Cauliflower Pizza: gluten-free pizza with a cauliflower base

When I was doing sugar-free September I cut out gluten and so wasn't eating bread or potatoes. I decided to make pizza for lunch one weekend - my husband had a normal homemade pizza base, while I decided to try something I'd kept hearing about - cauliflower pizza.

That's not pizza with cauliflower on top (though I did once share a pizza with a vegetarian many years ago that had nothing but broccoli on top) - but where the pizza base is actually made of cauliflower. Have you heard of cauliflower rice? The pizza base is made in a similar way with the cauliflower riced and then baked in the oven. It tasted surprisingly good - cauliflower normally has quite a strong taste but it is masked somewhat by the pizza toppings.

To serve 2, you need:
1 whole cauliflower
1 egg
30g pepper
pinch of salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180C. Pulse the raw cauliflower in a food processor until you have crumbs that look like rice.

 

Tip into a large frying pan - you don't need to add any oil - and cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally, until the cauliflower loses some of its moisture.

 

Allow the cauliflower to cool then mix in a large bowl with the egg, cheese and salt and pepper.

Line a flat baking sheet with greaseproof paper and spread out the cauliflower mixture on top. Push down with the back of a spoon so you have a fairly packed down layer. Bake for 30 minutes until the cauliflower has turned golden brown.

If you can, get a spatula under the pizza base and turn it over in one piece and bake on the other side for ten minutes.

Remove from the oven and spread with tomato puree. Top with grated mozzarella and whatever pizza toppings you enjoy, and return to the oven for a few minutes until the cheese has melted.

Why not give it a go if you haven't tried this before?

Provena Gluten-Free Products and a Giveaway

I've been baking a fair bit with gluten-free flour over the past year or so as I have a work colleague who can't eat gluten. From reading other blogs I know there are a lot of people out there in the same situation, and it's amazing the number of things you can't eat or have to check the labels on in case they contain gluten (sausages, for instance). And I always assumed she wouldn't be able to eat breakfast cereal as that contains gluten, but it turns out I was wrong.

Provena is a specialist in gluten-free cereals, flours and baking products - its range is oat-based and the company says it uses some of the purest and highest grade of oats in the world, which gives a better flavour. The oats they use are grown in Finland, a country with the lowest air pollution in Europe, which is all good for their products!

They sent me some products to review and also some to give away to one lucky reader - see below for the entry form.


Even if you can eat gluten, these products are worth a look. Did you know that oats can help lower cholesterol, they contain fibre which is good for digestion, and also stabilise blood sugar levels and boost metabolism, and give a slow release of energy throughout the day.

The products that Provena sent me, and which you can win in this giveaway, are:

Gluten Free Jumbo Oats:  won two gold stars at 2016 Great Taste awards. Provena’s flagship product; they say : "Large, wholesome oats, that brim with taste and goodness." You could use these to make a breakfast dish or to bake into cookies.

Gluten Free Flour Mix with Oats - won a gold star at the 2015 Great Taste awards. They say: "An honest, gluten free flour that creates better tasting bakes".

Gluten Free Oat Museli: gluten-free muesli containing apples, dates, raisins and sunflower seeds "for a superb start to the day".

Gluten Free Wholegrain Oat Flour: with even more fibre, suitable for sweet or savoury doughs "that create astonishingly tasty, well-textured baked goods".

Gluten Free Oat Bread Mix: a flour mix containing oats that "creates a bread with a fantastic texture and delicious taste"

Gluten Free Instant Oat Meal - a mixture of porridge oats and either raspberries or apricot (it comes in two flavours). I was quite curious to try this as I've had porridge before that you mix with milk and put in the microwave, but with this you only need to add boiling water (so it's much easier to make at work for instance). I tried the apricot flavour and it was really good!

Gluten Free Chocolate Muffin Mix - of course this is the product I turned to first and made up the packet mix to take in for my colleague at work. It was so quick and easy to make - you just add eggs and margarine. I was slightly confused by the instructions to add 150ml melted margarine as I had no idea how much that equated to before it was melted, so I guessed, and melted some in the microwave and then added a little bit more. The muffins turned out really well and tasted great - they have little chocolate chips inside them and my colleague was delighted!

