Paleo Cinnamon Rolls

Would you believe that I've never eaten a cinnamon roll? They've always been something I've admired on blogs but have never really piqued my interest enough to take the next step to try one.

For some reason, lately I've had quite a hankering for one. It may be something psychological, you know, how you always want something you can't have. As someone who can't eat gluten or most dairy and as someone who is trying to avoid refined sugars, cinnamon rolls (and my other hankering, monkey bread) is probably as close as something I "can't have" as can be.

Luckily for me, there are wonderful bloggers out there with answers to all life's problems, including what to do when all you want is an allergy-friendly, no refined sugar sweet treat. A quick google search for "paleo cinnamon rolls" brought up some incredible recipes.

In the end I went with a recipe that had the necessary balance between ease and convenience, i.e. I had all the ingredients. Cait from Paleo Perfectly created a beautiful paleo treat with minimal sugar.

I found that my almond meal dough was a little sticky. My almond meal wasn't very finely milled, perhaps it didn't soak up as much as other types? Anyway, a sticky dough did make it slightly difficult to roll, but in the end I used the baking paper as a guide and ended up with something that vaguely resembled a crescent roll.

I love the smell of baking cinnamon, it was almost disappointing to take the rolls out of the oven after 15 minutes.

The coconut sugar glaze was phenomenal. It was simply coconut sugar, arrowroot, your preferred milk substitute (I used rice milk) and vanilla. It mixed into a delicious caramel sauce. I didn't like that the coconut sugar stayed quite granulated, so I microwaved it for 30 seconds and was rewarded with a lovely silky texture.

I had pictured cinnamon rolls being pillowy soft dough and a sticky glaze. These rolls had a crisp outside and a wonderful soft interior. The cinnamon is the predominant flavour, which is great, my fear was that any roll I made would be too sugary. I love paleo recipes.

See this post on Paleo Perfectly for the recipe.

Pizza Perfection

Hello.  I used to blog here.

As a bit of a re-introduction, I love food.  I love cooking and eating and even though I might sometimes be lazy, I want what I eat to be great.

When you heard from me last, I had been diagnosed with my gluten and lactose intolerance.  Since then, we have also discovered I'm intolerant to soy.  It's been quite an interesting journey adapting my diet to get rid of the things that were causing so many issues.  I still suffer from IBS, so even with my new diet I do have to be careful with some of my IBS triggers.

Five months of relatively clean eating (I have had the odd "gluten"-ing or "dairy"-ing, not fun) has seen me feeling so much better.  I really feel like a completely different person.  I am not getting sick nearly as much as I used to, I have energy and motivation.  I'm enjoying going places and seeing people and I've discovered some fantastic new foods.  I also kicked off the new year with a 21 day detox which made me feel better still and I'm trying to maintain a lot of that by eating more paleo (although I love my quinoa and the occasional legume).

Feeling like a new person may not be entirely due to my dietary changes, because I have now lost 43kg since I started my weight loss journey in August 2010 (if you want, you can read about how it began here).  So, I'm less than 2/3 of the person I used to be, but now - at the risk of sounding massively corny - I'm much more than I was.

Lots has happened in my life since I last posted, apart from the lack of the will to write, but I'm starting to get the itch back again.  I have a lot of backlogged posts from when I wasn't eating properly and I'm tossing up whether or not to post them.  We'll see how I feel!

My revival recipe was dinner tonight.  D bought a ham and mushroom pizza from the Eagle Farm Markets and I countered with the creation you see above.  A socca pizza monster.  Please excuse the iPhone photo, every single one of the photos I took on the camera turned out blurry.  I may have been lazy with some of my food pictures, so you might see a couple of iPhone photos coming up.

I love socca but I haven't had it for a while.  I didn't want to make a complicated pizza base, I just wanted quick and easy.  My pizza had to have vegetables too, lots and lots of vegetables!

