. The truth is the benefits are outweighed by the effect of the tannins on the stomach. A leather stomach doesn't digest food very well.) So during my years at the Perth Academy of Natural Therapies, where the student's common room kitchen was well stocked with some "out there" herbal blends, I learned to love the stuff.

I mean really love the stuff! I'm very proud of my extensive and eclectic tea cupboard! I feel that my approach to tea drinking is probably akin to that of our ancestors. Thousands of years ago, and until recently, people drank tea as a tonic, choosing herbal blends to suit the time of day, the season, their constitution or state of health. I use it simultaneously as a source of comforting warmth, a gesture of self care, and as medicine. I often turn to a tea for relief before any other treatment, if I feel 'below par'.

Right now my tea choices are influenced most by my pregnancy. During the first two trimesters I choose nettle and rosehip, sometimes separately and sometimes blended together. Rosehip is a great source of vitamin C, while nettle is a great iron source, as well as a good kidney tonic. After the 30th week of the pregnancy I will add raspberry tea, to strengthen and tone up my uterus for birth.

If I was feeling bloated or overfull,  I might choose peppermint tea, which is a calming and uplifting digestive aid. Chamomile is calming and soothing, and also a wonderful remedy for an unsettled stomach. I might even blend it together with peppermint for this purpose. I often order these teas when I'm out for a meal, partly because they're often the only ones available, and partly because they can be an antidote to any dietary indiscretions that may have transpired!

When a cold strikes I actually use tea as a primary source of relief. Besides taking such things as garlic tablets and tablespoons of coconut oil, I take teas containing such herbs as sage, calendula and golden seal. These three are antibacterial and help with lymphatic drainage, alleviating sore throats from glandular enlargement or infection. I also squeeze the juice of half a lemon into a cup, add a splash of water and drink this several times a day as it is a strong antiviral remedy, and I find it very relieving. Last week I had a cold, and, being pregnant, these gentle remedies became some of my only options. I also ate a handful of small, young nasturtium leaves daily as an immune boost. The cold was mild and lasted all of three days before I was fully recovered.

If I felt anxious or stressed I might choose white tea, vata tea (see below) or chamomile. Any of these would bring me down to earth. If I was feeling sad I might choose peppermint, lavender, rosemary or my personal indulgence tea, a cup of chai! (I've posted the recipe as I make it in the thermomix below)

Teas are a part of my beauty regimen. My beauty regimen is almost entirely focused on keeping my gut healthy, I do very little to my skin on the outside as I consider it too late by the time the skin cells have reached the surface! Ginger tea is especially good for the stomach and intestines, helping them break down the food we eat. Green tea is also a digestive aid, and mild liver tonic. In addition to gut health, hydration is important for the complexion. Any herbal tea is hydrating, while tea and coffee are dehydrating.

Ayruvedic medicine, which is the ancient Indian medicine system, offers tea tonics as wonderful daily balancers. I discovered in college that 'Vata' tea helped to relieve my period pains. Vata tea is also a wonderful digestive aid, and soothing to personalities prone to stress and anxiety. However if you are a 'hot' type of person, say you might suffer from reflux, or arthritis, dislike eating chilli and work in a creative or athletic capacity, the Pita tea is for you. Finally the Kapha tea is for those of us who are 'smell the roses' types, heavier set, robust and grounded people. Kapha tea can get you motivated and help with weight loss, sinus congestion, a sluggish bowel and even help alleviate depression.

Finally, my indulgence tea is another Indian inspired one, chai! I love a good chai. When I feel a hankering I take a teaspoon of black leaf tea and put it in the thermomix with a stick of cinnamon, some cloves, some cardamom pods, a star anise, a good chunk of fresh ginger and some peppercorns. I blitz them for 10 seconds on speed 9, then add a cup of water. I boil this at 100 for about 7 minutes, then add raw honey and raw milk, and strain into a big mug! Sometimes I make a big batch of the brew (before adding milk and honey) and put it in the fridge in a milk bottle. Then I can use it as a cold chai smoothie. I put a third of a cup of the brewed tea into the thermomix with a banana, some raw or nut milk, 2 raw egg yolks and some honey and blitz at speed 7 for 20 seconds. Great breakfast on the go!

