Ninja Turtles Pizza!

Ok, so those who know me know that I'm a hardcore original Ninja Turtles fan and since the upcoming movies are all over the internet (most comments not so good, including my own) I decided to do a return of the original cartoon style. Ya know, the 2-D one that made me fall in love with drawing comics. So similar to the Kermit the Frog Pizza I made when I started this blog I decided to make a gluten-free pizza featuring a new green character. Only this time I'm going paleo with a green crust as well! I know! It sounds too green. It's pretty healthy (depending on what you put on top of course) but all in all it was super fun to make! And why not make this into the Ninja Turtle's favorite thing to eat?!! Pizza time!!!

So I've seen cauliflour pizza crust all over the internet and that's cool. Though I couldn't find any organic stuff at my local health food store. So I decided to go with broccoli which I totally love already anyway. I found a pretty simple and straight forward recipe to follow online at Purelytwins.com here even though it's a bread sticks recipe you can turn it into a pizza crust! So I followed most of the directions but tried it with chia gel instead of egg and omitted the psyllium husk...oh, and added some extra Italian seasonings! Mmmmm! Next time I may be omitting some sea salt though...too salty for my taste.

Then came my fave part as you know...DECORATING!!! I found this picture featuring fairly recently made figures inspired by the original Ninja Turtle's cartoon:

Yeah, for those who don't know the original Ninja Turtles all had Raphael's red bandana. Raph also happens to be my favorite! Just so you know, you don't have to do Raph (or the original turtles) like I did, if you want to create Michaelangelo's mask you can use orange cheese or possibly an orange veggie if you wish. For Donatello you could use eggplant skin, and for Leonardo...well that's a bit harder. You may be able to make a dessert version with blueberries for his mask. Unless you know of a veggie that has edible blue skin that I'm not aware of.

So anyway, to decorate Raph I used Neal Brother's Foods roasted garlic organic pasta sauce (just so you know apparently garlic is a cancer fighting food, one of the toughest ones around too) and covered the whole crust with that. Then I put on some L'Ancetre organic mild cheddar cheese made with unpasteurized milk for a light background, organic baby spinach as the green face, just a few select leaves. Carefully and stratigically poured on more sauce for the bandana and finely cut up some zucchini for the eyes with no pupil and snarling mouth. If you like black olives that would be a nice pupil too if that's the style you're going for. And voila! There you have a wonderfully green and healthy Ninja Turtles pizza with no carbs involved!

Here's the pizza crust.

Raph raw, before the oven.

Raph cooked. He looks a little sad and wilty...I guess that's what happens when you become what you eat. LOL!

This pizza is mostly made with organic ingredients, is vegetarian but not vegan (though it could be if a vegan replacement cheese was used or cheese was omitted entirely), low sugar, high in fiber and like the blog promises, gluten free of course!

Just so those of you are aware of my geek cred when it comes to the Ninja Turtles, I met one of the Ninja Turtle creators Kevin Eastman a few years ago at Fan Expo. He was super nice and I shook his hand. All I could say was, "Nice to meet you!" but of course I really wanted to gush about how he influenced my life and how I became a cartoonist because of him. A few years later I made a Krang outfit for Zombie Walk (I figured everyone goes as a zombie to Zombie Walk, why not go as a brain?) and Kevin Eastman actually told me on Facebook that my costume was "Genius". Yeah, you can bet that was one of the best days I ever had!

So not only do I do Ninja Turtles cosplay and used to draw them all the time as a kid but I also have a bunch of their merch and I'm not just talking comics. I have a few figures, some pez dispensers, art given to me from cartoonist friends with the green team all over it, and I have a drinkware set in which I drink out of Raphael's head everyday! I'm not that obsessed though...I swear. Here's a pic of just one of my toy shelves though:

How to Make Eating Veggies Fun!

So with Easter coming up I decided to do a little dinner for those kids who don't like to eat their veggies. This is how you can make eating veggies fun, for you and kids! Last night I made a fun little dinner for my boyfriend and I completely vegan and gluten-free as well. So I ended up making some super fluffy and spreadable mashed potatoes (make sure they're spreadable, whatever recipe you decide to do, try to make sure it's lump free, you can whisk it with a mechanical beater if you want, it may help) some broccoli for some trees and used the recipe for the quinoa avacado salad I adore so much (but omitted the peppers and hot sauce) and arranged it nicely on a plate using cookie cutters and fun sandwich cutters.

