The Birthday Box

It is my son’s 32^nd birthday today. Since he lives in California we won’t be celebrating the occasion together. But this doesn’t deter me from sending what is now known as The Goodie Box. This is a well thought out box of surprises that takes in consideration my son’s lactose intolerance and his girlfriend’s gluten intolerance.

My daughter and I look all year for different things to send that are fun and tasty. The initial box was sent the first birthday my son was in California over five years ago. Now we send three boxes a year, one for each of their birthdays and Christmas. We have sent many things such as Star Wars cut out cookies, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, and the most popular to date homemade chocolate and caramel pretzel bark.

I have to tell you that my son’s favorite nut is a cashew. So every time we send a box there is a cashew somewhere. Sometimes it is fancy flavored cashews in a bag or cashews on the caramel chocolate pretzels.  This birthday we sent him cashew caramels from a vendor at our local farmers’ market.

We sent an assortment of gluten free chip dips also from a farmers’ market vendor. You see my son has one of those televisions that is just about as wide as I am tall. I’m 5’4”. His house has become football central so I thought well at least everyone can eat the dip.

I have been noticing in all the commercials and cooking shows that brownies have made a come back. You can get diet ones in a box ready to eat. I’ll leave that to someone else to try. With that thought in mind, and a gluten free baking class at Williams-Sonoma, I made brownies to put in the box. I just took my old family recipe, which has only ingredients and no instructions how to make them, and substituted the usual flour for gluten free. They turned out well. I haven’t heard the final verdict from the birthday boy yet.

I did learn a tip in the baking class as to how to measure the flour. I am a classically trained baker and weigh all my dry ingredients to make a consistent product no matter what time of year. They told me that gluten free flour is best done with the scoop method. This means dip into the flour with the appropriate measure and after bringing it out of the flour level it off with a knife. I tried it and it did work better than my other attempts at family favorites when I weighed the flour. This has been a learning experience trying to make things taste like they are the same as baking done with regular flour.

Happy Birthday, Matushka