Baking gluten free

I love muffins, cookies and cakes. I know they are terrible for me and as we transition away from fake food to eating whole, more paleo friendly foods I am trying to avoid them. I am also a breast feeding mom who needs calories quick and needs food that can be ready and available when I have a second to spare. In effort to make foods that don't taste like cardboard we have loaded up on supplies. What kind of supplies does a gluten free kitchen need? Basically enough to open your own bakery. Making pseudo-gluten is a strange science and best left to the cook book professionals or that guy Bob and his profitable red mill.
If you are already a gluten free aficionado  sit back, nom on a delicious treat and just watch the humorous video. If not, read on.

Gluten acts as a sticky substance in baking giving it cohesion and allows the gas to be trapped and lets the dough rise. Without it, dough would be dense and dry. When you remove gluten, you end up with dense, dry bread and that makes bakers sad. To bridge the happy gut, sad baked goods void takes a little practice. First step is to head to the market and choose which road to take.

Your choices are as follows:

1. Best choice- go Paleo! You don't need this stuff and we are designed to live without it so just take this as nature's sign and move on. Now you have incentive to never go back. Still love the baked goods? Perhaps door number two is your friend.

2. Mix and match- you can buy frozen gluten free goods but they can get pricey and are manufactured somewhere else, stuffed with unnecessary additives and loaded with artificial items that are just as bad as gluten but won't make you sick. Ranting aside, Shar brands, Glutino, Udi's, Rudi's and a few more are readily available and taste pretty good. Some are even dairy and soy free. Bob's Red Mill makes pre-packaged options that you simply add your own eggs, oil and whatever. Good to note that gluten free items do not rise when baked. When you pour regular mixes into a mold they form the shape and usually double in volume. With gluten free the way it looks when you put it in the oven is the way it will look on the way out. So, make it fill the whole area and make it even or you will have the most interesting product ever. At least it isn't a beauty contest.

3. Third option involves more work. Making everything from scratch. This is what we do most of the time. Since we are also soy and dairy free, there are very few products available to us. We tend to mix our own flours and bake from scratch. King Arthur Flour offers a boxed bread package and it is pretty easy. The down side is that for $11 at our local store, that is the most expensive bread loaf we have ever bought. We decided to invest in a few gluten free cook books and chose to go the route of completely allergen free to alleviate the problem of having to further adjust the recipes.