As you can see I made one Easter friendly for the upcoming occasion and also a geeky one as this blog is about nerding out on stuff, so I made a fun little dinosaur one for those paleontologists out there.

So I'm gonna break down the food decorations into parts here:

The Background:

Unfortunately I didn't have a blue plate for the background so this was the closest thing I had for a sky. Looks like tornado weather. LOL! I would have chosen a blue plate for a sky if I had one, so perhaps you have one or can come up with another idea for a sky...or perhaps you'd like to do an underwater scene or really you could make a scene anywhere, depending on the background you use. Try to get creative!

The Animals:

I started off with placing the animals in the middle of the plate and building the scene around it. You can make as many animals as you want and it doesn't have to be these ones I chose. Perhaps you have other cookie cutter shapes of animals like bears or cats or whatever that you'd prefer to use. Again, I was trying to stick to a theme, for my site and the upcoming occasion. Go nuts and get creative! You don't have to just use mashed potatoes either. I'm sure you could use other things that you could mash into a creamy consistency. You could use sweet potatoes, squash, yams, mashed carrots, etc. if you want more of an orange color, say for making a fox or clown fish (for an underwater scene) or something along that line. If you want you could also use the recipe below for the glassy terrain to make a green amphibian of some kind. The possibilities are really endless. It's up to your cookie cutter collection.

So for the bunny I used a cookie cutter I happened to have and placed it in the middle of the plate, then I took a small spoon and tried to carefully put the creamy mashed potatoes in the cookie cutter shape and packed it down and tried to make it as smooth as possible with the backside of the spoon. When I had filled all the gaps and made it look smooth enough I carefully lifted up the cookie cutter and the shape was retained. I then added a few chives for the eyes.

The dinosaur was made in a similar way, but I added more chives to it for spots on it's body. You could also decorate with grated cheese, spices or other things, depending on your preference. The dinosaur was actually used from a dinosaur shaped sandwich cutter I picked up at the grocery store recently. You can also find them online here. If you wanted to you could also use these for healthy sandwiches too or grilled cheese, though, because I didn't have any gluten-free bread on hand for this post and because I wanted to make a more naturally gluten-free post I chose to use mashed potatoes.

The Clouds:

Also made with potatoes. Just plop them on the plate messily...the messy part is fun and kinda therapuetic. Oh, for the record I cheated a bit here and made instant mashed potatoes with water and margarine. I just found them way quicker to make at the time and they're super creamy without having to get the kitchen tools too messy, so if you're pressed for time and don't mind packaged potatoes, you may try that, but if you want everything to be all natural I highly recommend that route more. It may take longer, but there are lots of recipes online I'm sure you can try.

The Trees:

Broccoli has always looked like little trees to me. I love broccoli and because my mom told me that as a kid, my imagination took over and it could be the reason why I always loved them. Could also be the reason why I'm a vegetarian too. I steam mine with a special steamer (sorry, I don't know the technical term for it if it has one) and it looks like this, if you need one:

Look online if you don't know how to make or steam broccoli. I normally steam them with a little water with some salt in the bottom of a pot and I place the steamer inside, put in the broccoli and lower the heat as it starts to boil. Cover for 12 minutes and poke with a fork to see if they're soft.

The Terrain:

As I said above I used the Quinoa avacado recipe I love so much. The link for it should be above, but here it is again if you need it. You can also make a green salad if you want to make something quicker, but I find that quinoa avacado salad I recommend can be full of all sorts of good nutrients to help you and/or your kids stay healthy. Plus, it tastes amazing! You can make it mild or spicy too depending on your taste. Some lettuce may have barely any nutritional value. If you can, choose kale or baby spinach if you want more healthy salads.

So again, you can make whatever animals you want or whatever scene you want. You're only limited by your imagination, and there are so many colourful veggies out there to make cool food art so play around with ideas if you want to. Here are my fun plates though:

For Easter, or just those who love cute bunnies. You could also steam some baby carrots for this too. It looks like the bunny is running through a garden a bit.

