Gluten Free Cooking Wins and Fails

So I've been hacking and coughing for about four days (gross I know) and I probably should have called in sick to school on Monday and didn't.  So on Tuesday night when I was continuing to cough through Obama's re-election I decided to call in sick for Wednesday so I didn't infect all my students further.  After I got a good night of sleep I had some time to do some gluten free cooking.  With uh, a variety of interesting results.

I love kraft mac and cheese.  I know its terribly unhealthy for you but I can't help myself.  Actually I love anything that you can slather in cheese.  Which makes this dairy free business even more difficult. So I bought this at whole foods in hopes of maybe getting something that might slightly resemble mac and cheese.

This tasted like doodoo.  Okay, that may make me sound like a four year old but that is the best way I can describe it.   I took a bite, and then another, and then I dumped that crap down the garbage disposal.  It was that bad.  The taste was just...off.  It didn't taste anything like cheese and what was worst was it had this really strange, gritty, texture.  I try not to waste food but there was no way I could eat a bowl of this stuff.   One reason why it was so bad may have been the fact that I used soy milk which is kind of sweet, but still, I don't think that would have made it flat out nasty.  Oh well, you live and learn.  I can't wait till I can go back to dairy and I can at least make my own mac and cheese if I can't eat the kraft stuff.

After that disappointment I ate a chicken breast with some gluten free teriyaki sauce.  Much better.  Then I broke out the gluten free cake mix!  Sometimes for dessert I will make a cake either from scratch or a box and then I will have pieces of that for dessert sans frosting.  Makes it at least a little bit healthier.  So I used this cake mix to try and duplicate that.  

So this recipe said I could use either milk or milk substitute or water for liquid.  After the soy milk in the mac and cheese I was not sure that I wanted to go with the soy milk again.  So I split the batter in half and made one with soy milk and one with milk.  After baking and comparing the two I didn't find much of a difference so that was good.  

How did they come out?  Well they were a little denser than a normal cupcake.  They tasted pretty good, actually not as sweet as a normal cupcake which could be a good thing.  Warm out of the oven they were pretty good, although later on at room temperature they were not as awesome.  Not bad though, and with some homemade frosting (because apparently store bought frosting has gluten) they would be pretty good.  

So one win and one lose in gluten free cooking.  Guess I will need to get used to that.