Gluten-Free Pear Chocolate Muffins with Maple or Chocolate Mascarpone Icing

So I know this post was supposed to be about peanuts and squirrels and life and was actually meant to go up on Valentine's Day, but stuff happens (like a broken in two places toe), so it will be the next post. Instead, I have to tell you about some gluten-free chocolate muffins I made a while back; I meant to post these before now because I wanted Béa of La Tartine Gourmande to see what she'd started in this house, and the Monthly Mingle deadline is today too so bombs away.

Before I say anything else, let me state a couple of things: 1) No I'm not turning into a gluten-free baker, if there's anything I love in life besides my family, it's gluten; I just haven't posted many gluten-free recipes here but 2) I do have gluten-intolerant friends and friends with food allergies (this is for you Chlōe) so I do like to keep some recipes on hand to bake for them when I need to, plus if the flavor and texture you're trying to recreate is not incredibly complex, it's not difficult to substitute in gluten-free flours without noticing the difference.

Anyway, we're constantly in boxes here, packing, unpacking, packing, unpacking; so if you can believe it, I found a 1Kg bar of Varhona chocolate in one of the boxes a few weeks ago which I had purchased at La Grande Epicerie in Paris back when I was pregnant, and though it hadn't actually gotten old even though the use by date was October 2009, I felt I owed it to our bellies and general well-being to use it as quickly as possible; also, it's cold which everyone knows is perfect chocolate weather. You will be seeing more results of this massive chocolate usage in forthcoming posts, but let's stick to the muffins for now.

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Bread Pudding when I dream of snow...

Although I'd agree with anyone that there are just some kinds of cold days that are beyond miserable, I have to say I'm a cold weather kind of gal at heart. I love winter clothing, wrapping up in thick sweaters, trying different kinds of knots in my scarves every day (I wouldn't be a real French girl if I didn't have a drawer full of scarves and at least five different ways of putting them on), cradling a cup of hot chocolate or a steaming bowl of soup in my cold hands and then savoring them slowly, letting the warmth seep through me, all things I am happy for every time the calendar hits December.

Unfortunately, my ideal winter and the one I actually get here are two rather different things. I suppose I should be thankful that we don't get three feet of snow at a time the way my sister and her family do in Chicago, but a little snow once in a while would be nice, and by that I don't mean snow that I might see if I were up between 6:00 and 6:17am before it has essentially vanished, making one doubt it was ever here to begin with.
Last year there was one such day, unexpectedly. Granted, it caused the whole nation to grind to a halt and I did lock myself out of the house that morning while walking the "one who brings the crazy." But even while heavily pregnant, somewhat inappropriately dressed, trying to control one very spazzy dog reconnecting with something in her Dutch, barge-pulling, canine DNA, and walking over to the hotel nearby to call A. to come home and let me in, I was still thoroughly charmed by the six inches of snow through which I was trudging. Call me crazy.

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Norwegian Coffee Cake: A Yeast-Averse Story

If you've read some of my posts before, you've noticed that I don't make a lot of bread, and that on the rare occasions when I do, I mention my aversion to yeast. Well, maybe it's time I admitted that this aversion I have to yeast is mostly due to my often having a packet of yeast in the cupboard that, logically, hardly ever gets used resulting in the yeast becoming so old and ineffective that, when I finally get around to using it, a fair amount of cursing and imprecations is directed at said yeast when my dough still hasn't risen after 3 hours of pilot-lighting, oven-front sitting, steam bathing, etc...

So imagine my utter delight when, having purchased a brand new shiny packet of yeast a couple of months ago, all my bread endeavors now promptly ferment, bubble and rise and I obtain the bread I was trying to make, my kneading inability notwithstanding.
Really, there are two culprits in this newfound desire I have to actually make bread and brave yeast: their names are Jamie and Deeba. I mentioned both of them in the last post.

What you may not know about them is that Jamie has this fabulous recipe for a chocolate meringue coffee cake on her blog which was the catalyst of my old yeast/new yeast debacle, and Deeba pulls baked goods out of her oven like Mary Poppins pulls whatever she might need out of her bag. So when Jamie declared that she was hosting this month's Bread Baking Day and that the theme of it would be her birthday which was the 28th of January, I felt I really should participate both because she is a dear friend and because she got me to start baking bread. Deeba's contribution was to insist on posting bread after bread after bread, some from the Ottolenghi book which I gave her when she was here for FBC, which heightened my desperation for bread-baking success. 

