Gluten-Free Cranberry Clementine Christmas Bread

This recipe is free of gluten and dairy.

Well everyone, it's that time of year again! Time for presents, family, friends and food. The Christmas season brings on a world of fragrances of its own, my childhood olfactory Christmas memories are just spilling with everything from pine to turkey dinner. Living away from family is hard this time of year, though every Christmas I go to be with them, having a limited amount of time there I find myself yearning for these familiar smells to get myself in the spirit! 

One delicious aroma that always gets me in the Christmas mood is the smell of baked fruit dishes. Fruit cake, dessert breads, any kind of carb-filled fruit dessert really kick starts my Christmas spirit. So, last night me and Navada got together and baked a Cranberry Clementine Christmas loaf. 

It came out more than ideal! This is my new favourite dessert bread and I'll definitely be baking it for my family once I get home. Served warm with a bit of butter it was just fantastic. Definitely a Christmas bread I'll be making over and over again.


Yield: 1 loaf

1 cup brown rice flour
½ cup tapioca starch
½ cup arrowroot starch
1 teaspoon xanthan gum
½ teaspoon guar gum
1 cup sugar
1½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup cranberries (I used frozen)
3 clementines
Zest from 1 inch clementine peel
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup chopped pecans


Grease a loaf pan with coconut oil and preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C.

Zest one inch of a single clementine. 

Peel all the clementines. Place cranberries, clementines, zest, oil, vanilla, egg and pecans in a food processor. Pulse but do not liquefy.

Combine dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Mix well.

Add the wet ingredients slowly to the dry, making sure only to mix until a dough is formed.

Transfer the dough into the pan. Bake for 1 hour.

Remove the loaf from the pan, but leave it about 15 minutes before portioning. Serve warm (re-heating is totally okay) with butter for dessert!

Enjoy! Happy holidays!


Post by McKayla

Gluten-Free Yogurt Blueberry Lemon Scones

This recipe is free of gluten, nuts and has a low lactose content.

Scones are one of my favourite breakfast/snack foods. Their delicious biscuity texture has been sincerely missed since I had to drop gluten from my diet. I used to work in a coffee shop, and the smell of fresh scones would stab me in the heart every time. 

My first concern when trying to create a gluten-free scone recipe was the texture. As many of you gluten-freebies know, when baking gluten-free a lot of the time it comes at the price of texture... In this case, not so! These scones are exactly what I was hoping for; crumbly and not as flat as a pancake!

Yield: 8 scones

1½ cups rice flour

½ cup tapioca flour

¼ cup arrowroot starch

½ teaspoon xanthan gum

¾ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ cup cold butter, minus 2 tablespoons

1¼ cups fresh blueberries

½ lemon; zest

⅓ cup yogurt

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

2 eggs

Preheat oven to 400° F.

Mix flours, arrowroot starch, sugar, xanthan gum, salt, and baking powder in a large bowl.

Cut butter into tiny pieces and mix into dry ingredients. Rub the butter and flour together until it's completely crumbled evenly into the mixture and you can no longer feel its sticky presence.

Stir in blueberries and lemon zest.

Mix yogurt, vanilla extract and eggs together in a separate bowl. Create a hole in the middle of the dry mixture and pour the wet mixture in.

Mix JUST until you get a dough, do NOT over mix. Dough will be sticky as gluten-free doughs usually are, and that's fine.

Transfer entire mixture onto a lightly floured surface and flatten out into a square about ½ inch - 1 inch thick. Cut this square into 4 smaller squares, and then half those squares into triangle shapes. Place onto a pan/pans lined with parchment paper, and brush a little bit of yogurt on top of each scone.

Put the pan(s) in the oven for 22 minutes. My oven goes a little cooler than most ovens so I put mine in for 25. I also used two pans for the scones, so keep that in mind when baking yours.

Remove and let cool.

Enjoy!

Post by McKayla