Cinnamon Raisin Loaf

Ok so I know it’s been way to long since my last post! I blame the hard work we’ve been pitting into the start of our new business Bubs and Up (which you can find on Facebook)… Anyhoo

We are really enjoying this new cinnamon raisin loaf for breakfast and it’s an easy one to make the night before, or if you are like our family,really early I the morning so it’s nice and fresh 🙂

Recipe:
2 cups almond flour
1 tbsp coconut flour
2 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
Pinch sea salt (not recommended if your child is under a year old)
5 eggs
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup raisins
1/4 cup goji berries
1/4 cup macadamia nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 170 deg Celsius
Line a bread tin with parchment paper.
Combine almond flour, coconut flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a medium sized bowl.
Combine eggs, honey, coconut oil, and vanilla in a larger bowl and mix with an electric beater until all ingredients are well mixed.
Slowly add dry ingredients to the wet, and continue mixing.
Once everything is well mixed, add raisins, goji berries and macadamia nuts
Pour batter into bread tin and bake for about 35-45min or until toothpick comes out clean.
We enjoyed it with plain with some butter but I’m sure some nut butter or jam would taste just as nice

Enjoy x

Gingerbread cookies

I’m loving The Lovely Little Lunchbox, her recipes are usually great, different and tasty. The author isn’t quite as strict about sugars, salt or wheat as I like but the recipes are fantastic and pretty easy to change up if I need to. In preparation for christmas tomorrow we tried to bake her gingerbread men and what a great recipe, they came out great even with my small changes.

Recipe:

400g almond meal
1 tsp cinnamon, ground
1 tsp ginger, ground
1/2 tsp nutmeg, ground
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup coconut
4 fresh soft dates, pitted
1/3 grapeseed oil
1 very ripe banana
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg

Place the almond meal, spices, baking powder, coconut and dates into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until combined and the mix is crumbly. Add the oil, banana, vanilla and egg and pulse until combined and a soft dough forms, it can be quite thick and may give your blades quite a workout so don’t overdo it 🙂
Place the dough between 2 sheets of baking powder and roll to about 3 mm thick. Put it in the fridge, I ended up leaving it overnight as I ran out of time, so just see how it feels after a hour. You need it to set a bit so it’s not quite so sticky. Preheat oven to 150 degrees celsius. Remove the top layer of baking paper and cut the dough into shapes using christmas cookie cutters, I didn’t have gingerbread men do just made Chrissy trees. Place the cookies onto an oven tray lined with baking paper. Shape dough scraps into a ball, flatten until 3mm thick and continue to cut cookies until no dough remains. Bake cookies for 10-15 minutes or until golden and cooked. Allow to cool.

Enjoy x

Scones and homemade jam

Sorry we have been a bit quiet the last week. Christmas with a child is a whole new world for us and we have been so busy with all Mr. B’s events and play dates, shopping for pressies, decorating our home and just day to day activities. I still have some homemade pressies to make before the end of the week and of course a few Christmas parties to cook for but it’s all so much fun!

For now though how about an easy breakfast, today we had some delicious spelt scones and what I call homemade jam but it’s really just chunky puréed fruit that we spread on our scones.

The scone recipe is from a great book called I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson. She calls them Finnish scones and they are delicious.

Recipe:

1 1/2 c whole meal spelt flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tbs Olive oil
180 ml water

Line a tray with baking paper. Mix the flour and baking powder in a bowl. Pour in the water and oil and stir with a woodie spoon until smooth. I usually cut out scone shapes but this time I accidentally dropped the baking tray as it was heading into the oven so I just salvaged what I could and made one big scone that I sliced into 4 (not all the way through) before placing in the oven. We baked it for roughly 15 minutes. For the “jam” I blitzed a handful of cherries (de-stoned), 4 good sized strawberries and 1/2 a banana in my. Bellini. It was delicious, messy and nice and healthy, with most of the jam ending up on Mr. B’s forehead (not sure how that happened though).

