Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about the bread catching on fire inside of our elderly, avocado-coloured toaster? That was fun. Look what Cuisinart sent me!
Now my house won’t burn down. AWESOME.
And WHAT am I toasting inside that fantastically retro-looking toaster? What epicurean delight awaits me?
Pop Tarts. Ha.
So we didn’t do anything VERY fancy for Easter supper last night – we had a family dinner with my parents and my two brothers and my sister-in-law the night before, with my kids the sole, doted-upon kids at the party, and that was really enough. It really makes me respect the appetites of people back in the era of several-day-long feasting, because all it takes NOW is one big meal and I’m pretty much set for a week, but I’m a frail modern person and obviously lack the admirable stomach of olden times. I DID exert myself enough to make a VERY GOOD carrot cake – gluten-free! – with a thick cream cheese icing and it turned out (have I mentioned this already?) to be completely tasty, so I was rather pleased.
Things like carrot cake work quite well in gluten-free cooking, because the moisture in the carrot/pineapple/applesauce mixture works on the often-off putting texture of the gluten-free flours. It felt quite triumphant to make a gluten-free cake that is practically indistinguishable from a regular one, which might feel like a minor thing to you but it’s a HUGE deal when your child has food issues. The Baby DOES have a limited diet and ordinary life is fraught with these hidden dangers for her and it sucks, frankly. Yes, there are many, MANY worse things in the world, but she’s just a very little kid and she has trouble eating in restaurants, she can’t eat the candy handed out in church on Easter Sunday, can’t eat her friend’s birthday cake – and she NOTICES and feels heart-breakingly left out. My poor little girl.
So now she can have carrot cake. Too bad carrot cake isn’t a real preschool favorite, but it’s progress. Which brings us back, oddly enough, to the Pop Tart hanging out listlessly at the start of this post. "I want THOSE," The Baby said, pointing at the commercial for Pop Tarts on the television. "Yes, Pop Tarts for me."
"They’ve got gluten in them," I said, probably not even looking up from my magazine, "You can’t eat them, remember?"
She was quiet for a few minutes and then I heard a sad little sniffling noise and looked up to see that the poor little girl was just sitting there and crying quietly, all of these things that she just could never have too heavy on her little shoulders.
So this week, I’m going to attempt to make homemade gluten-free Pop Tarts, which is just insane, really. I have some gluten-free pastry mix and I’m going to roll it out and fill it with jam and squiggle some icing on the top, the real Pop Tarts here for sculptural comparison purposes. It’s the best I can do for my kid, this effort which is both more then enough and never enough, this constant work which we all must do to keep life from breaking our children’s hearts too early.