These Gluten-Free Desserts Will Impress Everyone
Three seasonal recipes from Aran Goyoaga’s excellent new master class on baking elevated and artful wheat-free breads.
Reprinted with permission from The Art of Gluten-Free Bread by Aran Goyoaga. Published by Artisan Books. Copyright © 2025. Photographs by Aran Goyoaga.
Seattle-based baker Aran Goyoaga has spent more than a decade developing a new approach to gluten-free bread. Her upcoming book, The Art of Gluten-Free Bread (Artisan), collects the results of that work—clear, carefully tested recipes that cover everything from sourdough boules to laminated pastries.
Goyoaga’s background spans professional pastry, food styling, and photography. She’s a three-time James Beard Award finalist and the author of two previous cookbooks, but this is her most technical and ambitious project to date. Motivated by her own gluten intolerance and shaped by a childhood spent in her grandparents’ bakery in the Basque Country, Goyoaga’s book offers a complete system for baking with alternative grains.
Belathée Photography
She outlines how to build and maintain a gluten-free starter, mix doughs using ingredients like teff, sorghum, and potato starch, and adapt classic techniques to work without wheat. There are recipes for seeded sourdough, sandwich loaves, flatbreads, and enriched doughs, along with holiday-specific bakes like panettone, star bread, and sufganiyot.
For the holiday season, we’re featuring three standouts from the book. Goyoaga’s cinnamon buns use a rich brioche dough and are proofed overnight for minimal prep on the day of baking. Her quick brioche recipe delivers light, pull-apart texture with no long ferment, and the same dough is used to make glazed doughnuts with a crisp exterior and soft crumb.
Each recipe is designed to be repeatable, with notes on timing, substitutions, and storage. The book also includes full-page photographs taken by Goyoaga herself, styled with the same natural simplicity that runs through her writing.
These recipes give gluten-free bakers a dependable set of options for holiday gatherings, but they’re equally suited to anyone interested in working with a broader set of grains.
Go Gluten-Free at Home
Quickest Buttery Brioche
If you don’t have two days to make sourdough brioche, this is a great shortcut. There is no bulk fermentation either; only one proof and then straight into the oven it goes. The crumb is light, tender, and really fluffy. It is high in starch, but you really need it for brioche. The xanthan gum is listed as optional, but it does help create a crumb that has a bit more layering and pull. If using this brioche recipe to make buns or any variation that requires the dough to be stretched, I highly recommend using the xanthan gum to help provide structure, or the dough can be too soft to handle.
Vanilla-Glazed Doughnuts
These brioche doughnuts have become the benchmark for all other doughnuts. They are so tender and fluffy that when people try them, they don’t even know they’re gluten-free. If you want to fill them, don’t cut the hole in the center. After frying, let cool slightly and fill with pastry cream or jam.
Aran Goyoaga’s Cinnamon Buns
Cinnamon buns are the quintessential comfort breakfast. I make them for lazy weekend mornings, and they are my family’s Christmas morning tradition. Make the dough the night before you are going to serve the buns and chill it in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning, fill, proof, and bake the buns.
Get the Book
Reprinted with permission from ’The Art of Gluten-Free Bread’ by Aran Goyoaga. Published by Artisan Books. Copyright © 2025. Photographs by Aran Goyoaga.
The Art of Gluten-Free Bread: Groundbreaking Recipes for Artisanal Breads and Pastries, by Aran Goyoaga.
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