Finding gluten free candy is not difficult. And with enough experience you get pretty good at knowing what to pull from your excited children's clutches when they go trick-or-treating or to the Christmas party, or to the Easter egg hunt. After a while, the kids even get used to having the candy pulled away from them on the short trip from bag or basket to mouth. But this year we got a new curve ball that has made us change our whole approach to holiday treats.
This year we learned that Lex is allergic to corn. Without going into the gory details, we have recently become a gluten/corn free family. It does add a new level of hassle to many things, but believe me when I tell you Lex and everybody else around him is so much happier when he doesn't eat corn.
So our challenge this year was to make sure the kids got the experience we and they wanted to have without any corn syrup sweeteners. That pretty much eliminates store bought candy. I think we succeeded. On the menu for Easter treats we made:
Bunny Peeps. Sugar, water and unflavoured gelatin. I beat mine a little too long, so the cream was already setting before I could spoon it in the mold. I was trying to smush the stuff in before I had a giant mixing bowl shaped marshmallow. Hence the scary looking bunnies. But Peep were always a little better kinda mashed up. We also made our own
colored sugars to really lend authenticity to these imitators. Paul wanted to stick with all yellow classic colors, but I made the sugars and did the work, so we had tri-color Peeps.
You can't have Easter without peanut butter chocolate eggs, right? Since Reese's are off the menu, we made our own
Chocolate Peanut-butter eggs. We subbed peanut flour for the graham cracker crumbs, and used bittersweet chocolate (70%). They don't taste like the traditional egg. They taste better! And the kids were just happy to have something chocolaty to melt in their hands and smear across their faces.
Al-Mound Joy (because we feel like a nut, but also like the dark chocolate). We made a
macaroon recipe, topped it with an almond and coated with dark chocolate (90%). It wasn't quite Almond Joy center. We still need to get the texture right, but we are getting there. I like that ours aren't as sweet and we control the type of chocolate we use. Lately dark chocolate has been much more appetizing compared to milk chocolate.
We also made
brownies in this egg mold (except ours is
pink). This is supposed to be the recipe that gets Oprah excited. The brownies in the egg molds were a perfect combination of moist, fudge-y taste and texture with just a bit of crispness to the "crust". The second half of the batch, baked in a square baking dish, was less fudge-y brownie and more fudge-sludge that was broken up and frozen to find its way into Chocolate Brownie Chunk ice cream. We didn't want all those good chocolate antioxidants to go to waste.
For our Easter egg hunt, we filled the children's eggs with coins, erasers and some other little trinkets. We turned Lex loose first to find eggs on his own before letting Alayna and Cavell get started. Lex did a pretty good job for a little kid on his first hunt. Once he figured out what was going on, he ran all over the back yard looking for little plastic treasures.
As stated above, I think we met our goal and had a successful Easter for the kids. They didn't complain one bit about missing out on the cheapo hard candy they would have gotten from the community sponsored egg hunts. I guess we need to start investing in silicone molds so we can make holiday appropriate treats all year around.
