Awesome, Easy, Most Decadent Brownies You'll Ever Experience (Gluten-Free and from a Mix!)

It's a cause for celebration that Aldi has started carrying gluten-free products in their baking section. Especially nice: their brownie mix can easily pass for regular, fudgy, somewhat gooey, gluten-filled dark brownies.

And, they can be dressed up so very easily, to make the kind of brownies you spend lots of money for, at those chi-chi little bakeries.

Oh, trust me. You don't need to add anything to the new line of gluten free baking mixes from Aldi, but if you're of the school of "don't use paint straight from the tube," you can create something almost criminally yummy.  All you need is the mix (and the eggs, butter, and water it calls for), plus 1/2 cup each of coarsely chopped toasted pecans, coarsely chopped dried tart cherries, and semisweet chocolate mini chips.

Follow the instructions on the box, to make the brownie batter. Stir in the nuts, cherries, and chips, pour into brownie pan, and bake as directed on the box. 

It's that simple, and they're this sinful:

Ain't misbehaving. No, really. I ain't. Well, not much, anyway.

Gluten-Free Zesty Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

It really hurts when you watch those ads for breakfast at some establishment where they slather butter on a tasty, fluffy biscuit and then turn it into a breakfast sandwich, and then you remember that you can't eat wheat. Because sometimes, you just need a biscuit.  And I'm not really a big fan of the flavor of those normally produced by gluten-free mixes, but I also haven't yet found my own mix of flours I like for the texture.  

Until I remembered the rule I learned from my painting instructor in college, o, so many years ago: never use paint straight from the tube.

Adapting it to the kitchen: don't use a mix straight from the cupboard. Make it your own. And I had another mix on the shelf, the powder for ranch dressing (sometimes I make my own, but I was lacking ambition, at the end of a long day of moving furniture to make way for my soon-to-arrive gargantuan bed frame). So, I put two and two together and made dinner.

I had a large pot of my Philly Fish Chowder, and I completed it with these:

And there were enough left over for me to have one for breakfast. Just one. I'm the only one here, right now, too.

Gluten-Free Zesty Buttermilk Drop Biscuits

Ingredients:

2 cups Bob's Red Mill Biscuit & Baking Mix
1 Tablespoon dry buttermilk powder
1 Tablespoon powdered ranch dressing mix

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 1/2 cups lowfat milk (or more, if the dough seems too heavy)

1/2 cup butter for pan

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Using a pastry blender or fork, work butter into dry ingredients until it has the consistency of coarse cornmeal.

Place butter in 9x13" baking pan, put in oven to heat up.

Stir in milk until completely mixed into a sticky dough.

Remove pan from oven, make sure butter covers bottom of pan. Drop biscuit dough by heaping tablespoons into the pan.

Bake for 20 to 22 minutes, until beginning to turn golden brown. Turn off oven, allow to cool a minute or two in pan, to allow the biscuits to absorb the remaining butter.

Serve warm.