Friday, June 20

Gluten Free Dessert!

One of my favorite places to look for recipes is the food blog raspberryeggplant, written by a woman named Roopa in Baltimore. She has a great recipe for key lime pie (or tartlets) which is just phenomenal. I've made it a few times, but since my boss is gluten free I usually make it with a few changes.
I'm re-posting her recipe here, and explaining the changes I usually make to make it gluten free. I would add pictures, but someone (my brother and sister!) ate all of the aforementioned tartlets before I thought to take any pictures. Next time I make them, I'll come back and post some pictures to go along with the recipe. You can find the full original recipe at raspberryeggplant, so I'll just talk about the crust here! Normally you would mix 10 finely crushed graham crackers with 5 tablespoons butter. To make it gluten free, you have 2 options:

1) You can use finely crushed nuts such as almonds or walnuts and mix them with butter. You then follow the rest of the recipe, but know that the nuts will not conform to the shape of the cupcake tin in the same way that graham crackers. Even after you bake the nuts for a few minutes, they will not form a real crust. After you pour the custard mixture into the cooled put the whole muffin pan into the freezer. Otherwise the tartlets will not hold their shape, and will turn into mush when you try to get them out of the tins. If you leave the tarts in the freezer for a few hours you will be able to use the removal method mentioned in the original recipe (hot towels, turn over etc)!

2) The other option is to buy pre-made gluten free cookies instead of graham crackers. I've tried using gluten free cookies once, and it was semi-successful. You can pretty much follow the original recipe if you use the cookies, but they're usually really sweet. I used plain shortbread cookies I found at the store, but the tarts were overwhelmed by the cookie taste. I'm going to keep looking for other gluten free cookies, but for now I suggest using tactic #1!

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