I'm looking forward to trying out the other products but as the company wanted me to run the giveaway as soon as possible I haven't had the chance yet! There are also some great recipes on the Provena website.

You can find Provena on Facebook and Twitter and you can buy their products from Holland & Barrett and Amazon.

So here's what you can win, the full Provena range. The giveaway is open to UK addresses only; you just need to fill in the Rafflecopter entry form below.

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

White Chocolate, Banana and Walnut Gluten-Free Muffins

Some people crack open the champagne when they win an award - I crack open the flour and sugar.

I was recently named Writer of the Year (I know, right?!) by the Institute of Internal Communications (that's my day job in case you didn't know - Senior Writer in a bank's comms team) and as my fiancé was still too tired to go out in the evening - after weeks of working through the night and weekends on a big project - I decided to celebrate by throwing together some cakes to take into work the next day.

I had a few overripe bananas to use up and wanted something quick and easy to make, and my eye fell upon a cookery book called Muffin Magic by Susannah Blake. I found a recipe for nutty banana muffins and decided to adapt it to make it gluten-free as the lady I sit next to at work is gluten intolerant and I wanted her to be able to enjoy them as well. So here's what I did:

 

White Chocolate, Banana and Walnut Gluten-Free Muffins

300g gluten free self raising flour (I used Doves farm)

90g soft brown sugar

150ml skimmed milk

1 egg, beaten

100ml sunflower oil

2 ripe bananas, thinly sliced or mashed

85g walnut pieces, chopped

100g white chocolate chips - I used Dr Oetker

Preheat the oven to 200C. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl.

 

Beat the egg and add to the sunflower oil and milk and pour onto the dry ingredients. Mix well.

 

 

 

Spoon into paper muffin cases and bake for 20 mins at 200C.

 

 

 

Allow to cool; I put some of them into tulip muffin cases - these are the kind you typically see in coffee shops - as I think it made them look nice.

 

 

 

The muffins were great - I couldn't tell any difference with using the gluten-free flour. They weren't too sweet so I actually had one for breakfast, and the rest of the muffins which I took into work disappeared pretty quickly!

 

 

I'm sharing these muffins with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is M.

 

 

I'm also sending this to We Should Cocoa, hosted by Tin and Thyme, as the ingredients to use for the challenge this month are chocolate and bananas.

 

 

Delicious Alchemy Gluten-free, Dairy-free Oaty Cookies

One of my work colleagues is gluten intolerant but most of the bakes I’ve brought into work recently have been things I’ve made to have at home and had some left, and I thought it was about time I actually made something gluten free.

 

Every so often I purchase a Degustabox – it’s a monthly subscription service but you can dip in and out, which I have reviewed (after buying with my own money) before. I had one of their boxes a couple of months ago which included a packet of gluten-free cookie mix so one evening – given I’m always short of time after work – I decided to make the cookies.

 

The company behind these mixes is called Delicious Alchemy; they make cake and bread mixes and cereals as well and have a limited edition Christmas fruit cake mix available at the moment as well. It was started by a computer games producer who discovered she was coeliac and went off to university to study food science and marketing. They’ve launched products in Sainsburys and Waitrose and they are also available through their website. I’d never come across the company before but I love their colourful packaging and fun approach – the company history timeline has an anecdote about how the founder discovered she was coeliac (an ear of wheat down her sock!) and another about the time the company accountant got stuck in a lift.

 

The mix I had, the Oaty Cookie mix, was so easy to make. All you do is mix the contents of the bag with melted butter and water – you can also make these cookies vegan by using a butter-substitute which is what I did, after hearing that another colleague also can’t eat gluten or dairy.

 

I got 9 cookies out of the mixture and they were so quick and easy to make, and tasted pretty good too. I think they would have been better with butter and they were not particularly sweet – which is a good thing as it makes them feel a bit healthier. Also, my colleague said that often gluten-free products are packed full of sugar and she finds them too sweet, so she really likes these. In fact when I told her about the packet mix I’d used, she went on to the company’s website and ordered some herself!

I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, hosted by Kat the Baking Explorer and Stuart at Cakeyboi, as their theme this month is autumn, and I think there is something very autumnal and warming about oats.