Socca Pizza
inspired by so many people to list

1 cup chickpea flour
1 tsp black pepper
1 tbs garlic powder
1 tbs onion powder
1 tsp Italian herbs
1 tsp salt
1 cup water
2 tbs coconut oil

Your choice of toppings  (I used tomato pizza sauce, sundried tomatoes, artichokes, mushrooms, zucchini, eggplant, capsicum, kale, cashew cheese and a drizzle of balsamic before serving)

Mix together the chickpea flour, pepper, garlic and onion powder, Italian herbs and salt.  Slowly add the water while stirring to avoid lumps.  Let the mixture stand for 15-30 minutes.

While the mixture stands, preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.  Line an 18cm cake tin with baking paper and add coconut oil.  Place the tin in the oven to heat the tin and oil, leave for about 10-15 minutes.

After the oil is hot, add the batter and return to the oven for approximately 30 minutes.

Once the socca has cooked, remove it from the tin and place it on a lined baking tray.  Turn off the oven and switch to a hot grill.  Add toppings of your choice and place under the grill until lightly browned or cooked to your liking.

Weekend Eats

I love Averie's Raw Vegan Apple Crumble.  I've only made it once but I have dreamed about it many times and have always meant to make it again but I've never gotten around to it (read: I'm lazy).  Then I found out about my gluten intolerance and my doctor recommended I avoid oats (even gluten free ones) while I'm particularly sensitive and typically, all I could think about was the apple crumble.

Today, I decided to give it a try using some gluten free alternatives.  I used rice flakes in the base, although I had to use six small dates and some Nuttelex to bind the base together.

Averie's recipe is raw (or can be made to be raw) but I don't think rice flakes really work with a raw dessert.  They taste just like uncooked flat rice (funny that).  I'll try heating it up in the microwave before serving to try and soften the flakes.

Ideally I would have started again, but I'd already layered the apple mixture over the rice flake base.  I changed to quinoa flakes for the crumble topping.  Quinoa flakes worked much better and next time it will be the oat substitute I use.


I drizzled some Broken Nose Vanilla vanilla-infused honey over the top.  I've been wanting to try this honey since Regional Flavours at Southbank but they had sold out by the time I got there.  I stumbled across some at the Eagle Farm Markets today and had to break it open for my crumble.

It was lovely.  It has a wonderful subtle vanilla flavour and a gentle honey taste.  It smells incredible.

After preparing my crumble I felt the need to balance the sweet dessert out with something healthy and fresh.

The other week at our family dinner my mother prepared make-your-own rice paper rolls with some gluten free honey soy marinated chicken and lots of fresh vegetables and herbs. I wanted to do try and get that same fresh rice paper roll flavour into a nori roll with sushi rice.

They were the biggest fattest sushi rolls I've ever made, my bamboo sheet didn't go all the way around some of them. Some of them turned out quite messy and I'm hoping they'll stay together when I unwrap them from their gladwrap.

Lentil Stew

First of all, please forgive the (moreso than usual) poor photography.  Somehow I was extremely organised today and managed to eat my test serve and box up the remaining serves for freezer lunches and only take one photo.  And it was with my iPhone. 

That being said, it was incredible and it needs to be shared.

I was de-gluten and dairy-ing my kitchen yesterday and I discovered that I had many many tins of lentils.  My plethora of lentils got me thinking.  I've seen many a blogger make lentil stew but I couldn't find any in my Diigo bookmarks.  I googled my way back through lots of posts but ended up finally seeing something that struck my fancy in Eat, Drink and Be Vegan by Dreena Burton.

I started with Dreena's recipe for Lentil "Sniffle" Soup.  I didn't want a soup, I wanted a stew but I thought it couldn't be too difficult to adapt.

Lentil Stew
adapted from Eat Drink and Be Vegan by Dreena Burton

a splash of olive oil
2 cups diced onion, carrot, celery and garlic (I had these precut and in the freezer)
another carrot, diced
half a massive zucchini, diced
half a cup capsicum, diced
a small head of broccoli, cut into small florets
a handful of beans, cut in half
an ear's worth of corn kernels
some sea salt and black pepper
2 tsp curry powder
1 tsp paprika
1 tbs baharat seasoning
1 tsp Italian seasoning (has thyme, basil, rosemary and stuff in it)
1 can lentils
1 cup cooked brown rice
2 cups vegetable stock
a big handful of kale
a big handful of baby spinach
2 1/2 tbs apple cider vinegar
a dash of worcestershire sauce
a dash of lime juice

Put all the ingredients up to and including the Italian seasoning into a saucepan and cook over medium heat until vegetables start to go tender.  Add the rest of the ingredients and cook for 10-15mins.  Adjust seasoning to taste.

I couldn't be happier with how this turned out.  The apple cider vinegar and the lime juice gave the stew a great complex flavour and even though there was only a minimal amount of curry powder it had a nice kick that really cleared the sinuses.  It's filling and full of goodness, a perfect lunch.

Scone Week

I love Celia’s blog Fig Jam and Lime Cordial and since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when she blogged about Scone Week, I had to too! As Celia says in her post, it was just that a bunch of bloggers all made their own scone recipes in the second week of August last week and then they joked about designating this week Scone Week.

What a great idea.

I love scones.  Unfortunately for me and my scone loving ways, after a very long period of gastrointestinal and digestive issues, lots of pain and two trips to hospital we identified that I suffer from GORD (which is surprisingly common, I’ve discovered) and I have an intolerance to gluten and dairy/lactose.  This, as you can probably imagine, has led to a rather drastic change in my eating habits.

While it’s hardly an excuse for neglecting my blog, our latest foodie outings have been in search of the best gluten and dairy product replacements.  Just wait til you read about my quest for the best non-dairy cheese.  It’s a must-see.  Well, not really, but it was very very interesting for me.

So, back to scones.  A typical scone recipe includes flour and butter.  The whole idea of a scone is that wonderful buttery flavour and that amazing texture, but flour and butter were now no go zones for me.  So I decided to try a variation on a lemonade scone recipe (just another shoutout to Fig Jam and Lime Cordial, Celia has her version of a lemonade scone recipe here).



I made a few changes. This recipe was actually made prior to my lactose intolerance being confirmed, so you can see the milk and the yoghurt were of the standard variety.  The big changes were the use of self raising gluten free flour instead of regular self raising, soda water instead of lemonade and Greek yoghurt instead of cream.  I love the butteryness of scones, so I also added some Wilton butter extract.



The dough was quite wet and sticky and I didn’t want to add too much flour, so I tipped the whole thing out onto a tray and made a giant scone.  It took ages to cook.  Not recommended.

Despite that, it tasted very good.  It didn’t rise all that much, but that’s really to be expected from a gluten free flour.  The texture was good, but they were very sweet.  Some of the reviews did say that the scones were on the sweet side, but I thought that by replacing the lemonade and cream I might need the extra sugar.  It definitely didn’t.

Soon after, the dairy issue was confirmed so I went back to the kitchen to try these scones again.  This time, there were a few more substitutions.



So this attempt used gluten free self raising flour, no sugar, lactose free yoghurt, soda water, rice milk and butter extract.  And a muffin tray and ice cream scoop.

Tadaaaaa!

These were awesome and stomach friendly!  I took them out of the silicon muffin tray and returned them loose to the oven when they were firm to touch so that they crisped up on the bottoms.  I love them.  I love them so much.

I enjoyed most of the batch topped with a little bit of Nuttelex and a sprinkling of sea salt.  I think I might add a bit more salt next time.

“But Adrasteia,” I hear you say. “What about the typical Devonshire Tea? How do you enjoy scones with jam and cream now?”

Have no fear. Soyatoo soy whip cream in a can is here.  Along with a delightful dragonfruit jam bought from South Bank Regional Flavours.



Perfect for a gluten free dairy free high tea.  Even my mum agreed.

One day I’ll have to tell you about the time my mum (who is very considerate) made me a gluten free dairy free custard from gluten free custard powder using soy milk.  Her and D’s reaction is definitely a story for another time.