24th of December 2011. I did it. I worked with yeast. I got my gluten free bread/cake to rise ... though that was about the most successful part of my baking adventure. It didn’t start off too well. I read my recipe quickly and chucked a tablespoon of sugar in with my buttermilk and yeast instead of teaspoon. So I threw it out and started again. I wanted to do this right. I left it for ten minutes while I creamed butter and sugar and eggs. The Buttermilk/yeast/sugar was meant to be going frothy. Nothing was happening. I left it for another 10 minutes and shook it about. I chucked it in with the butter, sugar, eggs. Of my own accord I chucked in an extra egg because in the past I’ve noticed this helps gluten free things stick together. I even separated two of the eggs so that I could whip up the egg whites all nice and fluffy like to add a bit of excitement. Later I read that yeast works better with sugar to feed it. Maybe I should have kept the first lot.
Adding an extra egg of course adds liquid. Oh well. No matter. I added the flour. A mix of cornflour and gluten free plain flour. It was all looking very runny. There was no way I could turn this mixture out to knead it. I added a bit more flour, but in the end I took the advice of an unknown gluten free baker who keeps a blog and accepted that in my mixing bowl my raw cake would look more like batter than dough. I left the bread/cake batter/dough in a warm place and, when I came back to it some time later, I was absolutely over the moon to see the batter/dough had doubled in size.
I put it in a tin (the wrong shaped tin, mind you. I wasn't about to buy a new cake tin for one GF baking experiment). I put it in the oven, baked for ten minutes, turned down the temperature, baked for another half an hour. I left it to cool.
I sliced it, I ate a bit. All I can say it’s a good thing that on my list of things to do I didn’t include any qualifiers. All I said was bake gluten free panettone. And I did that. I worked with yeast and gluten free flour and I got my bread/cake to rise. I didn’t say it had to be good, or tasty or soft. My panettone smelt right, and tasted ok, but it was super crumbly and quite dry. I did enjoy it, but I don’t think I would have served it to anyone, especially not a gluten eating person. Still, I ate it for breakfast on Christmas day, and that made me quite happy, and got me prepared for a full day ahead of festive eating.
I’ve now frozen the majority of it and will at some point use it in trifle or tiramisu or some such thing. I think surrounded by cream and other nice things it will work a treat.
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