For those dino lovers!

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this post! It was fun to make and fun to eat too...totally tasty!

The 4 Seasons "Fruit" Cake

So, this winter has been going on for far too long and as you can see I've been making some pretty straight-forward but summer inspired birthday cake ideas. Recently we celebrated 5 February and March birthdays in my family including myself and my boyfriend (we're born on the same day) and I'm sure like everyone else in Canada we're all sick of this weather. So to counteract the S.A.D. syndrome I have been feeling lately I thought this would be a great excuse to introduce a mostly all fruit cake. I've seen some wonderful cake ideas on pintrest. The best thing is you can totally customize them and be as creative or as lazy about it as you want. LOL! I think using lots of bright, colourful fruits helps put people in a better mood. Normally they start off with a beautiful, pink, seedless watermelon base and then they go from there. I like to think of it as a fruit salad but arranged in a different way.

When my older bro told me on the phone that his 3 year-old daughter got sick from chocolate recently I thought this would be a fun challenge, I'd been waiting to do this for a while. His family is big on healthy and organic foods and me being a vegetarian jumped at the opportunity to make this. The best part was that the 3 year-old had three cakes to choose from, this one, a cookie cake and a chocolate cake. Not only did she tell me that she wanted the pink cake out of all of them but she devoured most of it herself! Talk about awesomely healthy kids! She loves watermelon and her mom was so impressed with the idea and got all excited to make it with the kids to decorate it like they did their gingerbread house this past Christmas. It's so healthy and customizeable and with all kinds of colourful fruits coming into season soon enough it'll be fun for spring and summer parties in the future!

Ok, so here's a picture of the glorious cake idea I had:

So as you can see I had a theme for my idea. I made it nerdy in a creative sort of way and for those meteorologists. Seeing as this isn't the time of year for large watermelons just yet, I only found mini seedless watermelons and I bought two to make the layers. It was a very small cake mind you but it was easier for me to transport to be honest. So I will walk you through how I made each layer of the cake starting with the bottom layer and working my way up:

FALL
So for the bottom of the cake I decided to make it look a little dull, seeing as fall is a very dead-looking season I tried to make it as edible as possible and decided to peel some kiwi skins and put it around the cake to symbolize dead grass (to be honest I could have worked this out better but I was decorating it as everyone else was making food so it stayed as fresh as possible and I didn't have much counter space to do this and I wasn't as carefully creative as I normally am with this part. So I would have made more "dead grass" in this case but chose not to for reasons of lack of space and time) and I cut out pieces of what looks like leaves from an "Elevate Me" healthy fruit and nut bar that I picked up at "Noah's Health Food" store. I wanted the healthiest "fruit roll up" type thing I could find so I could use my mini metal leaf and flower vegetable cutters I found at "Kitchen Stuff Plus". So I was thinking of fruit leather and I almost thought about making my own with natural fruits, but I don't own a fruit dehydrater and you can do it in an oven but it takes a long time. So when I found those fruit bars at Noah's I was super happy! I tried it first and rolled out the bars to make them flatter to look more like leaves (they are very moldable and you could even just use the heat of your (clean) hands to mold them and press them flat if you want to) but I stupidly laid them out on a bed of melon at first before I had the better idea to lay them on the dry, fuzzy skins of the kiwi. So, I had to toss the first batch I did as the bars were all soggy by the time I got them to my Dad's house to celebrate. It's ok, I luckily brought my cutters with me and another lot of fruit bars just in case this happened. The melon balls around the side of the cake plate were just for additional decoration...didn't really go with the bottom theme as it brightened it up a bit more but I wanted to put them around if anyone wanted to have a bite-sized ball to pick at.

WINTER
Winter wasn't as elaborate as fall, but it made the cake less fruit based and vegan friendly I suppose. The yogurt went well with the fruit though, and tasted really refreshing and healthy. So vegetarians and dairy fans may appreciate this part a bit more. I wanted a healthy icing and I know yogurt is a great compliment as a fruit dip. So I made this out of really thick greek yogurt (some people strain it with a cheese cloth before they pipe it on, but I didn't find this necessary, it didn't drip all that much) and honey. I didn't measure it out much, but just added and tasted as I went until I could taste the sweetness but it was still slightly tangy. You could use other things like agave, maple syrup and maybe even pineapple juice would be nice with it (though the other options may make it stickier and thicker to stick on better as an icing, any kind of fruit juice may make it too runny), but I chose honey for my sweetener in this case. I then put the mixture into a ziplock bag, snipped a tiny hole in the corner and piped it around to make it look like, thick, frosty, drippy snow.

