Gluten Free Brownies

If you read my post for Cauliflower Pizza Crust then you read my rant about gluten free recipes. How they never deliver on their promises. How the finished product tastes awful and usually has a weird texture. How they use a bunch of totally obscure, expensive ingredients. How I don't generally like them. Well this recipe fails beautifully to fit that norm. It may be gluten free but that's all it's free of. The taste and texture are great. The ingredients are pretty simple. Except for the coconut flour, which is pretty affordable, you probably already have most of the ingredients. The best part is that you'll never be able to tell they're gluten free. I'm totes serious. I originally tried this recipe as a treat for my dear friend that needs a gluten free diet but I'll be making them again for sure.

I kind of cobbled this recipe together from a few I found on the web and then added the step to separate the eggs and beat the whites to lighten things up. (Gluten free baked goods always tend to be a bit heavy and I assumed this step would help.) Then I flipped over the bag of coconut flour which had a brownie recipe on the back and found my recipe to be pretty darn close to that one. Hmmmm? Funny coincidence. You can find that recipe here. I changed up the technique and temperature which I totally recommend you do. If you make then just like I have below, you'll love them.

Texas Roadhouse Rolls

Here is another popular Pinterest recipe. It's all over the place, pinned and re-pinned a bunch of times. If you're on Pinterest, I know you've seen it. Obviously so did I and since I'm trying to improve my hand at yeast risen doughs, this looked like a good recipe to work with. So I decided to give it a try.

At first I didn't realize it was a "copycat" recipe from a popular restaurant chain, Texas Roadhouse. I just thought that it was the name of a type of roll, like Parkerhouse Rolls or Crescent Rolls. Just a bit of poking around on the internet and I realized I was wrong. There isn't a Texas Roadhouse anywhere near where I live so I wasn't aware of them. But boy, do people seem to love their rolls. Kind of a cult following. And all the chatter seems to indicate that this recipe is a pretty close match.  I wouldn't know, I haven't tasted the rolls. But I did like this recipe. I'll be making it again soon and both my kids have already put it on the Thanksgiving request list. Thumbs up from the whole fam. For my first try I think I did ok. There's room for  improvement for sure but all in all, this recipe was a success.

Chocolate Pecan Florentine Cookies

This recipe has been floating around in my "To Try" recipe binder, well actually its a pile, shoved into a folder that falls out of my binder every time I pick it up. None the less, I've  hung on to this recipe, a photocopy of what looks to be torn out of a magazine, for about 15 years. Seriously 15 years. It's always looked interesting but I've never had the guts to try it. You know, make it for a friend or bring it to a pot luck untested. I've always passed it over for something more "safe". But with the most recent purge of the "To Try" binder/folder/pile I decided I needed to either try it or toss it. So, I tried it. . .