Let me know if you try this and what other “jam” combinations you try.

Enjoy xx

Gluten Free Pumpkin Gnocchi

I love Italian food, all of it, every inch of pasta and lasagne or pizza and calzones! My all time favourite though is Gnocchi, it’s tasty, simple and you can add any sauce to make it great. Italian is by far my favourite food group but of course it’s loaded with carbs and gluten and well that’s just not going to work for little Mr B’s virgin gut. So I had to make some changes if I was going to introduce any of it into his diet. You may have already noticed we use rice pasta as a replacement for wheat pasta but since I’m making my own Gnocchi from scratch I thought I would also replace the potato with pumpkin to make sure there was more the one veggie in this too.
It was a hit at dinner time, although I should have made the pieces a bit smaller as they turned out a bit gluggy (as gnocchi can be) and it was sticking to the roof of his mouth so he was eating it like a dog eating peanut butter and I ended up cutting it a bit smaller for him 🙂 other than that these went down a treat!

Recipe:
600g cooked and cooled pumpkin
2 eggs
75g coconut flour
100g white spelt flour
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 red onion diced
1 can diced tomato
A handful of regular spinach chopped
Handful of baby leaf spinach chopped

Mash the pumpkin with a fork, add 1 egg and garlic and mix with the fork. (Make sure you let the pumpkin cool or you will cook the eggs who you add them and the mixture won’t stick together).
Add the coconut flour and give it a good stir through (with a spoon if you like) till it is completely mixed in. Let it sit for a few minutes (I had to change a nappy, so I probably let it sit for about 5min) as coconut flour really absorbs liquid. Then add the other egg and the spelt flour and give it a really good stir till it forms a sticky dough. Break off little balls and add them to boiling water. When regular gnocchi is cooked it rises to the top of the water but these didn’t so I just and to keep taking one out and checking it. You may have to do the same. Ours took about 10-15 min to cook and they stayed a little bit sticky which normal gnocchi doesn’t.
While that us cooking fry your diced onion until cooked. Add the can of tomatoes and simmer to they are warmed through, then add your spinach and cook till wilted. This took just a little shorter than the 15 minutes the gnocchi took.

Hubby and I sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top which finished it off nicely but Mr B just had it plain.

Enjoy xx

French toast roll ups!

I love French toast, dripping in honey or maple syrup and covered in fruit! I especially prefer it with white bread and with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar.
Delicious but it couldn’t be more unhealthy!
So what did I make for us over the weekend French toast roll ups. Now I would like to say that I managed to make these more healthy but alas that was not the case! It was however incredibly delicious and well worth having even if it is just once.

Recipe:
A couple of slices of bread with crusts removed.
Diced fruit if your choice, we used strawberry and banana
3/4 beaten eggs
Cinnamon

Lay out your piece of bread place the diced fruit in a line on the slice, close to the start of where you are going to roll them. Roll the bread and give it a bit of a squeeze to keep it all together. Dip it in the egg as you would normally make French toast and fry them in a pan till golden and cooked through. Sprinkle with a bit of cinnamon if your baby likes it.
I would not add any extra sugar or sweetness to these if giving it to my Mr B especially if you have used white bread but we also don’t give him any refined sugars so white bread had him bouncing off the walls all day and super moody!

Enjoy xx

Banana and Date loaf

I was not expecting breakfast to work out so well. As many of my readers know we don’t do sugar or salt with our BLW recipes and we are trying our best to limit dairy and gluten so I found this great Banana bread recipe using coconut flour and maple syrup. But that was still just a bit to much sugar for us, so I tweaked it and changed it and here is our new recipe. But let’s be honest a banana bread with no sugar or normal flour just sounds like a recipe for a failed breakfast…I couldn’t have been more wrong Mr B LOVED it and even ate some of mine 🙂

Recipe:
Ingredients
3 ripe, peeled bananas
3 large eggs
1 cup chopped dates (we used dry but fresh would work too)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup whole meal spelt flour

Method
Preheat your oven to 180°C, or gas mark 4. Prepare a baking pan with parchment paper. Mash the bananas in a large bowl. Add the eggs, dates and vanilla to the mashed bananas and blend well. Add the baking pwd, coconut flour and spelt flour to the wet batter and mix well. The coconut flour will absorb the liquid so if it looks too runny let it sit for a minute or 2.
Pour the batter into the baking pan and bake for 50 minutes or until the top begins to brown and a toothpick inserted in the center of the bread comes out clean.

