About me

I love baking. When my husband was diagnosed with celiac disease I was told I should throw out all flour and gluten containing products. For many months I stopped baking anything, until I decided to adapt my favourite recipes to gluten free options.

A few things:

1. Ordinary baking powder is not gluten free. I started to look online and found a gluten free option (Rumford gluten free baking powder) available through Wantitall. It is imported and a bit expensive, but it really is great and open up a lot of possibilities for cakes etc. I also experimented with a lot of gluten free all purpose flour. The one that works best for baking is the Gluten free all purpose flour from Komati Foods – I buy this at my local chemist (MKem in Durban Road Bellville). But the Woolworths products also work fairly well. These are the products I use:

2. I now buy cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda routinely – these products are all gluten free. You can potentially substitute baking powder with a combination of these in a 2:1 ratio cream of tarter:bicarb.

I also use Teff grain to add texture. This really works well in rusks or breads where you want additional texture.

I have thrown out all my ordinary flour and spices that contain gluten. I find that it takes a bit of effort in the beginning, but once you have done this everything is so much easier and you can only buy suitable products that prevents you from reading labels all the time!

Gluten free rusks

Rusks is a typical South African thing, and we all love it with our coffee in the morning…..The gluten free ready-made rusks are generally quite dry and the texture is very dense. So here is my own recipe.

3 cups gluten free flour

1/2 cup teff grain

1/2 cup rolled oats

4 teaspoons cream of tartar

2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon salt

250g butter

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

500ml buttermilk

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

1/2 cup sultanas

1/3 cup goji berries

1/4 cup sesame seeds

1/4 cup pumpkin seeds

1/2 cup coconut or coconut flakes

1/4 cup diced almonds

You could leave out some of the berries and seeds – I find that the gluten free flour is quite dense and adding a lot of other ingredients make the rusks more textured.

Mix all the dry ingredients in one large bowel.

Melt the butter and add the sugar to it and mix well.

Mix the eggs by hand or in an electric mixer.

Add butter mixture to eggs and make sure everything is well mixed.

Now add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients.

I usually bake the rusks in flat pan which is a 36cmx36cm square rusk pan. It comes with a cutter and I imprint the cutter on the wet dough to cut along the lines when fully baked.

Bake at 175 degrees Celcius for 30 minutes

When finished, cut along the lines of the cutter in medium sized rusks. Pack onto a clean oven plate (they must not touch each other) and dry out for about 6-7 hours at 50 degrees celcius.

Enjoy!