Of muffins and other treats…

Starting off the hike with Marjolaine

I must start by saying that my sister and her baking adventures have inspired me to share about my own experiments. Granted I do not have the same type of camera nor the same adeptness for taking photos, but I still feel inspired to share anyways 😛

With Andrée and Etienne it can be somewhat challenging to make something they actually like to eat. The gluten-free flours in their various combinations provide a taste that they are not used to, and so sometimes I am left with a whole batch of muffins to myself. I do like to eat my baking, but not that much 😛 So I am adapting as I go and I hope that their taste buds will get more accustomed.

My friend Christina and I have been penpals since I came to Quebec, and we also exchange recipes. Christina sent me a recipe for an Apple Galette, which I had never heard of before and is like of like a pie except only the edges around the top are covered by pastry.

Apple Galette

Honestly if someone has types for how to transfer pastry dough without it falling into a million pieces, I would be happy to hear some tips. While my pastry wasn’t the most beautifully presented, it was very tasty and quite popular with my household.

In my continued attempt to use up the cartons of plain yogurt in the fridge, I made another batch of muffins. I was so excited to see how they rose up that I had to take a picture 😛 My creation got it’s inspiration from this blackberry muffin recipe, and I modified it to be gluten-free.

Mmm muffin!

I used finely ground buckwheat flour in combination with other flours for both this recipe and the Apple Galette, but Andrée and Etienne weren’t so keen on the taste of this one. So maybe buckwheat flour is better in pastry and pancakes…

 

Today I tried out my sister’s recipe for vegan gluten-free strawberry shortcake. When I first saw her blog entry, I was instantly inspired and it has taken me a few weeks to get all the ingredients together.  I’m not sure that I patted out my dough to the right thickness because mine shortcakes didn’t seem as fluffy as my sisters, but they were still very tasty and a hit with Andrée. Since we didn’t have any fresh strawberries, I used blueberries instead . Mmm.

Goofing around

On another note, as I was recovering from Bénir Joliette this past week I had the pleasure of going to Prévost\Saint Sauveur in the Laurentides to visit Marjolaine. I met Marjolaine when I went to Prévost at the end of March this year to present our upcoming King’s Kids summer camp at her church. Because her church will be hosting one of our teams during the outreach portion of the camp, we had all gone out to lunch to discuss camp details.

At the time Marjolaine and I connected right away and we were so enthusiastic that finally someone asked us to move from the table since we were distracting the others from talking about the camp 😛

View from the top

I had been asking God about the possibility to work on my French, i.e. to take a French course or to find a tutor. Marjolaine, it turned out, had studied French at university, and she even offered to help me with my French (!). I was thrilled. The thing is that both Marjolaine and I have very full schedules. Which means it took 2 months for us to find a date that worked alright for the two of us.

So finally I went to visit last Tuesday and Marjolaine showed me a bit around the area. Tuesday night we took a picnic and walked up on of the ‘mountains’ to a nice view and to be swarmed by mosquitoes :s  Nothing like mosquito bites to drive someone crazy – thank goodness for bugspray lol.

check out the HUGE misquito bite on my nose...okay, maybe it's hard to see in a photo 😛

And I got inundated with French grammar exercises to work on now that I’m back in Joliette. Things like the subjunctive, direct and indirect objects, relative pronouns and relative clauses. Fortunately I enjoy grammar, unfortunately, I don’t really like swimming 😛 But I know it will get easier with practice. And I am grateful to Marjolaine for giving me her time and being patient!

with Marjolaine

Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading! À la prochaine 🙂