Catching up -- school days begin again!

My mom's empty classroom.  Photo: Elizabeth Urbach.

Hello everyone,

I haven't fallen off the face of the blogosphere, but wow!  It has been a long time since I've posted.  Several things have been going on in the meantime. My mom retired from her kindergarten teaching career and I helped her move out of her classroom; 20+ years in the same classroom = a surprising amount of stuff!  Weeks and countless hours of sorting, packing, throwing away, giving away, and hauling papers, books, DVDs and videos, pictures, posters, activities and worksheets that she used to supplement the curriculum, and all the toys, puzzles, and manipulatives that belong in a kindergarten classroom.

I also spent 6 weeks as a teacher's aide in the same school's summer school program, teaching Medieval
history to a class of mostly 3rd, 4th and 5th graders.  It was a lot of fun!

Gluten-free, vegan, cane sugar-free, nut-free, corn-free and soy-free roll-and-cut cookies!

Multiple allergy-friendly cuccidate!

O.k., I made the attempt yesterday to create traditional Italian cuccidate that my aunt and cousin (who are allergic to wheat, gluten, corn, milk/cream, egg, cane sugar and nuts) could eat.  I especially wanted the result to be tasty, and not weird-tasting or have a too-strange texture, and I think I can call the following recipe a success!  My relatives could already have the fruit filling from my regular cuccidate recipe: dried fruit, orange zest, spices and a little bit of honey all ground to a paste.  All I needed was the cookie dough to roll it up in.  I found several possible recipes, but this is the one I tried, from the Jules Speaks Gluten Free Blog, because the author said it could handle being rolled and cut out like regular sugar cookie dough.  I had to adjust it because my relatives couldn't tolerate all the original ingredients, and my adjustments still need a few tweaks, I think, but the result smelled good while mixing it, rolled out fairly easily (was very crumbly when I tried to form the cookies, though), smelled good while baking it, and tasted pretty good, too! 

Allergy-friendly Cut-out Cookies (adapted)
½ cup shortening or solid fat (butter, coconut oil)
1 cup palm, date or maple sugar (or 1/3 cup to ½ cup agave or honey)
½ mashed banana (or egg substitute equal to 1 egg)
1 tsp. vanilla extract or orange or lemon zest
2 ¼ cups gluten-free flour mix (if using a mix without xanthan gum, add 1 tsp gum for every cup of flour mix), plus extra for rolling
2 ¼ tsp. gluten-free baking powder
½ tsp. salt
¼ cup non-dairy milk (as needed to make the dough moist)

Gluten-free cuccidate: can it be done?

My regular cuccidate.

I love to bake traditional treats during the holidays.  So far, I've done gingerbread cake (recipe from good old Betty Crocker), nut-free fruitcake with dried fruit instead of candied fruit, cake mix cookies made with a spice cake mix and topped with cinnamon red hot candy, my great aunt's cocoa-anise cookies, and my nut-free version of cuccidate, or Sicilian fig cookies.  I bake so that I can have some good things, but not *the whole batch* and so that I will have something to give to my adult relatives (I only buy gifts for the kids).  My aunt and cousin, however, have multiple food allergies (as I do, but they have different ones than I have) and they almost never get to eat baked goods because their allergies include wheat, gluten, yeast, eggs, dairy (except they can have butter, weirdly enough), corn (both starch and syrup) and cane sugar.