Christmas Lollies!

So, following on from Emma Cawood's amazing efforts making single ingredient lollies... I decided these would be perfect for the twins' school bazaar next week. After much psyching myself up.... I set everything out and got started...

Ingredients

• 2 cups white caster sugar
• 2/3 cup light corn syrup - if you have this your lollies will stay fairly clear. I desperately wanted to source some, but so far no luck. After reading some excellent info here I decided to use Agave nectar instead. It worked fine, but the lollies were toffee coloured instead.

Equipment

• Lolly sticks
• silicone baking sheet
• sugar thermometer
• non stick pan
• bowl of cold water large enough to submerge lower half of the pan.

Tip:- Add flavouring if desired - mint or vanilla, but your lollies will darken unless you have clear flavouring! 

Method

• Heat the sugar and syrup in the pan and using a sugar thermometer heat and stir until it is boiling at 310F
• Remove from the heat. Submerge the lower half of the pan in the cold water bowl for 10-15 seconds, keep swirling/stirring.
• As it thickens up pour the liquid sugar on top of the lolly sticks in 1 inch circles. (If it spreads too much, it's still too hot)
• Quickly add sprinkles etc before the surface cools!

NB lots of sprinkles contain major allergens. I used these which do have egg white and soya lecithin in. We are lucky and these are ok for us, soya protein would not have been.

I honestly don't think I have *ever* been so nervous about a recipe before. I had never made anything like this - but it was surprisingly easy and I will be far more confident next time! Clearing up took a while, perhaps because I knocked over the sprinkles.....

Clearing up Tips

1. DON'T panic!!! You have't ruined your pan etc (unless and liquid sugar gets burned underneath.) as long as you have a large bowl of hot water to submerse the lower half in you an manage this really easily.
2. Once you have poured your lollies, the remaining sugar will be hardening and impossible to remove from the pan. Heat gently until it starts to move again, and literally POUR it into the cold water. It will set immediately, and your pan will have so little left in that the rest will easily dissolve in hot soapy water!

Single Ingredient Lollies

As promised, here is how to make #freefrom lollies, from the lovely Emma Cawood who is part of our Facebook Group. 

Emma describes so emotively the reality of catering for a child with few safe foods, and the lengths we mothers go to to ensure they don't miss out more than they have to.

Over to Emma:-

With the Christmas holidays fast approaching I could feel that feeling off doom overwhelming me once again. The dreaded season of parties and family get togethers, where every event seems to focus around food. If I'm being truthful I think T deals with it all much better than I do. He just takes it on the chin and accepts it for what it is. I'm the one that carries the burden and constantly questions whether this is having an impact on his childhood. Are his Christmas memories going to be ruined in someway because he never had a Candy Cane or Mince Pie? Because his selection boxes didn't contain chocolate will he somehow grow up unhinged? Ridiculous I know but it's the kind of thing that goes through my head on a regular basis.

So the day arrived that I thought I owed it to T to try and make a sweet of some sort out of his 6 safe foods. If I tried and failed at I would be able to hold my hands up and say at least I had given it my best shot. The good news is after a week of trawling books, the web and dismissing so many things due to too many ingredients I came upon a simple Sugar Lolly. The original recipe had more ingredients in it than T could tolerate so I omitted them all and went with pure sugar. Not the best option I know when you think of those little teeth and with my biggest boy I would have been hyperventilating at the sheer thought of it but these wouldn't be given more than once a week and as T gets no other sugar in his diet I took the bulls by the horns and went for it.

The first day I tried to make them I boiled the sugar in a solid bottomed pan on a low heat. It went through the various stages. Melted, grainy, back to powder again and then finally just as I was giving up hope it turned to a lovely golden caramel colour. I quickly poured over plastic cake pop sticks that I had laid out lovingly on plastic sheeting. However it soon turned into disaster. Without a mould the sugar didn't stay in neat round lollypop shapes, it ran everywhere. The pan began to boil and burn so when trying to remove the sugar from the pan I flicked it into my eye and nearly blinded myself. My husband arrived home to smoke, screams and chaos. Ok I thought! This isn't going to be as easy as it seems.

