1. The pre-packaged baked good
2. The refrigerated/frozen baked good
3. Pre-packaged mix
4. Making your own from scratch
The pro to pre-packaged mix is that it's convenient, but you still have a certain amount of flexibility in how you cook it. If you don't like using butter, you can use margarine. If you want to add chocolate chips, you can do that. If you want to use egg replacer, that option is available to you.
There are several pre-packaged baking mixes on the market right now for gluten free customers to choose from. Betty Crocker is, as far as I know, the only mainstream company to wade into this strange, unfamiliar territory. The plus side to a mainstream company producing gluten free baking mix? PRICE. Not only is it cheaper than other mixes available, but because it's Betty Crocker it's often available in ordinary supermarkets (where other brands usually are not) and it may even be on sale!
(I bought this one on sale. Whoo! Sale!)
These brownies are pretty simple to make. They only require half a stick of melted butter and two eggs. Mix mix mix mix mix, spread into a pan or something, bake around 30 minutes, cool, eat. Not only is that easy, it's the kind of easy you can do with kids or in your spare time. (I like a good Tollhouse, but waiting for the butter to get soft, creaming it with x, adding y, adding z, etc. etc. is just a pain in the butt.)
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| The four I didn't eat. |
I don't have a traditional kitchen situation in my ... er ... house. I have one of those electric skillets with a little wire rack in it. I tried baking these before in the skillet and they were dry on bottom and undercooked on top. It ... was not good.
This time I baked them in these little silicone baking cups. I bought them ages ago (on sale in the supermarket ... impulse buy) and never used them. It took quite a while to bake in the skillet (I had to pump it up to 400º) but they did eventually bake, and in the end I had six very large brownies.
I ate two. One box is 2400 calories, so ... do the math there.
This is my third time using this mix. As you can see, I liked it enough to buy it twice (it was on sale so I bought two boxes the second time). The reason I like it is that it's a gluten free product but it tastes like a regular, glutenful brownie. That is a big deal. It isn't dry, it isn't bitter, it isn't gritty or grainy. It's a chocolatey, moist, chewy brownie that tastes exactly like a brownie should. So enjoy! Add nuts, marshmallows, icing, whatever! I once baked them with coconut shavings and almond slivers, just because I had them on hand. Why not?
I paid $5.50 on sale at Don Quijote, and I've seen it on sale for a similar price at Safeway. You probably don't live on an island, so you can probably get a better price.
The ingredients are: Sugar, semi-sweet chocolate chips, cocoa, rice flour, potato starch, corn starch, xantham gum, and salt. It contains soy (in the chocolate chips). There are sixteen servings in the box (ha ha, yeah right), and each serving is 150 calories and 5g of fat (prepared). If you like your food to have nutrition in it (I do), there's a little iron in the mix and it ends up with some vit A and protein when you're all done.
Other varieties available are white cake, chocolate cake, and chocolate chip cookies.
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