5 Gluten Free Quarantine Baking Recipes I Love

During my state's "stay at home" time (which is now being phased out) I have been baking more.

 

Rather than a giving detailed recipes, this is a round-up of foods I've made and links to the original recipe.
Note: I eat gf to keep my belly happy. All 5 recipes are gluten free. Some of these recipes are also paleo, dairy free, nut free or refined sugar free. That's just an added bonus.


First, I experimented with mug cakes. 
Mug cakes, if you are not familiar, are single-serve cakes you can microwave and eat in a few minutes.

Life seemed upside-down, so why not have cake for breakfast? 🙃 The first mug cake I tried used coconut flour and was WAY to dry, plus, it wasn't chocolate flavored!

The second mug cake I tried several days later was chocolate, but it was too sweet for breakfast. Also, it didn't have any egg in it. I'm always looking for ways to trick myself into eating eggs. (I'm not fond of the texture of eggs on their own. I really love this flourless pancake recipe with banana in it.)

The third recipe, which I made twice.
It's more gooey on the left because it was microwaved for less time

As my friend says, "if you don't win, you learn." I kept searching for a chocolate egg mug cake with natural sweeteners and the third time was a charm. This recipe from Lisa Bryan of Downshiftology is refined sugar free.
Changes I made: I added a pinch of salt, and I melted the coconut oil before mixing it in, since the oil is solid at room temperature, and tends to solidify in the presence of refrigerated raw egg. I topped mine with some maple syrup and blueberries. Microwave time is different for everyone, but I microwaved mine for about 1:30. I like to flip the mug cake out onto a plate to make sure the bottom gets done.

While on the breakfast kick, I also made green pancakes. 
I spotted them online for St. Patrick's day. These pancakes are colored green with spinach. They're super easy to make and healthy, and they've fueled my obsession with Lexi's Clean Kitchen. The pancakes use a winning combination of almond four and tapioca flour, which makes them paleo. They're sweetened with applesauce, so they're refined sugar free. I've already made these twice because it's a painless way to eat veggies.

If you don't have tapioca flour, buy some! I used to never have it on hand, but it has wonderful baking properties — it holds baked goods together without a strong flavor, grainy texture, or typical gf dryness. I tried making this recipe with 1/4 cup potato starch or rice flour. (No that's not a typo, the recipe calls for 1/2 cup of tapioca flour but it's recommended to use less when converting to other starches.) Potato starch was better than rice flour, but nowhere near as good as the tapioca flour! The rice flour made thicker batter and drier pancakes.

Then I branched out to pizza.
This paleo pizza dough is easy peasy lemon squeezy. There's no yeast or rising time needed. (We typically used Bob's Red Mill Pizza Crust Mix which has yeast when we make homemade pizza.) This recipe is nut-free because it uses coconut flour and tapioca flour.

The one thing I don't like as much about Lexi's Clean Kitchen recipes is that her recipes are made to serve 1-2 people. I doubled this recipe so it would serve 4. If you need to double it again to serve 8 people, Lexi recommends making two separate double batches.

I saw someone make sweet potato noodles. They literally spiralized sweet potatoes just like you would zucchini. I fried my noodles in a skillet, and served them with spaghetti sauce, ground beef, Parmesan cheese, and feta.

Finally, I made chocolate chip cookies with a recipe from — you guessed it — Lexi's Clean Kitchen. These are mostly refined sugar free if you don't count coconut sugar. The chocolate chip recipe also calls for either honey or maple syrup and I used honey. Actually there's sugar and dairy in the chocolate chips, which means they're not truly paleo or vegan. They are egg free, though. They're way easier to make than these gf chocolate chip cookies that require separating eggs and chilling dough. (The other ones are good, they just take more work!)
Lexi says the cookies can be stored at room temperature for 3 days, but soften each day. We kept them at room temperature for a week without them going bad.

Do you have a favorite food blogger that makes winning recipes? I'd love to check them out, especially if they have some gf recipes.