SPRING
For spring I ended up using the same cutters I used for the fall leaves but this time I used more of a flower and cut them into thick cantaloupe slices. I cut a kiwi slice with the leaf too and put it beside one of the flowers. I think this would have looked nice if I had butterfly shaped cutters too of a smaller size to put around it. I also cut into the side of the watermelon layer I was placing these on and scooped out some of the watermelon with a spoon to make room to fit in the desired pieces. I then secured them with toothpicks but so they were noticeable I made sure I had ones with green tassles on the ends to represent green grass or leaves, depending on the viewer's interpretation.

SUMMER
I thought this was the fun part. So I sliced into a peach and popped one half of a peach on top of the the cake to represent a summery beach scene. I had bought a tropical pack of toothpicks, stir-sticks, drink umbrellas and fun straws from somewhere (sorry, I can't remember where it was from, it was so long ago) and used it for this scene. So I took a piece of kiwi skin and cut it to look like a beach towel, layed it in the center of the peach and then I used one of the drink umbrellas to represent a beach umbrella (I know, sometimes my cleverness suprises me too. LOL!), then I took a pre-tassled bendy straw and cut off one end so that it looked like a palm tree. You could probably decorate this further if you want (by maybe taking a brown, edible marker and colouring the "trunk" of the straw tree, and maybe glueing on tiny brown craft balls if you can find them somewhere to represent coconuts) but I went the simple route and just left it green. So it wasn't easy to stick the straw into the peach without it bending so I had to cut out an asterisk shape through the peach with a knife in order to help stick it in properly. I then put a bunch of different colours of toothpicks around the peach to not only fasten it to the watermelon but to make it look like a bordered off area on the beach that is private and you might not be allowed to enter. It made it look a little more festive too.

I was going to add organic blueberry jam on the side of the peach and mix it in with yogurt to make a light blue for water on the side of the peachy beach though I stupidly forgot to put the jam in the fridge after I opened it up and realized it had become moldy...pretty disappointing, but it looked alright without it anyway.

So there you have it, a very tropical, creative, festive and healthy cake that everyone (even the kids) can enjoy looking at and eating! Here's another picture of the cake with a frog in the background. I think the frog makes this look a bit more tropical, like we're in a rain forrest. LOL!

Anway, this is my "fruit" cake design. How are you gonna decorate yours?

This is great for those trying to do more of a paleo diet, gluten-free, vegetarian (vegans could enjoy it if they don't use honey or yogurt), people with diabetes or those wanting a healthier dessert option or they want to watch their weight a bit. Fun for almost everyone!

Gluten-Free Sandcastle Rice Krispy Square "Cake"

So, a friend of ours is a leap year baby and he decided to come visit us and stay for the weekend of his b-day this year. For the occassion of his birth I decided to make him this "cake" and I got the idea from Hungry Happenings a while ago. I figured most winter birthday babies (myself included) tend to crave a warmer birthday so why not bring the summer here early by making this cute dessert?

So anyway, I bought this sandcastle mould recently and two boxes of Gluten-free Brown Rice Krispies as well as marshmellows (I'll provide a vegan friendly recipe below for those vegan's who miss Rice Krispy Squares) and for decoration I bought some Glutino straight pretzels to look like sticks, some candy stones I bought at "Sugar Mountain" and those delightfully swirly Belgium Chocolate shells. The rocks are candy coated and had different things on the inside. Some had nuts, some just chocolate, some tasted like a cookie inside and I tasted one that seemed to have a raisin in it. It was nice to have all sorts of flavors! Kinda fun to be surprised!

