Babycakes Covers the Classics: Gluten-Free Vegan Recipes From Donuts to Snickerdoodles (3 page)

Frosting Spatula
You’ll need this knife-like instrument to spread frosting and glaze on a few recipes. It helps create a professional look that you can’t achieve with a regular butter knife.

Basting Brush
I have a pretty heavy hand. Drizzling can be tough, and putting oils on a paper towel just to grease tins is wasteful. The basting brush is perfect for these tasks. It is also invaluable when it comes to brushing pastries.

Rolling Pin
Any kind you like. I prefer the type without handles. In a pinch, you can always use an empty wine bottle.

Ice-Cream Scoop/Melon-Baller
Besides helping turn out impeccably uniform cookies, using a melon-baller also saves you from getting your hands all sticky. I use a 1-inch melon-baller for cookies, but feel free to go as large as you like—just make sure to mind those cooking times.

Plastic Squeeze Bottle
This is necessary for drizzling
Wonder Buns
and other things with sauces.

Cookie Cutter
For gingerbread men and sugar cookies. Your call entirely on which shapes to buy, but you should probably go crazy and pick up any you’re even slightly interested in.

Oven Thermometer
This is purely for preemptive damage control. Grab yourself one of these, mind it, and prevent early aging!

Specially Shaped Trays
In addition to your run-of-the-mill rimmed baking sheet, you’ll need madeleine pans and heart-shaped pans to make some of the recipes in this book.

Donut Pans
There are several of these on the market by now, some of which you may or may not like due to their chemical makeup. I’m in the same boat but am happy to report that I’m working to change that. Check out the BabyCakes website immediately for updates.

Loaf Pans (7 × 4 × 3)
This is the size we use at the bakery, but if you have one lying around that is smaller, go for it. It’s important, though, that you never fill your pan higher than halfway. Use that extra batter to make muffins.

Parchment Paper
Baked goods will stick to the pans if you don’t line them with parchment paper. Please forget about wax paper; it is an inadequate substitute.

Baking Sheets/Cake Rounds
I insist that you not bother buying super-pro versions of baking sheets that promise perfect cookie baking. These recipes work well on most any old rimmed sheet/cookie tray, as long as it’s lined with parchment.

Waffle Iron
Are you married? Do you know anyone who is married? If you answered yes to either of these, you have probably either received a waffle iron or been regifted a waffle iron. Now is the time to dust it off. If you don’t have one, hit the local mall and nab yourself the cheapest version; they’re all messy and there’s pretty much no way around that.

When I took to the drawing board to come up with what this book might include, I had some pretty serious decisions to make. Chief among them: Do I make this book totally gluten-free, or do I, as in the first book, include baked goods made with spelt as well? As most of you might know by now, spelt is a distant cousin to wheat that many wheat-sensitive folks, including me, don’t have a problem digesting. Judging strictly from a blind bakery tally, the numbers in the battle of gluten-free versus spelt customers are just about even: For every gluten-free item sold there is a spelt-based one scooped up as well. A conundrum! I kept thinking.

The spelt loyalist faction made it known often that they were counting on the recipes for the ordinarily spelt-based Wonder Buns, Honey Buns, and Hamentaschen in this book. I
had
to include them. But on the other hand, not a day goes by that we don’t get a phone call to the bakery from a frantic customer desperate for help converting a spelt recipe from the first book into a gluten-free one. So after much conferring with the BabyCakes NYC ladies, the choice was clear: I needed to get back in the kitchen and wiggle my way to the perfect gluten-free, vegan, agave-sweetened pastry crust immediately. The problem was that I had tried before and to date had never been able to make a gluten-free pastry crust that suited those recipes and met my standards. It was a giant and annoying Rubik’s Cube of ingredients I could never crack.

But I like challenges and, newly inspired, I got right to it. I had my usual mishaps and created some unfathomably grody dough. Lord knows I wanted to give up. But it was in those times that I remembered how sweet past victories over some of these ingredients had been, so I charged on. I ditched a little flour, added a bit of arrowroot, pumped up the vanilla, and soon I rolled out the perfect crust that is mellow, delicate, and sweet but that stands up ideally to the fillings I squish inside.

I tested the finished product, the Wonder Bun, on regular, spelt-cleared Skinny Bun customers, much like in the old Sanka commercials. Everyone’s mind was blown, and the look on the faces of gluten-intolerant regulars who were hoarding them by the bagful was practically reward enough. It was truly a transformational experience for me, and so here we are: a 100-
percent-devoted gluten-free BabyCakes NYC recipe book. A new road lies ahead …

(There’s a postscript, Spelt Lovers: I’ve included a special gluten-free-to-spelt conversion reference guide for you in
The Rules of Substitutions
. Everyone’s happy!)

