Coconut Milk Ice Cream ROCKS!

If you are milk-free and you haven't tried coconut milk ice cream yet, you are truly missing out. This stuff is delicious! I remember the first time I tried Rice Dream ice cream. I grimaced, felt sorry for everyone allergic to milk, and tossed the carton. Soy milk ice cream isn't terrible, but it's really not that great. My son can't eat soy anyway, so it's a moot point for us.

Coconut milk to the rescue. This ice cream, and the chocolate-covered ice cream pops made by the same company, is really good. Giving only the slightest twinge of coconut, this product is closer to milk-based ice cream than any other product I've tried. It is sweet, rich, creamy, and does not have a weird aftertaste. It genuinely tastes good. Most important: our kids can finally eat ice cream like their friends do.

All of the coconut milk ice creams from Turtle Mountain are GF/CF! Even the Cookie Dough flavor is gluten free! Hurray!

One day I hope to make this into an ice cream cake with my bundt pan. It might make a fun birthday cake.

Rolls Rise Better on a Cookie Sheet or Pizza Stone

A few months ago I made a large batch of rolls for a holiday event with my husband's family. Normally I bake in large glass lasagna pans. On that day I didn't have enough room in the lasagna pan so I had to bake some of the rolls in a pie dish. The pie dish has lower sides than the lasagna pan. The rolls that came from the pie dish rose higher than those from the lasagna pan.

Today I wanted to see if the rolls would rise even higher on a flat surface. I skipped the lasagna pans and pie dish and baked half my rolls on a cookie sheet and the other half on a pizza stone. I used the Sesame Bean Bread recipe from the Gluten Free Gourmet Bakes Bread. This was my first time using garfava flour from Authentic Foods.

The rolls rose quickly and nicely. I let them rise in a warm oven for 30 minutes, then I sprayed some foil with cooking spray, opened the oven, and laid the foil on top of the rolls. I turned the oven up to 400 degrees. Betty Hagman's book advises to preheat the oven before baking, but I find that bread does most of its rising during the preheating process.

The rolls on the cookie sheet baked faster but the bottoms mostly burned (a little) and turned hard and bitter. The rolls on the pizza stone took longer and the bottoms caved in somewhat, but they didn't burn or turn bitter.

I'm currently on the Atkins diet, so I cannot eat bread. However I really wanted to try the rolls to see if the new flour really tasted better. I decided to take a bite and spit it out. They tasted so good that I actually wasted a whole bun tasting and spitting! The rolls were soft like Wonder Bread and tasted slightly sweet, much like Challah bread (a bread traditionally served at Jewish Sabbath dinners). I could not taste beans at all! The rolls were a brown color, like wheat bread, because of the two teaspoons of molasses in them. Next time I'd like to try them with maple syrup or honey instead of molasses to get them to look like Italian bread.