Halloween’s here once again, so it’s time to get decorating the house with pumpkins, cobwebs and all kinds of scary decorations to have a fun night trick-or-treating. It’s also time to let your imagination run wild in the kitchen, which this year we’ve turned into a gluten-free zone so that gluten-intolerant children don’t miss out on any of the fun. Here are some ideas:
Spinach spider muffins
This is a great way of sneaking vegetables into a delicious fairy cake that will go down a treat with all ages. Just gently fry some spinach in extra-virgin olive oil and finely chopped garlic. Then mix it with some beaten eggs in a bowl and add salt, pepper and a little grated cheese to soften it out. Pour the mixture into muffin moulds, sprinkle some more grated cheese on top and pop into a preheated oven at 180 ºC for about 15–20 minutes. Take them out, let them cool and give them a Halloween look by adding some black pitted olives chopped in half lengthways: use one half as a spider’s body and cut the other half into strips to use as the spider’s legs.
There’s a spider’s web in my soup!
Make a vegetable soup with 100 g of leeks, 600 g of pumpkin, 100 g of potatoes, 300 g of skimmed milk and 30 g of olive oil. Gently fry all the ingredients together for a couple of minutes before covering with water, adding salt and pepper and leaving to cook. Blend until you get a smooth, thin consistency. Serve the soup in individual bowls and use a pastry bag with a fine nozzle and filled with cream cheese to delicately draw concentric circles across the whole surface and then interconnecting radial lines to form a spider’s web. Have fun!
Brownie RIP
This recipe has a terrifying ending… but first you need to get cooking. You’ll need 3 good-sized eggs, 180 g of brown sugar, 110 g of cooking chocolate, 150 g of gluten-free flour (chickpeas, chestnuts or rice), 80 g of chopped walnuts and 110 g of olive oil. Beat the eggs and sugar. Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie or in the microwave and add to the mixture. Add the olive oil and beat well. Finally, add the flour. Knead well and add the chopped walnuts. Preheat the oven to 170 ºC, pour the mixture into a suitable mould and bake for 35 minutes. Meanwhile, make some biscuits with 200 g of butter, 500 g of rice flour, 1 egg, 1 egg yolk and a teaspoonful of gluten-free vanilla essence. Knead well and roll out flat using a rolling pin. Cool for 2 hours in the fridge (when you could be making the brownie). Cut out pieces in the shape of tombstones and bake for 10–12 minutes. Once the brownie and biscuits are ready, you can start decorating. Crumble the brownie into some small glasses as “earth”. Write RIP on the biscuits in icing and stick them into the “earth”. It takes a while, but the final chilling effect is well worth the effort.
* Be careful! If you already use your oven to cook foods containing gluten, your gluten-free recipes are likely to pick up traces of gluten. You should use an oven that you only use to bake gluten-free food.
