Date Pudding

By and large, most things are fairly simple to convert to gluten free. Use a gluten free flour mix, add some xanthan gum, maybe increase the amount of baking soda/powder and add an extra egg, and otherwise keep the recipe the same. The only trick is to find a GF flour mix that has the same consistency as regular flour, and there are lots of those available in cookbooks and on-line. There are a few exceptions to this "simplicity".

(1) Yeast bread: For this, get a GF cookbook and follow the recipe to the letter the first few times (unless the temperature in the recipe conflicts with the temperature on the yeast you're using; temperature is key).

(2) White cake: I still haven't made a decent GF white cake. It's always too thick and dry. The closest is Bette Hagman's Italian Creme cake, but that's not really a white cake. Her supposed "Master White Cake" recipe was, well, er, interesting... It wasn't any better than any others I'd tried...and in some respects worse.

(3) Date Pudding: I've tried several times in the past to make Date Pudding with gluten free flours using my mom's recipe. It's never turned out. Until tonight. I finally found a GF recipe for date pudding that is similar to my mom's. It's in The Gluten Free Gourmet Makes Dessert. The differences were that I needed to decrease the flour, increase the baking powder, and add some eggs (and xanthan gum). That was it, and it turned out beautifully. So we now have a formerly traditional New Year's dish back on the table for tomorrow. ^/^

What else is on the table? Ham, corn bread, stir fried veggies, and...I'm not sure. I wonder if we have potatoes... I'll probably make rice to go with the veggies, so potatoes would be a mite redundant. At any rate, my mom and I are both happy to get to enjoy date pudding again.