The Best Recipes of 2016

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // December 30, 2016 // 2 Comments

15 of the most popular recipes in 2016! Delicious cakes, indulgent desserts, scrummy cookies, and amazing cocktails – Giraffes Can Bake had a very tasty year! Here are the 15 recipes you lovely readers loved the most!

2016! What a year! There’s been a lot of ups and downs, but overall it’s been a pretty good year for me. I experimented a lot more with my second love, mixology, and you guys loved it as much as I did – 6 of the most popular recipes this year were cocktails! There will definitely be more to come in 2017, I can’t wait to get mixing! I also learned to bake gluten free, which was a big, and often frustrating, challenge but I mastered it in the end – 5 of the top 15 recipes were gluten free, I’m glad you liked them as much as I did! Let’s take a look at the 15 recipes you loved the most in 2016, in no particular order…

Gluten Free Cookie Dough Salted Caramel Brownie Bombs

These were the first of gluten free baking successes – and it definitely started my 2016 gluten free baking with a delicious bang! They’re egg free cookie dough, dipped in salted caramel, wrapped in brownie and covered in chocolate! Holy awesomeness batman! I mean you can’t go wrong with these little balls of heaven, especially since they’re so easy to make!

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Brown Sugar and Pecan Caramel Bundt Cake {Gluten Free}

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // November 6, 2016 // 20 Comments

This Gluten Free Brown Sugar and Pecan Caramel Bundt Cake is packed full of pecans and toffee bits, with a moist and tender crumb, smothered in thick, gooey caramel, topped with butter toasted pecans! It’s a gluten free adaptation of my amazing Brown Sugar and Pecan Caramel Cake – and it’s perhaps even more delicious in gluten free form!

This cake, y’all. You need it in your life, trust me! I first made this over two years ago and it’s still one of my all time favourite cakes, it’s just so full of flavour, so easy to make and that thick, gooey caramel topping is just heavenly. It’s really easy to make too, which means this Gluten Free Brown Sugar and Pecan Caramel Bundt Cake basically perfect! You can see the original recipe here, it’s not gluten free of course and the photos, well, they leave a lot to be desired! I was still a baby blogger back then, so you’ll have to cut me some slack. I do hope to update those photos too one day, but for now just know this is how beautiful this delicious cake can be!

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Pecan Pie Cheesecake {Gluten Free}

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // October 30, 2016 // 31 Comments

This Gluten Free Pecan Pie Cheesecake is the perfect way to shake up Thanksgiving dessert! It’s has a gluten free pecan and walnut crust with creamy baked vanilla cheesecake, a bourbon pecan pie topping and bourbon brown sugar whipped cream. So delicious, so easy and make ahead!

Thanksgiving is one of my favourite holidays, and we don’t even have it in the UK! But any holiday that is primarily about eating a lot of delicious food and being thankful for all the good in your life is my kind of holiday! There are so many yummy traditional Thanksgiving foods that I love, but the dessert course is always my favourite, shocking I know! Pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, pecan pie… all the pies! I think that’s why it’s so easy to overeat on Thanksgiving, everything is too good, you just have to try a bit of everything! Or is that just me?!

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Gluten Free Peanut Butter Cheesecake Bars

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // October 9, 2016 // 40 Comments

These Gluten Free Peanut Butter Cheesecake Bars have a flourless peanut butter cookie base, with a creamy cheesecake loaded with tonnes of peanut butter, and topped with a rich and silky chocolate ganache. These cheesecake bars are so easy to make, and naturally gluten free so no fancy, expensive ingredients are needed! They’re a must try!

As a food blogger, I’m constantly trying to think of new recipe ideas to test out, flavour combinations to try and technical bakes to master. I have a long list of ideas on the notes on my phone, which range from fully formed ideas to just two ingredients/flavours I want to try putting together, to everything in between. This long list is probably a pretty good look into how my brain works, but I like to keep it secret, for no real reason, I just do!

As you can imagine, this list never seems to get any shorter, even when ticking off ideas I have tried (whether they end up being successes or failures). Part of the reason for that is because I have a million ideas swirling around my head and only so much time to try them out, and the other part of the reason is things like these Gluten Free Peanut Butter Cheesecake Bars!

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Cookie Dough Brownie Bombs with Salted Caramel {Gluten Free}

by Michelle @ A Tipsy Giraffe // September 5, 2016 // 26 Comments

These Cookie Dough Brownie Bombs with Salted Caramel are indulgence on top of decadence! Eggless chocolate chip cookie dough balls are dipped in salted caramel, then coated in chocolate salted caramel brownies, and dipped in chocolate. They’re gluten free, so easy to make and absolutely to die for!

Being a food blogger is hard work. There’s the recipe planing, the recipe testing, the photographing, editing the photos, writing the post. A lot goes into these humble little posts. But I think the hardest part is coming up with the recipe name! Especially for something as over the top as these beauties! I mean, if it’s a vanilla cake with chocolate frosting, that’s easy. But when so many layers make up the final product, each as delicious as the next, how do you decide on a name that does it justice and really tells your readers what they’re in for, without writing an essay as a title? I swear, naming a child would be easier sometimes. Hopefully my final recipe title has captured the deliciousness of these cookie dough brownie bombs that I’m about to share with you!

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