Released June 2009 (Ulysses Press) * 220 pages * ISBN-13: 9781569757048

The Book

Sugar-free Gluten-free Baking and Desserts: Recipes for Healthy and Delicious Cookies, Cakes, Muffins, Scones, Pies, Puddings, Breads and Pizzas by Kelly E. Keough is a collection of recipes for those who can tolerate neither wheat nor sugar. Although these recipes are likely of most interest to those with celiac disease or diabetes, no one else in the family will mind eating from this cookbook–as long as you can find the ingredients and don’t mind the frustrating index.

The Ingredients

I’ve had this book for several months. What kept me from trying it earlier was tracking down ingredients used throughout the book. Most of the recipes use flavoured liquid stevia, agave nectar, and Swerve. The flavoured stevia drops were an easy find at health food stores in both Alberta and British Columbia (yes, I went shopping in TWO provinces). I could not track down agave nectar where I live in Alberta, but found it fairly easily in British Columbia.

Swerve is another story. This crystalline sweetener replaces the bulk of sugar in many recipes. As far as I can tell (the manufacturer did not answer my e-mail), Swerve is only sold in the United States. No health food store I went to had ever heard of it. I did find erythritol once (a component of Swerve), but at $16 for half a kilo I opted not to experiment.

Even some of the ingredients that sound easy to find, like unsweetened carob chips, were hard to buy (sweetened carob chips are a cinch to find, not so for unsweetened). It’s not just me. In British Columbia I went shopping with a local and it still took us an entire day and six or seven stops to hunt down the ingredients to try a couple recipes (I don’t believe in just eyeballing recipes when I review cookbooks ).

The author says that you can find the ingredients at her website, but her site isn’t particularly helpful when it comes to Swerve, even if you are inclined to buy ingredients online (which I am not).

The Recipes

Sugar-free Gluten-free Baking and Desserts has a glossary of ingredients at the beginning which is helpful as well as some sourcing information if you need it and are willing to shop online. There is also a cravings-versus-recipes list where you can look up what you are craving and pick a recipe in the book that is supposed to address it. I could have done without the page on prayer and food (I dislike finding religion in books on secular topics) but that’s a small peeve since it doesn’t show up anywhere else in the book. There are recipe sections for:

• Brownies and Cookies
• Breads, Pancakes, Cereals, and Bars
• Muffins, Scones, and Bagels
• Cakes and Cupcakes
• Pies, Tarts, and Crisps
• Puddings and Kantens
• Ice Cream and Sorbets
• Candy
• 30-Second Snacks
• Baby Food

The index in this book is a bit frustrating. My mother and I kept having to flip through the book to find the recipes we had chosen because the index was unhelpful at best. Wicked Awesome Peanut Butter Waffles doesn’t appear under Peanut Butter (but other recipes do), but they do appear under Wicked. Vegan Blueberry Pancakes suffer the same fate, showing up under Vegan, but not under Blueberry. This makes the index near useless as the same thing is repeated with a number of recipes. It’s a good thing the recipes are good.

Taste Testing

So, on with the taste-testing! I made No Guilt Brownies, Wicked Awesome Peanut Butter Waffles, and Vegan Blueberry Pancakes. None of the recipes I tested used Swerve for reasons already mentioned.

The No Guilt Brownies were easy to make (mostly adding ingredients to a food processor–make sure you have a family size one). This recipe uses a can of black beans. Although most people said that they couldn’t taste the beans, I could tell they were there because I’ve eaten Chinese sweets with bean paste in them (there’s nothing wrong with the flavour, but if you’re familiar with the ingredient you’ll recognize it). This make a dense, high cakey-type brownie that isn’t crumbly and stores well. It was tasty and I would make it again (especially since the other half scarfed it down with no prompting–he’s the one with the gluten issues).

My batch of No Guilt Brownies (I've already taste tested them in the upper right corner).

Since I was in a house with a waffle maker (something I don’t have at home), I tried Wicked Awesome Peanut Butter Waffles. These were tasty though not as peanut buttery as I expected. The lone waffle that survived to the next day was more peanutty though.

A rare glimpse of the Wicked Awesome Peanut Butter Waffle (they kept getting eaten). The one left over tasted much more peanut-buttery the next day than when freshly made.

The Vegan Blueberry pancakes were tasty as well. The fact that all three recipes were tasty suggests that the others should be as well. There are recipes for cookies and bars that are made in a food dehydrator, which is technique that I haven’t seen or tried before.

Vegan Blueberry Pancakes--I'll make these again.

Verdict

If you can find the ingredients, the recipes (at least the ones that I tried) are tasty and not particularly complicated.

You can find Sugar-free Gluten-free Baking and Desserts: Recipes for Healthy and Delicious Cookies, Cakes, Muffins, Scones, Pies, Puddings, Breads and Pizzas (previously published as The Sweet Truth) at amazon (US, Canada), the Book Depository (Worldwide), as well as at other online and retail booksellers.

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