Cardamom Purple Sticky Rice Pudding & Gluten-free chocolate cardamom coffee molasses cookies

The inevitable consequence of always trying to come up with recipes and experimenting in the kitchen is that you have to be your own taste-tester, and generally, you are your own harshest critic. That being said, I am positive that I have eaten more cookies now that I know I have gluten intolerance than beforehand. Why? Gluten-free baking is so much more fun and exciting than regular baking. The chances that your recipe will fail are so much higher with gluten-free baking than regular baking and the suspense when you wait for your freshly baked goods to come out of the oven perfectly plump and delicious is amazing.

I have been meaning to try making a sweet coconut sticky rice/rice pudding for a really long time (ever since I tasted it at Taste of Thai Express in Downtown Ithaca), and have really been dying to come up with a recipe that does not include many cups of sugar. A recipe where you can actually taste and appreciate the flavor of the rice. I like to try to sweeten things with maple syrup or honey as much as I can, so I decided to try a purple sticky rice pudding with Thai Kitchen’s Organic Lite Coconut Milk and Grade B (dark) Maple Syrup (from Greenstar’s bulk department).

My good friend, Hope Rainbow introduced me to cardamom last semester when made a delicious sweet coconut cardamom wild rice dish for breakfast in sculpture class (we had leftover supplies from our Ginger Babel project). I really love cardamom, and have been trying to use it frequently.

Coconut Cardamom Purple Sticky Rice Pudding Pudding:
1 cup purple sticky rice
1 cup water
1 cup Thai Kitchen’s Organic Lite Coconut Milk
2 tbsp maple syrup
8 cardamom pods, whole

To drizzle on top:
½ cup coconut milk
4 tbsp maple syrup

In a medium sauce pan, combine 1 cup purple sticky rice with 1 cup of water, 1 cup of the coconut milk (before you open the can, shake it to make sure the coconut milk is not chunky), and 2 tbsp maple syrup. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and stir once in a while until rice is cooked and water & milk have been absorbed.

When rice is done, in a separate sauce pan, heat up the rest of the can of coconut milk (should be about ½ a cup) with 4 tablespoons of maple syrup and stir until combined and boiling.

You can serve either hot or cold (I prefer it hot). Scoop some rice into a dish, and pour the maple coconut milk on top, or you can layer the rice and the maple coconut milk. Yum :)


I am so happy that my friends are finally all getting back from break!! It was very peaceful and relaxing to have Ithaca all to myself for an entire month, but after a month of limited social interaction, I am ready to start hanging out again (at least until my school work wrenches me away from my friends). Yesterday, I went to Salvo with Varya & bought a large canning pot, and can't wait until the things start growing again.

Last summer at the farm, the tomatoes were so perfect and ripe that they fell off the vines and into my hand when I touched them. Bob had a hoop house full of tomatoes (to protect them from diseases) and a bunch of trellises outside, but the hoop house felt like a magical land. The trellises inside lined both sides of the hoop house, and as the tomatoes grew, we trained them to grow up, up, and up. Eventually, the vines growing on the trellises met at the top of the hoop house, forming a beautiful, bright tomato tunnel from the entrance to the far end.

Even with the trellises, the tomato vines were hanging so low that even I had to crouch down at times to get through. At the entrance of tomato heaven, there were gorgeous, gigantic heirlooms of all sorts of colors, shapes, and sizes. Some of the heirlooms were so large that I was surprised the vine could withstand the weight without breaking, even with the help of the trellis. Farther back there were sungolds and other smaller, pop-in-your-mouth varieties. The grape tomatoes were really interesting because they grew in bunches similar to grapes and were also shaped like small but long and slender grapes. Personally, my favorites were the sungolds. Hope and I spent way too much time picking those little orange beauties straight off the vine in the hot sun and popping them into our mouths, but they were so delicious and addictive that we had a really hard time not eating them.