What is your tea habit? Get eclectic and try something different next time you have a tea break!

Whole Food Parties

As promised, this post is about catering a kids party using health foods and sugar substitutes. It's perfectly possible to do this. I did it recently; everyone asked for my honey ginger cake recipe, there were zero cookies left after 2 hours, and one Mum even discovered her 4 year old was mad for fresh blueberries.

In addition to the routine dips, rice crackers and veggie sticks, there was a zucchini slice made by Mum, cut into finger sized pieces, and little meatballs made by MIL. The sugar free sweets included a chocolate cheesecake slice, a ginger honey cake, chocolate chunk cookies and the birthday cake. There was also some cut up fruit.

The birthday cake was a butter cake recipe from taste.com.au, into which I substituted gluten free flour and rapadura sugar. I could also have used coconut sugar. I experimented with using my thermomix to turn the rapadura into icing sugar, which worked well texturally speaking, but didn't taste awesome! I'll keep experimenting and give a recipe when I'm satisfied.

The ginger honey cake was a variation of a wonderful recipe I found in Clean Eating magazine. Here's my version:

1.5 cups stone ground spelt flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1.5 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup unprocessed honey
1/2 cup egg whites (that was about 4)
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup organic cold pressed peanut oil

Preheat oven to 180

Sift dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl.

In a medium bowl, whisk wet ingredients until combined. Pour into dry ingredients and combine, then bake in a sandwich tin about 25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. You can also use it for cupcakes.

See? Great recipe, nothing to it!! Also great because the cake actually improves with time in an airtight container, so I was able to bake it 2 days in advance. On the day I cut it in half and filled it with whipped cream. Yum. And low GI.

Gluten free honey sweetened cut out cookies: here. You can use some other flour if you like, I used a stone ground spelt and the recipe needed about a cup and a half rather than one cup. If you cut them into cool shapes, like the birthday kids' newly acquired age, as Nigella suggests in 'How to be a Domestic Goddess', they don't need fancy icing. For a christmassy feel, just add ginger, cloves and nutmeg, poke a hole in them before they go into the oven, then hang them from the tree by a ribbon when they cool. Nawww

The cheesecake slice was a matter of googling 'no bake chocolate cheesecake' and following the recipe for the filling, substituting rapadura for the sugar. I had also bought Well...Naturally's sugar free dark chocolate bars from the supermarket. I infused them into some cream by heating it on the stove and melting the chocolate into it. It chilled in the fridge, then I whipped it and used it in the cheesecake.

I have also had success making a honey cheesecake which is gaps friendly using this recipe by Sally Fallon-Morell. I usually halve it though, to fit a 22cm spring form pan. And it's amazing if you add 200g of pureed strawberries to the mixture! I put in some with the honey, some to swirl through the mixture, and the rest I drizzle over the top. Food of the gods.

The cheesecake crust, however, was 130g of pitted medjool dates, 130g of organic almonds, 20g of raw cacao (or more if you're game), 2 tbsp virgin coconut oil and a splash of vanilla extract. You can also throw in a handful of dessicated coconut. I blitzed this in the thermomix til the almonds were broken into small chunks, but not totally homogeneous with the rest of the mix. Then I pressed it into a biscuit tray and stuck it in the fridge.

The chocolate chunk cookies were easy too, just a matter of substituting rapadura and gluten free flour into this recipe from Joy of Baking.

At a recent brunch party, I served piklets made with stone ground spelt flour, eggs and milk. The topping options were lemon, honey, maple syrup, whipped cream and fresh berries.

I also made little yoghurt cups with mango or berries and maple syrup.

There are so many options and with a little imagination, the run-of-the-mill fairy bread starts to look pretty boring!

At the moment I'm experimenting with ice creams and Christmas cakes, all gaps friendly. I'll hopefully post about those delectable morsels before Christmas!