So out came the Tassajara Bread Book which I purchased last summer with every intention of making a ton of bread, and which went unused until yesterday when I leafed through it looking purposely for a yeasted recipe (yes there is a whole un-yeasted bread section in there) and came upon this Norwegian coffee cake. Flavored with cardamom, which I love, at its simplest, it seemed just the thing to bake on a chilly Sunday.
I had a bar of Valrhona orange chocolate I needed to use and orange and chocolate being two flavors that marry well with cardamom, half of it went into the bread. I could choose any shape and having never baked challah or any other braided bread before, I decided to try a four-stranded braid. Though I knew I'd gone wrong about halfway through the loaf (past the point where the diagrams ended), it wasn't until after I'd put the bread in the oven that I suddenly understood how the weave worked.

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Back to Regularly Scheduled Programming with A Gâteau à l'Orange

It's been a bit of a whirlwind around here these last few days. I feel like I'm doing eight things at once all online. It's a good feeling even though I don't think I have enough of a sleep reserve for it; this manifests itself in the fact that usually the more things I have to do, the more efficient I become, and right now I'm not being as efficient as I could be.
I want to thank everyone who's contributed to the Haiti Relief Effort so far both on this blog and through the Twitter campaign. Every comment helps more than you can imagine so thank you to everyone who left at least one comment here to help us out. So far, nearly $14K have been raised here and almost $5K on Twitter so I'm very pleased. Remember that every comment you leave until January 31st counts toward the total.

And for those of you who have been patient enough to wait for me to get back to the more regular pursuits of this blog, here's a cake for you. This cake has been blogged about elsewhere already as a result of my disseminating the recipe I'd found, but if you've seen this cake on another blog, probably Deeba's, you can see that my version of it is Cinderella at her stepmother's house, and her version is Cinderella at the ball. Either way, it's delicious and if you love citrus a fraction as much as I do, you should definitely try it.

It's winter and with winter comes revelry (and its remains), snow (sometimes), and above all citrus.
Let me be perfectly clear about this: I'm ethnically Iranian folks, and if any of you know any Persian people, you know we love our citrus. As I said to Deeba and she quoted me back on her blog: We're a bit obsessive and weird about our citrus fruit. We hoard it, display it, eat it, drink it, preserve it, dry it, cook it, and I'm sure we'd bake it too if there were a tradition like that of Western baking in Iran, heck we'd probably wear oranges and lemons if we could find a way to. When my father was a three year-old boy in Tehran, he would sneak into the pantry to drink the freshly squeezed and bottled lemon juice. Did you catch the part about his being three years old?

Nowadays, he will eat a whole 2Kg (4lb) bag of oranges at one sitting while reading the newspaper or working at his computer. And while my obsession at the age of seven lay with sipping red wine vinegar I'd have snuck in a cup back to my bedroom rather than lemon juice, I think you get the point that my family and tart and acidic foods, citrus being a prime group of these, are a tight-knit bunch. So the first time I had an orange cake that really tasted like it had orange in it, albeit not that much, but more than an orange pound cake, I became obsessed with finding a truly orange-tasting recipe.

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Haiti Relief Effort Does Twitter

A young boy receives treatment at a makeshift medical clinic at the UN logistics base in Port-au-Prince. Photograph: Logan Abassi/AFP/Getty Images

FINAL TALLY, February 1st, 2009: 428 mentions were obtained through the Twitter effort resulting in a donation of $4,280 to Haiti Relief. Thank you to everyone who participated with a mention and/or helped to spread the word out about our efforts. Thank you especially to Todd and Donnette for coming up with this idea.
As soon as they are made available to me, I will post the donation receipts. Thank you again.


UPDATE: If you have further questions about this Twitter fundraising effort, please read the FAQ at the end of this post. It should answer any questions you may have.

So, it's Friday the 22nd of January and if you didn't read my last post and have no idea what the Haiti Relief Effort is, please read it either before or after you read this.
My efforts to channel a very generous sponsor's money to Haiti Relief have been noticed and acted upon by two very kind souls, Todd and Donnette, who emailed me a couple of days ago with the idea of spreading the fundraiser to Twitter, which the sponsor agreed to with certain limitations.

So here's what you essentially need to know:

• A Twitter account named @MentionHaiti has been created to raise more funds for Haiti.
• If you mention this account once (@MentionHaiti) in your twitter feed, 2 things will happen: 

        1) Your name will be added to a list in @MentionHaiti's account.
        2) For each name that is added to the list, $10 will be raised toward            Haiti Relief.

• The cap on the amount that can be raised in this way is $50,000, so to participate you must be one of the first 5,000 people to include @MentionHaiti in a tweet.
• Once the cap of 5,000 people has been reached, the account will continue operating and posting new links on ways to help Haiti and the only request is that the listed people mention these posts from time to time.