So I followed the recipe for the original rice krispy squares and made 2 batches to fill up the bucket. I washed the bucket out numerous times and sprayed thoroughly with pam spray but if you're concerned you may try to cover your mould with siran wrap before pressing in the mixture. For those who are vegan (as marshmellows are normally not a vegan friendly treat (it's often made from crushed animal bones (for those who are unaware) to make the gelatin consistency) there are numerous websites devoted to vegan friendly alternatives but here's one of my favorites from Healthiful Pursuit (I would normally go for something peanut butter based but if someone has a nut allergy these ones are way better for them) if you don't have a nut allergy a peanut butter recipe may work great and might even add some extra texture too if you use crunchy. More lumps in the "muddy sand". Anyway, to make the sand around the "cake" I took the left over rice krispies and turned it into dust using the hand-held blender I had on hand. I'm sure you could use all sorts of methods to make this sand but that was mine. I bet smashing them (somewhat carefully) with a mallet would be fun too!

So once all the rice krispie sand and "cake" had finished it was time to decorate. I began forming letters in the sand with the edible sticks, stones and shells like I would if I was playing in the sand at the beach. *BONUS* The nice thing about this project is it's fast, simple, up to your imagination and if you don't like the way your letters are you can play with them and put them in a different spot. Hard to wreck, it's pretty much fool proof.

So I finally took the sandcastle out of the fridge and it only took a few pats for it to come sliding out onto the tray. I also put more "sand" around it and decorated it with more "stones", "shells" and "sticks". I even suggested to the birthday boy that he could keep decorating it if he wanted to when he saw it for the first time but he was too busy taking his own pictures of it for facebook and wanted to dive in to eat it. There were a lot of left over decorations though to do this.

When the birthday boy came in (after going to see a movie with my boyfriend and a few other friends) I trumpeted my celebration noise-maker and he looked very perplexed when I told him that pile of sand on the table was his cake. He wondered how I got this sand in the winter and then he got more excited when he realized it was a giant rice krispy treat. He loved the belgium shells too (who wouldn't?) as I noticed them disappearing off the tray when I looked at the dessert after we dove into it. All in all I think he liked what I made him as he said it was the best birthday celebration he had in a long while. I'm glad I could be a part of it and I'm also happy he liked having a tasty piece of beach.

Star Trek Tea Party / Marathon

"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!" is Captain Picard's fave beverage and I worked it into this little festivity by turning it into a tea party. Though it wasn't the phrase that began this whole festivity. It was, "Let's have a Star Trek Marathon!" that began this little idea. A mutual friend of my boyfriend and I happens to be a writer and huge Star Trek/Sci-fi fan and my boyfriend is big on Star Trek too. Though I must admit I am not what you call a "Trekkie" or "Trekker" or anything of the sorts...I am a geek but mainly about different things...cartoons and Muppets are more my forte I'd say...sci-fi piques my interest mainly if it involves time travel I've noticed. I have many friends that are into Star Trek and I assume it's because they're very sweet, progressive, and accepting people when it comes to everyone's differences. I like that about the Star Trek crowd...though I've tried to pay attention to shows and even movies, for some reason I can't quite stay with the dialogue. I often tell my boyfriend it's because I'm like a boring old Hobbit. I don't like adventure and would hate to be a nomad like these guys. I always cry when I watch The Littlest Hobo not just because of the theme song, but because he has no home. My boyfriend reassures me, "But he likes it that way. He doesn't want a home." Being a "homebody" myself I can't accept this reality that people are happy to not be at home. "They need to have a home! They're just circling around in space! Why don't they have a home?!" My boyfriend laughs and thinks I'm strange, "Their ship is their home." He explains. "That's not good enough!" I exclaim. He thinks my little quirk is cute for some reason so we get along just fine with him watching his Star Trek and me watching my cartoons.

So even though I'm not into the whole Star Trek thing, because my boyfriend and I have been dating for 4 years now he teaches me what some of the jokes mean every now and then. Seeing as I've been attending comic cons and had even been invited to some sci-fi cons I felt it's in my best interest to sort of get the world of Star Trek as best as I can. I like the idea of it, I just wish I could follow it and love it the way some of the fans do. Oh well, I guess it's not in my blood, but I tried. So when my friend and his girlfriend came over to Marathon through a few Star Trek episodes (My boyfriend pretty much has every show and movie, including the movie, Trekkies about the Star Trek fandom) and his girlfriend wasn't a fan of Star Trek either but she had a gluten allergy I thought I'd make the food somewhat healthy, geeky and fun! It appeared to be a success in my opinion. We watched a few episodes. I think the guys tried to get us into it with a few Tribble episodes. I personally like Tribbles. They're soft like cats and they purr like them too, all the cute and if you don't feed them, none of the mess, low maintenance. We even own a Tribble, but we don't feed it, so it's breeding habits are under control. See:

Anyhoo, back to the food. So, I had seen some Star Trek Insignia cookies being made on Nerdy Nummies on Youtube here and looked up a gluten-free recipe for these cookies and found them here I changed the recipe slightly for the cookies...I substituted the egg for 4 Tbsp of gluten-free ground flax seed and 12 tbsp of water instead of 4 eggs. So it was more vegan friendly and I didn't use the orange zest (which I think you're supposed to do) but I did use orange juice. My boyfriend and I went shopping at some health food stores and bought a couple of jams and we were given the yellow "walnut and fig" jam from friends for Christmas so we used it in here. You can use any jams you want and could even make your own I'm sure. We bought a few organic ones. As long as you have red, blue and yellow for their uniform colours I think that's all that mattered. I tried all of them and they were yummy!

Oh, side note* These cookies are Jewish Purim cookies and I had no idea our friend's girlfriend was Jewish (we had only met her once before) and she went crazy over it! I personally just love cookies with jam in them anyway and am also a fan of jam tarts so when I found this recipe I was happy. The dough was slightly crumbley, but in my experience with gluten-free doughs it did stay together fairly well. Maybe they don't look as good as the Nerdy Nummies ones do, nor the cookies from levanacooks.com but I was on a time restraint and making all these things at once so they were fresh on arrival.

As you can see someone gave my boyfriend a wonderful Star Trek inspired oven mitt from thinkgeek.com and I think it could also double as a "foam hand" sort of thing, if you will, while cheering for your Star Trek heroes during marathons. LOL!

Anyway, so the dessert was taken care of and I somehow wanted to work in my new fave dish that seems to be enjoyed by everyone I've made it for. I asked my boyfriend if they fought a lot of green aliens in Star Trek and he showed me this clip of apparently the "worst fight scene ever" according to people who watch Star Trek...and while watching it it seemed quite accurate. Though I felt the alien didn't exactly look green though I think he was supposed to be some kind of space lizard thing and my boyfriend said he probably was green, the footage is just probably faded from age. Either way, I decided to make this dish of the Quinoa Avacado Salad into something awesomely simple and geeky. I ommited a few things like the peppers and the hot sauce and the spices remaining gave it a nice, light and flavourful food you can eat on it's own or with chips as a dip. It can be a very nice, healthy and textured quacamole. So that's what we did. My boyfriend is a huge fan of these gluten free chips, in particular the red ones. I think the red ones were quite a hit and the first to get polished off.

So, what I did was I used each chip colour as a uniform colour insignia (again, much like the cookie idea) and the green ones I pretended they were little green aliens they had to fight in honor of the video clip my boyfriend showed me above. And the salad was the planet's tasty terrain.

I know...I have an active imagination, but I think it worked out well...though I don't know who appreciated the geekery involved, we scarfed it down so quickly.

Another healthy food I decided to have on display was inspired by my boyfriend's insistance that I watch Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home. He tells me on numerous occassions that I'd love that movie. I have yet to watch it, but it does sound like one I may enjoy, seeing as they go back to save the whales for some reason. Being a vegetarian (and the only thing holding me back from being completely vegan is cheese...I have yet to try a healthy and accurate substitute for it, and I know cheese isn't the best thing for me either, but I have tried to limit my intake of it more these days and have more veggies in my diet) I have a few ethical reasons for being one, I love animals, and not just cats and dogs, all animals (I even feel bad for little ants if they get squished) so when he tells me it's a political, environmental film about saving whales I must admit it has turned my head a bit. I'll give it a chance some day I'm sure (my boyfriend's probably doing a happy dance as he reads this) but for now I found this vegan "tuna" recipe and when I put it on the table I entitled it "Save the Whales Vegan Tuna". Even though this blogger put it in cucumbers I sort of skipped that step and bought some of my fave Organic Oven quinoa bread and bagels I've only been able to find at Noah's Health Food store (link to the store is featured on the side of this blog) and I love how this is no sugar added and eggless as well. It tastes best toasted, I must admit and I forgot to take a picture of it but I toasted a slice of the bread with some cheese and put some of this "tuna" on top with some cherry tomatoes and made a little tuna melt.

I must also admit I thought the vegan mayo would have made the fake tuna taste a bit more like tuna, and not that it was bad but it only looked like tuna, it didn't taste like it at all. Because of the almonds there was a very light, nutty flavor to it. My boyfriend said it was more like an almond spread. I'm willing to try other recipes for this. I saw one that looked yummy that involved chick peas (I love chick peas) so I may try that another time.

So I came up with this light, fun, and nerdy little table. Added some other items that weren't exactly nerdy or Star Trek inspired but still gluten-free and healthy like a few fruits and veggies. I also had the option of natural peanut butter and all three of the insignia jams (that we bought for the cookies) to also go on the Organic Oven bread if one wanted it but no takers on that idea. Oh well, there was a lot of food. And of course we had a lot of Earl Grey tea as seen above. Over all I think it was a good spread and our friend's girlfriend called it "Gluten-free Heaven!" and that's all I could have asked for.

Gluten-free Invincible Star Cookies!

Ok, so this was a pretty easy thing to make. I whipped them up fairly quickly for something I made from scratch. I followed the ingredients from this website www.livingwithout.com/ and altered it with a few substitutions as I didn't have all these things on hand. The alternate recipe is posted here:

1½ cups confectioner’s (or icing) sugar
1 cup of margarine (or for those who want to make it more vegan friendly you can use 1/2 cup apple sauce, ( was gonna try it but mine was too old, so I had to toss it))
1 egg (or 1 teaspoons ground flax seed mixed with 3 tablespoons of water (I used this substitute, as I'm not an egg fan))
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2½ cups all-purpose flour mix
½ teaspoon xanthan gum
3½ teaspoons baking powder

A lot of the ingredients I used were organic like the icing sugar, the flax seed, the vanilla extract, and the baking powder. Now, most of the directions on the website on how to make the cookies I followed www.livingwithout.com/ though to make the cookies a lot more yellow like the invincible stars in Mario I added a lot of yellow food colouring to the wet ingredients as I was mixing it. Don't worry, it was all natural food colouring (from India Tree) If you like you can make yellow icing, but I wanted mine to be pretty simple and not too sweet.

Then, after I made the dough, I made it into a ball and put it in the freezer for about 20 minutes. Then I cleaned up, took out the ball and rolled it out between two sheets of parchment paper. I just cut them out using different sizes of star cookie cutters I had, and put them on a few parchment-lined cookie trays and popped them in the oven for 10 min. when it was preheated to 350 degrees.

Once they cooled down a bit. I heated up some dark chocolate chips in a little glass bowl in the microwave at 15 second intervals, stirring as I went until the chocolate was all melted. Then I spooned the chocolate into a ziploc bag and cut a tiny hole at the tip to pipe on some eyes and voila! They're done!

Perfect for any time of year really, but I wanted to make something simple, nerdy, cute, and stars are kinda a Christmas thing, seeing as it's getting so close to that time of year. I made it for a few friends and one of the people coming over had a gluten allergy. I tried to make these for her, but they ended up cancelling, due to the crummy weather outside. I don't blame them, it's awful out. Anyway, if you have the ingredients you can make these yourself, or you may even try other recipes like gluten-free rice krispy treats made into stars, and so on. You can do so much with star cookie cutters! Have fun!

You can see the flax seed in these guys. They don't really taste like anything really once they're baked. You can normally smell it or taste it in the wet batter though. I just like them as a healthy alternative to eggs.

If you're new to baking gluten-free stuff, remember this stuff can crumble and fall apart easily, they're really soft when they first come out of the oven. So let them cool a bit before transferring them over somewhere else to cool.

Back to the Future Clock Tower Cake!

Hello! To those who haven't seen it, this is the cake I worked on for my "little" bro's b-day. It made sense to make as it was a set of movies we both watched repeatedly growing up. I actually consider it my fave trilogy...yes, even better than Star Wars...yeah I said it. I can even see the hordes of Star Wars nerds running to beat down my door now to tell me to "Take that back!" I even picture my older brother among them. Though I'm sure you can't blame me, the trilogy was an amazing one, and every time I bring up those movies I have yet to find someone who's seen them to tell me they disliked them. Oh sure, people will have their favourites in the trilogy; I myself love the 2nd one the best, as it has 3 different times in it and a complex storyline...plus is was hilarious to see their take on the not so distant future. All the movies had one thing in common, and that was the same scene of the clock tower being struck by lightning. I felt the iconic image of the clock tower was perfectly round enough to make a fantastic nerdy cake design! I even researched it to see if it's been done before and no apparently not in Google images, though I did see an Uncle Jail Bird Joey cake which I even contemplated making if things went sour with this one. Luckily I had been thinking of doing this for months and had a back-up plan to things if they went wrong. There were a few stressful moments when making the cake but everything went surprisingly well. The first attempt at making the cake I tried making a gluten-free cookie of the clock face to simply place on top of the cake, however, like most gluten-free cookie recipes there was a complication...it fell apart. Luckily I didn't resort to panicking and decorated the cake the day that I planned to and gave myself some extra time to do the little details. So I made a yellow gluten-free cake from a package as I've seen a lot of chocolate cakes and wanted to try something different. Then I whipped up a gluten-free vanilla frosting also from a package that I spread on the cake to support the fondant I covered the cake with. I then rolled out the fondant and placed it on the cake and to give the clock an antique look I mixed some of my India Tree yellow natural food colouring with pure lemon extract to create a nice wash and painted that onto the fondant with my food paint brushes. The food colouring mixed with lemon extract (or even vodka if you wish) reacts as a watercolour paint that absorbs nicely into the fondant and the more you wash over it the more vibrant the colour appears. Once that was done I used my picture reference of the clock tower that I printed up to do the next steps. These are the pix I used:

This one was my uber nerdy reference for complete geek accuracy on having the time set on the exact time Marty travels back to the future:

So I began cutting the Roman numerals out of fondant with little metal alphabet cookie cutters I luckily found at Degrees Kitchen Store. I placed the fondant on with water once I figured out exactly where I wanted it to go. It took a bit of adjusting to look accurate but it came together nicely. Then once everything was all set I hand painted on melted dark chocolate for the contrast with the clock and put the rest in a ziplock bag to cut a hole in the corner and pipe out onto the edges for a more textured edge of the clock. This was the most nerve-wracking step I much admit but even though it wasn't accurate to the picture it was effective enough for me not to worry.

For the finale and the whole reason I had the idea to do this for my bro's b-day in the first place, I used an ice cube tray I bought forever ago at The Silver Snail comic book store that had Back to the Future logos and license plates all over it and I decided to melt white chocolate into it. Again I used the same technique as I did when I was antiquing the cake and mixed natural food colouring with lemon extract and painted it on the chocolate. Interesting fact: It didn't sit on the chocolate as well as it did with the fondant as the chocolate was a bit waxier and slightly melty, plus the lemon was more evident on the chocolate (as told to me by my brother's girlfriend who tasted the logo) where as the taste almost seemed to disappear in the fondant. It was an interesting experiment none the less and I think it made the cake all the more dramatic:

And now for a few fun pix from the Back to the Future themed party. This is me dressed up for the occasion:

And this is my little bro who appears to love the theme of his party. No, he isn't three, we put three candles on his cake to symbolize past, present and future, a tradition my family started because we were sick of putting a gazillion candles on a cake, and frankly so many candles can ruin the look of a beautifully made cake before it's hacked up to pieces and eaten! Plus this past, present and future thing works quite well with the theme, don'tcha think?

Note here he was doing his Biff Tannen impression. You know, the one in the second movie where Biff uses his cane to beat Marty over the head to repeat his famous catch phrase, "Hello, hello! Anybody home! Think McFly! Think!"

Anyway, I enjoyed making this cake and luckily I didn't feel like I had to go back in time to remake it, I think it turned out quite well...though if I did have a time machine I'd go back in time to eat it again. It was delish!