Day 2, I was prepared with goggles, a new bag of sugar and a positive attitude. I had ordered a chocolate lolly mould online and set my stall out properly. The sugar started to melt and go through its various stages again but this time I was ready for it. As soon as it turned a lovely amber colour I took it straight off the heat and poured into the moulds. Yay!!!! I had lollies. Safe, gorgeous lollies for my beautiful boy. Ok, not the easiest thing to make but if they bring a teeny bit of joy to his life then worth every ounce of effort, after all when you're 7 years old to be able to eat something similar to other children means everything and even more so at Christmas.

Emma has inspired me - we are supremely fortunate that corn syrup is not an issue so I might manage to make some without the moulds, all being well!

Gingerbread Reindeer

A lovely easy biscuit recipe from a friend that you can decorate to make reindeer! This was a wonderful tip I saw doing the rounds on Social Media last year.

This recipe is so easy, it's a blend of various recipes so things like xanthum gum may need tweaking and the amount of flour may need to be increased. This will make about 30 gingerbread men/reindeer.

Ingredients

• 140g pure sunflower spread
• 100g dark muscovado sugar
• 3 tbsp golden syrup
• 350g Doves gluten free plain flour
• 1 tsp gluten free bicarbonate of soda
• 1.5 tsp Xanthum gum
• 3 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground cloves


Method

Heat oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. Line 2 baking sheets with baking parchment. Melt butter, sugar and syrup in a pan. Mix flour, soda, spices and xanthum gum in a bowl. Stir in the butter mix to make a stiff-ish dough.

Wait until cool enough to handle, then roll out dough to about 5mm thick. Stamp out gingerbread men, re-rolling and pressing the trimmings back together and rolling again. Lift onto baking sheets.

Bake for 10-12 mins until golden.

Cool 10 mins on the sheets, then lift onto cooling racks.

Decorate upside down as reindeer!

Tip: Remember that these will spread a little in the oven so keep a bit of a space between them.  
These keep for about a week in an airtight tin, dough should freeze if made in quantity.

Duck breasts with Pomegranate and Mint

A great Christmas recipe with lots of flavour!

Ideal if you are having a dinner party and need to provide a free from meal which looks stunning and so simple to cook, or if you have older children on exclusion diets.

Ingredients:-

4 duck breasts
200g rocket,
watercress and salad chard (Possibly chinese leaves?)
1 Pomegranate (on rotation)
1 small bunch or packet mint ( if the kids don't like mint you could use chives)

Method:-

Preheat the oven to 220/gas mark 7
Heat a flameproof, oven proof pan on the hob, and then sear the duck skin side down for a minute or so over the high heat. (Remove the skin if not tolerated)
Turn the duck breast over then place in oven for about 15 mins.
Remove the duck breasts from the oven and sit them on a carving board to rest.
Whilst the duck is resting line your meat plate with the salad leaves. Slice the duck breast very thinly on the diagonal and lay on the salad lined dish, pouring any meat juices over them as you go.
Halve the pomegranate and then bash out the seeds from one half to garnish the duck slices.
Squeeze some of the juice from the other half, just by hand over the duck as well.
Sprinkle with mint leaves or chives.

Serve it with mini home made roast potatoes or your choice of potato, rice or pasta.

Genius Christmas Heroes!

My twins are Genius Gluten Free's "Christmas Heroes " for Christmas Eve :) and were delighted to receive a box of goodies including the most delicious mince pies which got the thumbs up from us!

47 Sleeps until Christmas!

With Christmas only 7 weeks away I thought I would post about some free from Christmas treats for children. If you are looking for something a little more special at Christmas, Hotel Chocolat are to be highly recommended. They carefully label their products and cater for dietary needs. Their vegan range is particularly good, my favourite this year is the "Tiddly" range - especially the penguins!

Not necessarily the cheapest free from chocolate, but SO tasty. They also stock an Advent Calendar this year. Don't be put off by their lack of "Free From" labels, they have excellent customer service and speedy delivery. Full marks in our house!