My story starts out with my kids’ track team having a party to celebrate the end of the end of the season. I needed to make brownies, but I was fresh out of flour and couldn’t go to the store to buy more. I decided to try making my own rice flour and using my favorite recipe.

I have a Wonder Mill, formerly, Whisper Mill, to grind my grains into flour. The advantage of making my own flour is that I can guarantee that my flour is made only of rice. It only takes a few seconds or minutes, depending on how much flour I’m grinding at a given time.

Rice Flour (white or brown) can be substituted with a 1:1 ratio for all purpose flour when baking goodies like cookies and brownies. In other words, if my recipe calls for 1 cup of white flour, I can use 1 cup of rice flour.

So, I made my Gluten Free Brownie recipe. After I poured it into the pan, I tasted the badder that stuck to the sides of the bowl. It tasted every bit as good as when I used white flour in the past. It might have been a tad bit more grainy, but that can be fixed by adjusting the setting on my Wonder Mill to make the flour finer.

Now that you have the back ground, I bet you are ready for my recipe for Gluten Free Brownies. Before I do that, I want to remind you to make sure that your cocoa powder and vanilla (particularly if it is imitation vanilla extract) is gluten free.

Gluten Free Brownies

1 pound of cream cheese or butter (4 sticks) or any combination of the two

1 cup of cocoa powder

3 cups of sugar

6eggs

1 Tablespoon Vanilla

2 cups rice flour

Melt cream cheese and/or butter in a large sauce pan or dutch oven. Add cocoa powder. Remove from heat. Stir in sugar, eggs, and vanilla until combined. Stir in flour. Pour into a greased (unless using a stone bar pan that is properly seasoned) 15 1/2″ x 10″ bar pan. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 25-30 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. Top with marshmallows or sprinkle with powdered sugar or serve as is- still absolutely delicious. Makes about 72 delicious brownies!

Conclusion

While I didn’t set out to do any gluten free cooking tonight, I found that this recipe was easy to adapt. I chose to use 1 pound of cream cheese since I was also completely out of butter and was lucky enough to have cream cheese on hand.. Usually, I do about half butter and half cream cheese. Also, my eggs come from my own chickens that I raise in my back yard. They are fed a chicken feed that included flax seed to increase the Omega-3 fatty acids.

After I took them out of the oven, I let them cool before sprinkling powdered sugar on them. They did have a slightly different texture, but not enough of a difference keep me away from the pan. My kids, who are more picky than I am, enjoyed them, too! So, it is possible to enjoy chocolate in a gluten free lifestyle.

Since my mom may be reading this soon, I’ll put in a plug for her. She always said that necessity is the mother of all invention. Those words certainly rung true today!