Playing with Pain D'epices

I started playing around with pain d'epices recipes after reading a recent post on David Lebovitz's blog (see sidebar for link), one of my favourite food blogs for inspiration, and hey, he lives in Paris!
After reading David's recipe, I also checked my ever growing cookbook library, and decided to try the one in Nick Malgieri's A Baker's Tour first. I will call this the "lean" version - it has no fat or eggs, and fewer spices than other recipes. The sweetener is honey and sugar. It is very easy to make, you melt the sugar in water first, then just dump in the dry ingredients. It rose up beautifully, and made two delightful petite loaves in my little half size loaf pans. I cut it the next day after resting. It was a little chewy, but the flavour was very mellow and a little different from other gingerbreaddy stuff we are all used to.

It rose up more than double in the petite loaf pans. After again resting (ok, not as long, I had to taste it before going to bed!) it is very good, sweetened only with honey, and would be good as a sweet, or also with cheese.

My next try was the recipe from Flo Braker adapted by David Lebovitz and the recipe is on his blog. It has more spices, .It had more spices and is more like the flavour of typical gingerbread type of spicing. It also has a softer texture because it has a little butter and an egg. I made 1/2 the recipe, but just used a whole egg because if I try to use half it is impossible, it always manages to slither into the batter anyway! This version, maybe I can call it the "soft" type, turned out great, and was fairly tender.

The smell of this was so good, I had to make a gluten free version, I will post the results.