Me and my business partner, Sabrina Wells

This is a fantastic question. Next to each of the recipe titles in this book, you will find the newly created BabyCakes NYC Piece of Cake rating system. It is the answer to everything you’re wondering. In this system you will find miniature pieces of cake lined up neatly in a row, four total, with the colorful slices representing how tough a recipe is in relation to the rest of the book. One is the easiest and four is the most difficult. So take this recipe rating, for example:

In the BabyCakes NYC Piece of Cake rating system, the above recipe is comparatively complicated, warranting three pieces of cake. Please, please use this as your guide. It is the best way I know to help all the wise and savvy penny-pinchers among you. If you’re just starting out, go for some easy ones and you won’t waste precious ingredients. If you are a borderline professional, hustle over to the Wonder Buns and other similarly advanced recipes. There’s always room to grow here.

I love questions. As an unabashed question-asker myself, I have a high opinion of people who understand the importance of bugging those who are more familiar with a topic than they are. As a baker who proudly still works the floor and ovens of each of the BabyCakes NYC branches, I’m also uniquely well versed in what is
probably
on your mind … before it’s even on your mind! Here goes:

Oh no.
Oh no!
I’ve made my recipe and there is extra batter! Why?

This happens to the best of us at the bakery, too. Sometimes we think we are being so precise with our measurements and we end up with extra batter. Here’s the thing: Measures sometimes simply have a mind of their own. Maybe the flour in your bag has been packed really tightly, so when you measure it there is actually more flour in the bowl than there would be if it had been sifted. Other times it’s simply that the oil, agave, or applesauce was over-measured unintentionally by the baker. It’s at this point that your recipe is in jeopardy. How much time do you have? If you’re able, you might want to bake the leftover portion first and see how your batter turns out. If you’re familiar with your ingredients, you can adjust the full batch (with a dash of flour, say, or a bit more fruit mixture) and you’re all set!

What’s up with nut-based milks? Can I give those a try instead of rice milk?

Anything is possible if you’re willing to try and fail once or twice. Although I haven’t tried using nut-based milks instead of rice milk, I’m confident good results lie somewhere within.

My cookies look as if some lady ran over them with her station wagon. What’s that all about?

Perhaps your oil was over-measured or your flour under-measured. If you prefer a more cake-like cookie, you can throw in ¼ cup additional flour to plump them up next time.

Hey, I don’t have any potato starch, but I have some of this potato flour. Is that cool to use?

Nope! Potato starch it must be. Never ever potato flour. Actually, I’m not at all sure what potato flour is used for.

What about garbanzo flour? Is that okay to use instead of garbanzo and fava bean flour?

Sorry! Only garbanzo and fava bean flour will do.

My baked thing is in the oven and it looks all goopy even though it’s been in the oven for the time recommended in the book. What should I do?

This is a tough one. Not all ovens bake at the same rate. I learned this hard lesson when we opened the Los Angeles bakery. I bought the same exact oven we have in the New York flagship, but I found that the new one simply needed more time with the recipes—growing pains, probably. Just keep checking your baked thing every five minutes after it has reached the halfway mark and remove it from the oven as soon as the center is cooked through.

My mother, Mary

My coconut oil is solid. What shall I do?

You shall melt it! Coconut oil turns solid when its temperature drops below 66 degrees, so
before
you take it to the measuring cup, make sure to give it a minute or so in a saucepan, on low heat, on top of the stove, or pop it in the microwave for about 25 seconds.

My baked goods taste overwhelmingly of coconut. Is there anything I can do about it?

At BabyCakes NYC we use the unscented variety of Omega Nutrition 100 Percent Organic Coconut Oil. This particular product has practically no taste but offers up a miraculously butter-like quality when treated properly.

Speaking of coconut oil, my-oh-my this stuff is high in fat. Explain please.

Coconut oil is a very misunderstood food. Yes, it is a saturated fat; but not all saturated fats are alike. It doesn’t contain trans-fatty acids. It’s high in lauric acid, which is considered to be an essential fatty acid. Lauric acid is known to have antiviral properties that are important for immune-suppressed individuals—this is the same stuff found in mother’s milk that helps stave off viral and bacterial infections in infants. If you’re still uncomfortable using coconut oil, dig in with some experimenting.

Actually, I’ve decided that coconut oil is just not my thing. Can I use a different type of oil instead?

Sure you can. You’ll see that canola oil is an interchangeable substitute, but if that doesn’t work for you, other scentless oils like rice bran oil and grapeseed are great, too. The only case in which you will get a bad result is when you are making the BabyCakes NYC icing and frosting. This recipe cannot be done with any other oil besides coconut.