A new website. A new cart. I need a vacation.

I'm sure you have noticed the new website. It's going through a bit of a change...

The cart is almost ready to roll. That will make ordering easier!

Free delivery is still offered for orders over $30 in Bristol and Plymouth Counties. For those of you out of that area, you can drop by to pick them up or I can Priority Mail them to you. Why use mail? Well, it's actually cheaper and more environmentally friendly than me getting in my car or hiring a courier to drive them to you. And when they are mailed from close by, you'll get them in a day or two at most. How can it be environmentally friendly? Well, everyone gets mail, right? So why not have them deliver your Snowflake goods with your mail?

What's been baking? Well, we are in the home stretch on developing a chocolate biscotti. The official taste tester team (say that three times) gave it a sort of thumbs up. A couple of tweaks, another go round, and you should see them soon! They are topped with white chocolate and peppermint, and begged to be eaten with hot chocolate!

It looks like there might be a couple of flakes coming our way soon! Keep your eye to the sky!

Cranberry Upside Down Cake and Wooly Bears...

My massage therapist recommended that I look up cranberry upside down cake. He saw something on the cooking channel and said it looked awesome. I looked and found a few recipes, relatively the same, so I took the best from each and then applied my gluten free magic. The results were fantastic. The bakery will be carrying 6 inch and 9 inch cakes as well as small individual cakes (about the size of a jumbo muffin). Look for them soon on the website...but without further delay, the introduction:

And as a reminder, wooly bears are still rolling around the countryside (sometimes, they literally roll around in a ball) so be careful and try to not hit them as they are sprinting across the road. IF you see them, look at how fast they are trying to cross! I haven't seen too many orange and black ones, but next to turkeys, football and raking leaves, they are one of my nostalgic signs of fall....

Battle of Los Angeles, Pic Line and Pad Thai...

Most people that know me realize I ride alot of different bikes. Pink bikes, road bikes, fast bikes, grocery bikes....




The Great Fall of 2010

 




Grocery Bike roll with 'kins in the baskets



Bike Room prior to renovation

And most people know I lived in California for a long time. South and North. But what you probably didn't know, is that I hardly watch movies...and when I do, I keep wondering about the dumbest details.

Last night, I went to see my good cycling buddy Cyclocross Dave. He got Lyme and then pericarditis. And now he has a Pic line. But he still has a sense of humor.



Cyclocross Dave upright



So I brought the cupcakes, which I know he will feast on while he is laid up. And we ate Chinese food. And watched a movie that would make anyone panic. Battle Los Angeles.

So there are a couple of spoilers here, so if you are waiting for this movie to show up in your mailbox from Netflix, you might want to roll on by. But here it is. The west coast thinks it's a meteor shower but they are getting invaded by aliens. And they are weird aliens. They look like the skeleton guy from the Nightmare Before Christmas meets Predator.

 So they battle it out, nothing left of LA. Or anywhere else. Maybe Iowa, they didn't say anything about Iowa. And they are here for our water. So of course we make out well in the end, but there are a couple of things that make me wonder:

1) The staff sgt gave a letter to a woman to deliver to someone's wife. Did she ever get it there?
2) If the aliens were going after radio transmission, why were they still using radios?
3) Why do people run towards natural disasters in movies and not away. Who would go to see meteors hit the ocean and there might be the chance of a tsunami?
4) These guys never ate or drank water the whole time they were battling it out in LA. How do they manage that. And they never slept....
5) Where did they get all those bullets from???

So now you can see...why I don't watch alot of action movies...  :)

On another note, cupcakes were delivered and enjoyed by all. Next up, pie crust and maybe a pie or two.

Hello, Cupcake!

So the infamous Cliff kept asking me where are the cupcakes. And I should work on them. Right on it Cliff.

Actually, I have been working on them for a while, but never satisfied with the results. Until now.

Meet the cupcakes! Excuse the frosting. A little sloppy but all good. I will let you in my secret. I do not use 'gluten free' cook books. Why? I find them...inaccurate. I'm not sure if it's that they aren't well tested, or maybe it's my measuring cups, but they never seem to work out. So instead, I have done enough work to find the right ratio of gluten free flours, starches and liquids. And then I hit old cookbooks, like the binder style Betty Crocker one. The same book my mom would use, I can pretty much alter most recipes now. It takes alot of work, countless horrible batches but the effort is well worth it.

Too bad Cliff isn't around...more for me! And for my friend Cyclecross Dave, who is laid up with pericarditis as a gift from the Lyme Disease gods. Finally out of the hospital...hopefully along with very bad action movies and greasy Chinese food, he'll recover fast enough to maybe do one more cyclecross race.

Carmel, Peanuts, Macademia Nuts...oh my!

I have some passionate 'taste testers'. One by the name of Cliff. Cliff suggested I make chocolate chip cookie with macadamia nuts. I said no. At first. He kept asking (along with cranberry oatmeal) and so I caved in. Not a bad relinquishment of cookie power, it's a win-win:

His second request is one modeled after my favorite candy bar. Snickers. So I went to work, and it's pretty close, except the carmels are not gluten free, so I need to find another carmel supplier, and maybe use peanut butter without the nuts...

When life gives you bruised bananas....

Make banana bread!

My first venture into gluten free baking was banana nut bread. And I believe it was the only one (I adapted the recipe from Fanny Farmer) where it worked the first time.

The most important ingredient is bananas. They can't be just ripe. And they can't be black. They have to be in between. The one on the bottom is just right!

This banana bread contains the good stuff. A mix of gluten free flours, including almond flour. Toasted walnuts and chocolate chips finish it off. These little loaves (no one seems to like the name breadlet) weigh in at 200 calories. Much less than one of those HUGE muffins you see in the store! Some of which contain upward of 400 calories! YIKES.

I am finally listing them on the What's Baking page. Sold in boxes of 4 for $7, they are fun to make. And fun to eat. Some ideas were recently brought to my attention...

Split one down the middle and pan fry (oh there goes the 200 calories!) and slather with peanut butter. I have not tried this yet. But I have oogled the wheat containing banana bread french toast...now there is another idea!

Another fine idea is to maybe toast them a little and spread with Nutella. While packaging up a box for a someone, this came into mind as this person recently discovered Nutella. Or how about a fluff sandwich with peanut butter and fluff? Like I said, so much for the 200 calories...

So when life gives you bananas, make banana bread. Just make sure you make it before the bananas get too ripe then...well...you can compost them :)

No rain, all cookies...

Today was a cookie order day. Along with cranberry orange muffins. Still wrestling with the online shopping cart. Some of the formatting makes no sense. I guess I should just do it and stop trying to reason every tag and font!


Chocolate chip:

Oatmeal raisin:

Who doesn't love a cookie? And if you can't eat wheat, these cookies will love you back :)


Cranberry Orange Muffin, which is made with real cranberries from the local area (NOT OCEAN SPRAY). I would not suggest this if you don't like tart. I tried to keep it from becoming a 'cranberry cocktail' which is nothing like cranberry juice (what a surprise eh?).  Cranberries are good for you. Eat up!

Ever have a perfect cranberry orange muffin model? Me neither. This muffin knew how to work the camera:

Okay muffin, ready for your last close up?

Shifting gears, the landscape is giving in to Autumn...holidays are getting closer!!!

During a mountain bike ride in Freetown, a big fat moon welcomed dusk. Hunting started this weekend so if you venture in the woods be sure to wear ORANGE!