Because this was an experiment, if you do make it please let me know how it goes so if there are any problems I can tweak the recipe even more, thanks.

Enjoy xx

Bunless Burgers

We’ve always made our burger patties ourselves and now that we are feeding a cute little man with a virgin tummy we are being eve more careful with our ingredients than ever before. I really thought our burgers would have to be for adults only as we usually use tomato sauce and BBQ sauce in our recipe, not to mention salt and pepper. I still wanted them to have some flavour and not be to dry or just fall apart when cooking and so I concocted this recipe.

Recipe:
500g mince
3 tbs diced tomato (we just used some from a can)
2 tbs breadcrumbs
1 tbs mixed herbs
1 tbs rosemary (I love rosemary with meat)
1 egg

Mix it all in a bowl, I find using my hands really works it in well. For into small balls and place into a hot pan. Flatten with a spatula and fry till brown on both sides. For Mr B I noticed if it was a little bit blackened it would be to hard for him to eat so try not to over cook it.

Enjoy xx

Mac and Cheese with a twist

Busy, busy week in our household. Besides the usual run up to Christmas events and stuff, I took a few extra shifts at my old job to help out so our meals have taken a slight back-seat! Which is working out pretty well for us because little Mr B is having some terrible teething troubles and food has taken a big back-seat anyway. But between all that we have had some winners every so often and this one was a firm favourite with Mr B 🙂

It’s the usual Macaroni and cheese but I’ve stuffed it full of veggies and tried hard to get rid of as much dairy as I could.
So here is the recipe and see how you go:

(We used a standard sized baking dish but you might need to use less/more ingredients depending on the size dish you end up using)
2c macaroni
1c peas
1c sweetcorn
1c carrots
1/2 head of broccoli
Put it all in the dish and give it a stir

For the sauce:
90g butter (I was going to use coconut oil cause I wanted to make it completely dairy free but forgot)
90g spelt flour (I say this is gluten free but someone mentioned to me that spelt still has a type of gluten in it so will have to do some research into that)
1l almond milk
1tsp nutmeg

Melt the butter over a low heat and stir in the flour till it forms a paste. Slowly stir in the milk and nutmeg until it thickens up and pour it into the baking dish over the above mix. Give it a quick stir to mix it all up thoroughly.
We didn’t add any cheese to this but topped it with a sprinkle of mixed herbs.

Bake in a preheated oven of 180deg for about 30min.

Enjoy xx

Fruit salad… Yummy yummy, fruit salad… In my tummy!

What a busy day, I’m only getting the chance to sit down now to do your breakfast post! We love fruit for breakfast, for lunch in fact even for dinner! So when the Wiggles were singing about it this morning I knew that’s what we were going to have for breakfast 🙂

We always try and eat what’s in season so in this fruit salad we have: Banana, nectarines, peaches, kiwi and delicious mango!

Egg and Avo wraps

After a very busy weekend I thought today’s breakfast had to be healthy and easy.
This is one of my favourite breakfast combos, some good healthy fats and proteins to start the day. It’s also tasty, super messy and a good challenge for my sons dexterity.

I must admit though after putting this on a wrap I realised I could have just sliced the avo up and given him scrambled egg and avo with out the gluten filled wrap… Oh well.

Recipe:
1/2 avo
2 eggs scrambled
1 whole wheat wrap

Mash the avo up and spread it onto the wrap pour the egg over and spread it out too.slice into appropriate sizes for your little ones dexterity and breakfast is ready.

Enjoy xx