Here is a (terrible) picture of some of the beautiful tomatoes from the farm (although the picture really doesn't do the tomatoes any justice):

After Salvo, we went to Wegmans & then down to the commons with Lyca. It was nice to walk around, but really, really, really cold. The wind was biting my face and I was happy to seek shelter in the stores. I ended up buying a new pair of running sneakers from the Finger Lakes Running & Triathlon Company, which are going to be really helpful because I have been running on roads in trail sneakers, and now I finally have a pair of road shoes.

The same night that I made the purple coconut rice pudding, I also decided to make some gluten-free chocolate cardamom coffee molasses cookies (very, very long name, I know). The first batch came out completely flat, but tasted AMAZING, so I added some more flour, baking powder, xanthan gum, another egg, and some chocolate chips to the recipe, and it came out really good.

Here is a rough version of the old recipe which didn't work out:

Gluten-free chocolate cardamom coffee molasses cookies

2 tbsp coffee beans
seeds from 6 cardamom pods
2 chocolate hunks (goya chocolate)
¾ tsp xanthan gum
1 ½ tsp bk sda
½ tsp bk pdr
pinch salt
*Wow, I forgot to write down how much flour and I used.... I think I originally used about 1/2 cup buckwheat flour, 1/2 cup oat flour, 1/2 cup butter, and about 3/4 or 1 cup of a mixture of light & brown sugar

**To this I added (after attempting to bake batch #1 and it came out terrible)

½ cup buckwheat flour
1 teaspoon bk pdr
½ tsp x gum
1 egg
a bunch of chocolate chips

Well, obviously, this recipe is a mess and I need to figure out the correct proportions. The main thing is the cookies were really good, and the combination of the coffee, cardamom, chocolate, and molasses was very interesting in a cookie. The cookies were nice and soft, and I think the addition of the chocolate chips was essential. I also really liked using the Goya chocolate instead of 'regular' baking chocolate. **Need to work on recipe!**

The sunset yesterday was absolutely gorgeous. I was driving home and had to park my car and get out to take a picture of this building on the engineering quad because it was glowing:

01.01.11.

Happy new year :) While eating breakfast this morning (corn, peas, beets, potatoes, carrots all sauteed with some garlic and eggs, gluten-free bread, and homemade cheese (made by my friend, Laura),

I compiled a list titled "Things to remember in 2011 & for life. 01-01-2011 9:16 AM". This list consists of many things that I have thought about in the recent past that I hope to never forget. The list serves to remind me of things such as: "take time to reflect on the purpose for the things you do", "record your dreams", "take a little time at the end of each day to reflect on everything you accomplished in a mere twenty-four hours", "appreciate simple things around you, like the first crocus of spring or a winter sunset", and "cherish the beauty & solitude of each morning. use this as an excuse to get out of bed.".

I am working on developing a gluten-free chocolate chip cookie recipe. Why? Because everyone loves the classic chocolate chip cookie, and those who cannot eat gluten are sure to miss it. I attempted twice to bake delicious gluten-free chocolate chip cookies on Christmas eve with no success. Both times, the cookies fell flat, spread out, and did not rise a bit. Oh yeah, they were also very crunchy because they were so thin (on the plus side, however, they did taste REALLY good) and cooked too long. Anyway, I realized that my problem was not adding enough baking soda to the recipe, and not mixing the flour/baking soda/salt/xanthan gum mixture well enough so that all ingredients were evenly distributed. So... I decided to try again tonight.

First, I decided that I needed a good starting point in terms of flour. I wanted to try a very large combination of gluten-free flours in hopes that the combination of their flavors would yield a desirable cookie. I have all sorts of gluten-free flours at my house, and am just starting to experiment with combining them. Here is what I came up with:

Gluten-free flour blend #1 (yields 8 cups of gluten-free flour)

4 cups brown rice flour
1 cup potato starch flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 cup sweet white sorghum flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup chestnut flour
3/4 cup almond flour
6 teaspoons xanthan gum

*Combine all flours VERY well so that the resulting blend is uniform in texture and color. If you can, sift the flours together. If you don't have a sifter (I don't), I would recommend mixing it with your hands so that you can feel when all of the flours and xanthan gum are incorporated.