The comment program from the last post is still active, let me remind you of the basic points:

• For each comment you leave on this blog until January 31st, $10 will be donated to Haiti Relief by my sponsor, a Gulf State Embassy here in London. 

• You may leave one comment per post on as many posts as you like, each one raising $10 toward relief.   A few people have raised nearly $1000 by just leaving a comment on nearly every post in the blog.  The only restriction is that you may not leave multiple comments on the same post.

And in case any of you are wondering if I'll get back to posting regularly soon, I'm writing a post right now, just haven't had time to finish it.
  
FAQ

What is the purpose of @MentionHaiti? 
We are trying to create an easy way for people to demonstrate their support for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti and reward this demonstration of support by having our sponsors donate money to disaster relief for Haiti. 

Who is the sponsor donating the money to? 
Doctors Without Borders.

Why did you choose Doctors Without Borders? 
Doctors Without Borders has been working in Haiti since 1991, and has a well established presence with 813 full-time staff permanently on site. At the moment this number is augmented by whatever additional relief staff can make it to Haiti. Doctors Without Borders provides comprehensive trauma care at the Trinité Trauma Centre and Pacot Rehabilitation Center in Port-au-Prince. In 2008, 17,950 patients were treated in the emergency room, and 6,196 underwent surgery. Trinité is the only functioning trauma centre in Port-au-Prince.

Doctors Without Borders strives to operate efficiently and to minimize fundraising and administrative costs. Between 1995 and 2006, more than 85 percent of expenditure to MSF's social mission was allocated to programs and public education activities. Maintaining this standard is a high priority for them. You can see their annual financial statements here: http://www.msf.org.uk/annualaccounts.aspx

Who are the sponsors of the @MentionHaiti campaign? 
The sponsor is a Gulf State embassy in London that wishes to remain anonymous.

What countries are considered to be Gulf States? 
The following countries are in the the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf  Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the sultanate of Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
    
Why does the Gulf State embassy in London want their sponsorship to remain anonymous? 
It is part of their culture to not be boastful about giving. Publicizing charitable activities is considered improper.

What assurances do I have that the sponsor will actually donate the money if I @MentionHaiti?
Right now you have to trust that money will be donated.  When the donation is made
receipts of the donation will be posted on the blog.

I want to help Haiti.  How can I help?
If you add @MentionHaiti in any Tweet you will be added to one of our Twitter lists and $10 will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. This includes simply replying to @MentionHaiti so you do not have to make it a tweet all of your followers will see, although that would obviously help get the word out.

We also want to inform people about the current conditions in Haiti, the progress being made with disaster relief in Haiti and how social media and the Internet is being used to raise funds and organize relief efforts.  If you find great articles related to these subjects please include (cc @MentionHaiti) with your updates that link to these and we will RT your update.

Is there a limit to how much can be raised via the @MentionHaiti Twitter campaign?
Yes.  Our sponsor, a Gulf State embassy in London, will donate up to $50,000.  Which means that the first 5000 people to @MentionHaiti will be put in one of our @MentionHaiti lists and $10 donated for each list member.

Can I @MentionHaiti in Tweets more than once?
Yes.  Your first Tweet with @MentionHaiti raises $10 for Haiti, all subsequent Tweets after the first one will not raise additional funds for Haiti, but helps us get more people to @MentionHaiti.  We appreciate that.

I want to help raise more than $10 how can I do that?
You can comment on every blog post at http://saffronandblueberry.blogspot.com and $10 will be donated for every single comment in the blog  (with a limitation of one comment per post) which means by taking less than 2 hours of your time volunteered will raise over $1000.

Is there any limit to the amount of money that can be raised by commenting on the blog?
Per person, the limitation is $1090 because there are 109 posts on the blog.  Overall, there is no limit however.

Millions of people could comment on the blog.  Isn't it risky to not have a limit on what could be contributed?
We would like to have the problem of too many people commenting on the blog.  If it comes to that, the sponsor can declare a cap to the amount that can be raised on the blog. Please comment on as many posts as you can to raise money for Haiti.

Does the blog benefit from the comments in any way?
No, the blog has no ads or corporate sponsors and thus derives no revenue from traffic. Of course, if you find the food articlesinteresting please come back and visit the blog or subscribe to it.

I'd like to be a sponsor is that possible?
Yes.  Please contact us.

What do I have to lose from doing this?
The only effort that is required is to click Reply & Update to any update found at http://twitter.com/MentionHaiti.  That is it.
Try it.  Spreading the message and raising money for Haiti is a great thing that you can do to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti.