Teff Flour Gingerbread

Yes, the Christmas season is technically “over,” and everyone seems to be preparing for either New Year's Eve, their New Year's resolutions, or both. However, I've been away for the holidays, and unable to post any of the wonderful Christmas recipes that I've been trying. And I didn't think it would be right to completely bypass this Teff Gingerbread, which was a new and delicious addition to my Christmas baking repertoire.

I've certainly baked lots of gingerbread before, and only recently made gingerbread cookies, but I wanted something new, festive, and slightly good for you to bring to my fiancées office party. You don't need the red and green sprinkles that I added, but I plan on making this recipe during other parts of the year, and so wanted to differentiate it for Christmas.

Teff flour is heavier than your whole wheat or white flour, and so it does not work well as a substitute to other flours in just any recipe. But here, it is mixed in with unbleached white flour, giving the gingerbread a bit of weight, but not making it so dense that it inedible. The spices are really what make the gingerbread what it is, and this combination worked fantastically. Not too sweet, not too spicy, this gingerbread was just right.

Teff Gingerbread

Ingredients:
1 ¼ cup Teff flour
¾ cup unbleached white flour
1 tsp. baking powder
½ cup brown sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ground ginger
½ tsp. allspice (ground)
½ tsp. sea salt
1/8 tsp. ground cloves
1 egg
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
1 cup milk

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 425° F. Butter a 9-inch square baking pan.

2. Sift together the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Set aside.

3. In another bowl, whisk the egg, melted butter, and milk together. Stir the dry ingredients into the egg mixture and blend well.

4. Scrape into the prepared pan and bake for 20 to 23 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

The Holiday Spirit with Gingerbread Cookies

I do not follow a specific cycle of baking or cookie-decorating, but I do appreciate when December 1st rolls around, and suddenly everywhere I look (that is, baking blogs and cooking magazines and the Food Network), I'm surrounded by Christmas Cookies. There are recipes and decoration how-to's and lists of the best and tastiest and most unique and most festive holiday desserts...and I read through each and every one, my Christmas giddiness swelling along with the Christmas carols playing non-stop on my computer. So even though baking for me is not a seasonal affair, I do adore this particular yearly celebration of sugar.

I have three favorite December cookies, and this year, I plan on baking them all with a wholesome twist. The first up were gingerbread cookies, and although I had a short stack of gingerbread recipes to try, many that I had been saving for months in order to break out during this month, I chose a recipe that was fairly new to me. I went again to the cookbook Baking with Agave Nectar and baked these gluten-free treats for a group of friends which included a couple of gluten-sensitive people.

I, and my friends, thought the cookies turned out well, though I'm not sure I can say that this is my all-time favorite gingerbread recipe. They are soft and chewy cookies with just the right amount of spice to them, but they are very fragile. I learned the difficult way that it is best to wait until they are fully cooled to try and remove them from the pan; otherwise, you will find yourself with a jumble of misshapen gingerbread pieces. And as for decorating, they are a wonderful template for icings and sprinkles and other various methods of design. That is the part I enjoyed most of all, although I'm thinking that I should jot down “Martha Stewart-worthy cookie decorating skills” on my Christmas list this year.

Gluten -Free Gingerbread Cookies
From Baking with Agave Nectar

Ingredients:
2 ½ cups brown rice flour
1 ½ cups amaranth flour
1 ½ cups tapioca flour
2 Tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 Tbsp. ground cinnamon
½ tsp. ground nutmeg
½ tsp. ground cloves
1 tsp. salt
1 cup agave nectar
¼ cup molasses
¼ cup unsweetened applesauce
1/3 cup canola oil
2 Tbsp. vanilla extract

Directions:
1. In a large bow, whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and salt.
2. In a separate bowl, mix together the agave nectar, molasses, applesauce, canola oil, and vanilla extract. Pour over the dry ingredients and stir until the two mixtures are thoroughly combined.
Cover and chill the dough for 2 hours or more.
3. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Sprinkle a work surface with flour. Divide the chilled dough into 4 portions. Take one portion and roll out on the work surface until the dough is ¼ inch thick. Cut out gingerbread with cookie cutters and place them on baking sheets. Bake for 6-8 minutes and cool for 5-10 minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

Agave Oatmeal Cookies

A new favorite cookbook of mine is one that I found quite by accident, while casually perusing the cooking section of a large bookstore that I stopped in for only a few moments. I hardly had the time to jot down the title before I had to leave, and even though I wasn't able to look more closely through the book, it was obvious to me that it was a book that I would want to track down. Later, I did not even look at my note to see what the book was called; I had ingrained it in my memory over the course of the interceding hours. Baking with Agave Nectar is a book that I'm entirely unsurprised has been published, and thrilled that has been published now, as I'm not sure I would have bothered with it a couple of years ago.

Finally, when I borrowed the book from my local library, and I studied each recipe between the covers, I knew that I had found a real treasure. Not only do all of the sweet and savory treats in the book include the relatively healthful and natural sweetener agave nectar, the baked goods represent a more transcendent theme of wholesome baking, as evidenced by the continual use of ingredients such as whole wheat flour, flaxseed meal, and applesauce. It is no coincidence that these agave oatmeal cookies contain all of these things. The milk chocolate chips were, however, my own addition.

I made these cookies for my friends to enjoy after a long day of work in the garden, and they loved how they were not too sweet nor too heavy, and the applesauce paired with the agave nectar heightened the fruity notes under the oats.

Agave Oatmeal Cookies

From Baking with Agave Nectar

Yield: 30 cookies

Ingredients:
¼ cup applesauce
¾ cup light agave nectar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 ½ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 ¾ cups rolled oats
¼ cup flaxseed meal
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. sea salt
¾ cup raisins
½ cup milk chocolate chips

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325° F and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the applesauce and the agave nectar. Add the eggs 1 at a time and stir in vanilla extract.
3. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, oats, flaxseed meal, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.
4. Add to the agave nectar mixture and stir until combined. Fold in raisins and chocolate chips.
Drop the batter by tablespoonful onto the prepared baking sheets and bake for 12 minutes.