Baking is a wonderful hobby, and being gluten-free doesn’t need to stop you from enjoying that wonderful passtime. While we’re sure that you’ve got some great gluten-free recipes that you love to make, we’ve found these options that are utterly delicious in their own right. Try them out soon!

Flourless brownies

The wonderful thing that makes this recipe completely gluten-free is that there is no flour used whatsoever. While you could, in theory, make gluten-free brownies by swapping out wheat flour for rice or another alternative, this recipe simply encourages you to forego flour entirely.

This approach is certainly worth a try, as the final brownies are really interesting and supremely tasty! We’d recommend them to anyone, whether they’re following a gluten-free diet or not.

Ingredients

• 200g butter, chopped into small cubes, plus extra to grease the tin
• 250g dark chocolate, broken into small pieces
• 225g caster sugar
• 3 eggs
• 100g ground almonds

Method

1. Start off by heating the oven to 180˚C, or 160˚C if your oven is fan-assisted. While it’s heating, butter, and line a square cake tin.
2. After completing the prep work, melt 200g of the chocolate together with the butter in a large, heat-proof bowl. Do this over a pan of boiling water, so that you don’t overheat the mixture, and ensure that the water and the bowl don’t touch. Stir the mixture every now and then to ensure everything melts evenly. Remove the mixture from the heat, once it’s melted into a homogenous mixture, and then leave it to cool for ten minutes or so.
3. While the mixture is cooling, whisk the sugar, eggs, and a little salt together in a large bowl. Mix them until they’re pale and foamy – more like a milkshake than a meringue. This will probably take around eight minutes with a hand whisk, or a quarter of the time with an electric hand mixer.
4. Pour the butter mixture into the egg mixture, as well as the almonds. Fold everything together well, ensuring that there are no streaks of chocolate and that everything is well mixed – avoid any dry spots.
5. Tip the mixture into the baking tin, and top it with the rest of the chocolate. Bake the mixture for twenty-five minutes, at which point it should be cooked! Ideally, the brownies will be firm at the edges with a very slight wobble right at the center.
6. Leave the brownies to cool for roughly ten minutes, and then scoop them into bowls to serve. Alternatively, allow them to cool completely, and then cut to squares and serve as a snack.

Gluten-free Chilli Cornbread

Here, the dish is made gluten-free through the use of polenta as a type of flour. This isn’t too unique a concept, but the interesting thing about the way it’s used in cornbread is that the polenta’s naturally slightly sweet flavor comes to the fore, bringing a taste sensation to every mouthful.

Ingredients

• 200g polenta, or fine ground cornmeal
• 284ml pot buttermilk, or 284ml milk, with a tsp of lemon juice or white vinegar added. Leave to stand for ten minutes, then use as buttermilk.
• 25g butter
• 1 red chili, deseeded and finely chopped
• 1 tsp baking powder (be sure that the powder is gluten-free, as not all baking powders are)
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 50g frozen sweetcorn, defrosted
• 2 large eggs, beaten

Method

1. In a dry frying pan, lightly toast the polenta for three to four minutes. Make sure that you stir regularly, as this will ensure even cooking. It should be pleasantly fragrant, and small patches should be fairly golden-brown. Take the polenta off the heat, before tipping half of it into a large bowl, and add the buttermilk. Stir the mixture very well, ensuring that there are no dry spots of polenta, and cover. Allow the mixture to sit, soaking, for two to three hours.
2. Melt the butter in a large frying pan – a cast-iron one is perfect, ideally around 25cm across. Heat your oven to 220˚C/200˚C while you melt the butter.
3. Stir the butter and remaining ingredients from the recipe list into the buttermilk and polenta mixture. Add half a teaspoon of salt, for flavor, and make sure to add the rest of the polenta itself.
   1. At this stage, it’s crucial not to wipe out the inside of the frying pan. The thin layer of butter in the pan will ensure that the bread doesn’t stick once it’s done cooking.
4. Put the pan back over the heat on the hob, and turn up the temperature quite a lot. Once the heat has been absorbed into the pan a little, pour the wet mixture into it. As the mixture hits, it should sizzle, as pancake mix does when it hits the hot pan.
5. Place the whole pan into the oven, and bake it for fifteen to twenty minutes. At that point, it should be golden brown and a little firm in the middle. Leave the bread to cool for a moment or two, and then serve it, cut into wedges.
   1. We’d recommend serving this spicy cornbread with plenty of salted butter – the flavor is divine!

Pastel de chocolo – Corn cake

This cake is an interesting exercise in flour-free options. Not only does the recipe forego the use of flour, but there’s really no dry ingredient involved in the recipe at all! Instead, the egg whites in the recipe form a meringue-style base that firms up during cooking. This light base gives the other ingredients a wonderful medium to be eaten from.

Ingredients

• 2 large eggs
• 500g frozen sweetcorn, defrosted
• 75g butter, melted and cooled
• 2 tsp cornflour
• 1 ½ tbsp baking powder
• 1 tbsp granulated sugar
• Oil or butter, for greasing
• 100g feta, cut into small cubes
• 25g olives, sliced

Method

1. Start off by heating the oven to 120˚C, or 100˚C if your oven is fan-assisted. Also, grease a 20x20cm cake tin, and line it with baking parchment.
2. To start the cooking process, separate the eggs into two bowls. Place the yolks into a food processor or a blender, along with the sweetcorn, and blitz them into a puree. Tip that blended mixture into a large bowl, and then stir the butter, cornflour, baking powder, sugar, and 1 tsp salt in. Mix everything together very thoroughly, ensuring that there are no dry spots and that the mixture is homogenous.
3. Whisk the egg whites together well, ensuring that they have reached the stiff peak stage. This is likely easiest to do with a hand mixer or stand mixer. Gently fold those whipped egg whites into the corn mixture, using a large metal spoon. Be sure that they’re completely incorporated, and be sure that you keep as much air in the mixture as possible – this will prevent your final product from being too dense.
4. Spread the corn batter over the base of the tin evenly, using a spatula or the back of a spoon to level the top surface. Sprinkle the cubes of cheese over the flat mixture, and press them in so that they’re almost completely covered.
5. Cook the mixture in your preheated oven for one hour and forty-five minutes. At this point, it should be firm and golden, while also shrinking from the sides. Remove it from the oven at that point, and leave it to cool for at least fifteen minutes, at which point you can cut it into chunks and serve. Serve the cake with olive slices scattered over the top of each piece.