After I made this *experimental* flour blend, it was time to come up with a chocolate chip cookie recipe!

I really like soft, chewy cookies, so I decided to bake the cookies at a higher temperature for a short amount of time. I based this decision on an article on this website, , which notes that the bigger the cookie, the more moist it will stay after cooking (a key to a soft, chewy cookie), so I should bake big cookies "for a shorter time at a high temperature to firm them up and minimize spreading".

Step #1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit

Another key to keeping moisture and fluffiness in cookies is BUTTER which is usually creamed with the sugar, egg, and vanilla.
I took out the standard 2 sticks (equivalent to 1 stick) of butter, which were frozen (I decided to stick them in a bowl of warm water to soften them because I wanted softened butter, not melted butter for my recipe- does anyone know of any other tricks for defrosting butter? This worked pretty well, but I got impatient and wanted to make the cookies, so I ended up putting the sticks of butter in a bowl and mashing them up as well as I could, and putting it into the preheating oven in 30-second increments. I would take the bowl out, try to cream the butter with a fork, and put it back in. The end result was that most of the butter softened, but a little bit on the edges had started to melt a bit.

Anyway, I knew that I would also need brown sugar (light and dark), vanilla, eggs, baking soda, and salt for my recipe. Here is the ingredient list:


2 sticks butter (softened!)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (packed)
1/4 cup light brown sugar (packed)
1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups gluten free flour blend #1
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

Looking back at the recipe now, I just realized that I only added half of the sugar I had intended to add! So I would actually suggest that you add an additional 3/4 cup of white sugar to the recipe because they ended up being much less sweet than a "regular" chocolate chip cookie is supposed to taste and could have really used a bit more sugar to balance out the taste of the flour blend. Here is what the recipe *should* look like:

Gluten-free chocolate chip cookies (yield ~a little more than 3 dozen cookies)
2 sticks butter (softened!)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (packed)
1/4 cup light brown sugar (packed)
*3/4 cup white sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups gluten free flour blend #1
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
11.5 oz bag Nestle Milk Chocolate Chips

Okay. First step (after turning on the oven and not forgetting the sugar!) is to cream the 2 sticks of butter with the dark brown, light brown, and white sugars. Next, add the vanilla and eggs (beat one in, then the second). Set this bowl aside. In the other bowl, measure out 2 cups of the gluten-free flour blend you made earlier, and to it, add 2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt. Make sure to incorporate all of these dry ingredients thoroughly so that you don't have little chunks of baking soda here and there. If you can, sift these ingredients. After you are done combining the dry ingredients, add them to the wet sugar/butter/egg/vanilla mixture. Mix until dough is a uniform consistency, then add an entire 11.5 oz package (well I used technically less than a whole package because I couldn't stop eating the chocolate chips while I was baking!) of Nestle Milk Chocolate Chips. Mix everything together, then drop by rounded teaspoons onto a cookie sheet (I didn't grease mine, but you can if you want I guess). Bake for 7 minutes! No more than 7 minutes! Any minute more and they will burn! Trust your nose with these cookies! When you start to smell them cooking, that means they are done!

The cookies came out pretty good, but now I realize that you can taste the flour blend... it is a really interesting flavor- you can really taste the brown rice and chestnut flours.... I think it might be too chestnutty for me, but I really think that an addition of the 3/4 cup white sugar would do the trick- oh yeah, and I also forgot to put molasses in them! Well, these are a good starter cookie, I'd say, and now I have the other 6 cups of my gluten-free flour attempt #1 left to experiment with (I think it would make a really interesting pumpkin or banana bread, carrot cake, or oatmeal raisin cookies... hmmmm!).