Thank God there are other alterative flours like rice flour and potato flour. Now you just need some recipes that use those types of flours. I’ll give Grandma a call later today and see if she has one that she can give me. Once I have it I’ll post it here on the thread.
My SIL and two of our nieces are gluten-intolerant. She has found lots of products she likes at Bob’s Red Mill…it’s a mail-order place that sells both flours and blends, as well as grains–both gluten-containing and gluten-free stuff like quinoa. They have a store in Milwaukie, Oregon, which shares a border with the east side of Portland, but I think the bulk of their business is now via their website. (If you can get to the physical store, though, there are some great bargains to be had by buying out of the bulk bins.)
Bob’s carries a corn flour that I like…it is just a very fine cornmeal, but there it offers the opportunity to fine-tune on texture for cornmeal recipes. I think my SIL also buys a gluten-free version of Bisquick, there, too.
The other thing that might be worth checking out is to go online at a celiac chat forum and see if there are nice quality commercially-made gluten-free cookies that you can buy and decorate at home…you know, 3 inch rounds, something like that. Sometimes the commercial bakers have tricks they use that are difficult to duplicate at home. I would only buy those on some good endorsements, though. There are some dogs out there!
Also, don’t forget that there are recipes out there that produce things like the traditional Buche de Noel (the cake that looks like a yule log) as a frozen dessert made of ice cream or a semi-freddo. You could probably do a “gingerbread house” ice cream cake out of chocolate ice cream! There’s a wow factor for you!
I just thought of one other thing. My kids made Christmas ornament “cookies” one year at school out of a mixture of applesauce and ground cinnamon. They aren’t meant to be eaten, but you decorate them like gingerbread and they smell really good. (We put whole cloves in to decorate them, but had to come back later with a little glue to keep them in.) I think if you wanted to do a “gingerbread house” with them, though, you’d need to use them as shingles glued on to cardboard. The cookies dry rather than bake, so the ones that are too big have this tendency to crack…you definitely want to put the hole for the hanging ribbon in before they dry. There is a little trial and error involved in getting the mixture right, but they were fun to make. (Buy the cinnamon bulk or at Costco, or the amount of cinnamon you will need will bankrupt you, though!)
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Sounds like hard work cooking for you and yours!
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. I’ve churned out some real clunkers in the baking department, and bought some gluten free items that were inedible, so thank you for the good advice.