Putting myself through gluten free school

The number one block to my experimentation?  Lack of ingredients?  Nope!  Lack of ideas?  Not a chance.  Lack of skill?  Puh-lease!  The number one stumbling block to increasing my rate of gluten-free experimentation is lack of eaters. 

It's basically impossible to make four kinds of cupcakes and then eat them when only two people live in your house!  And inviting people over for a dinner party makes you go for safe recipes - ones you know you can hit out of the ball park; ones you know the timing on, what it looks like when it's done, etc.  How does one find eaters for ones (possibly failed) experiments?

You'd think it'd be easy, and I've had people volunteer in the abstract but it's never actually happened.

I may have stumbled upon a solution.  My husband likes to play ridiculously complex strategy games with his boys.  They take forever.  And his friends aren't fussy.  They'll eat whatever I put in front of them and are generally thrilled to be fed.  They're not the most insightful critics, but they're omnivorous.  So I do the criticism.  I eat one or two.  If they're good I eat more.  Either way, they eat the remainders.

Todays experiment:  eclairs!  This is the eclair recipe from the culinary institute's gluten free baking book, as I have discussed before.  The flours are a combination of white rice flour, brown rice flour, starches, guar gum, and albumen.  It was my first experiment with a pastry bag and I learned a lot with that.  First and foremost being, roll up the top to get the batter further into the bag to avoid it coming out the top.  Second, you need more than one tip.  The pastry cream also needed to be piped and because I didn't have a small enough tip, I ended up using a (n artless) ziplock bag.  It got the cream where it needed to go, but I fantasize about a day when I can make it all fluted like at the bakery.

Universal acclaim, just so you know.  For a baked good with so many steps, it's relatively easy and the pastry is delicious.  Considering that I have never seen a pate de choix based baked good in a bakery, these turned out really good. In other words, it's not that hard people, especially if you have all the equipment and other people should be able to do it.

My recommendations:  make the pastry cream first, it needs to cool completely - like be a little cold to the touch.  It'll take longer than the pastry will.  The eggs don't need to be room temperature but it does kind of re-solidify bits of butter.  My eclairs are tiny.  I was concerned about how dense it'd be and I made small ones.  It's unnecessary and in the future, I will go ahead and make larger eclairs.  Don't be concerned if your piped dough is a bit bumpy (if you use a small tip, it'll end up requiring more than one pass to get the size dough that you want) - the bumpy actually provides a yummy texture.  They do puff up, but only about 30% more.  Use that as a guide to how high/thick/big to pipe your dough.

I'm working on a list of what the next experiments will be.  Hopefully the next thing will be donuts and/or corn dogs.