My partner is writing this:
I changed this recipe to make waffles today, but used:
1 cup millet flour
1 cup buckwheat
1/3 cup potato flour/starch
1/3 cup tapioca
The mixture was a bit sticky to work with, but liquids mixed into it fine with a bit of encouragement. Tapioca and Xanthan Gum or substitutes are important one as they help to bind the flours like gluten otherwise would.
I can't have rice, so we have to change almost any gluten-free flour as most ask for rice flour.

This recipe on the same site uses millet flour, maybe if you use this flour ratio in your recipe it will work? You'll have to add extra baking soda or powder though, as your recipe asks for self-raising flour and then adds extra raising agents again. The millet flour might also be a bit heavier than wheat flour.
3/4 cup brown rice or millet flour
1 cup sorghum (could sub with buckwheat or rice or gram flour?)
1/2 cup arrowroot or tapioca flour
1 1/2 teaspoons xanthan gum
and... Don't quote me on this (unless it works!), but to make the flour self-raisng try:
Adding per cup of flour:
1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon or a pinch of salt.

Just give it a shot, and if it doesn't work out well tweak your ratios. Whatever happens, it probably won't be inedible, so just make plenty of toffee sauce! Can't go wrong.

Or this combination to make it self-raising? Sucks when you are low on flour types.

Gluten-free self-rising flour

2 tablespoons potato flour
enough white rice flour to make it up to 1 cup
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon xanthan gum OR guar gum
OR pre-gel starch

Ach, I knew I'd forgotten something in that cupboard! I also have xanthan gum, bicarb of soda and arrowroot. I did have soya flour and potato flour years ago but I think they've been thrown out by now. I definitely don't have tapioca flour and you can't even get sorghum flour in this country. I am still getting utterly lost with all these combinations. Why are GF flour mixes so wretchedly complicated?

The Doves Farm flour says it contains Rice, Potato, Tapioca, Maize & Buckwheat. As I said, it made biscuits taste horribly dry and powdery. I did just throw the biscuits together without measuring or recipe in the way I used to get away with when I was using wheat flour. I'm wondering whether it would behave itself better in something that is by nature moist and strongly-flavoured, or perhaps in combination with other flours?

Those pumpkin waffles look amazing.

(from dawning_horizon, but I can't be bothered signing out and in again then out and in again, again.) :P

Sorghum is really hard to get here too (in Australia), I have a faint memory of having it once. I got a lot of flours from an Indian grocery store (a lot cheaper than a health food store), so they often have different names. Sorghum is called Jowar. Maybe try getting it in one of them? Indian breads often use other flours that aren't wheat - bit of an untapped resource for wheat-free bakers. No idea what sorghum's properties are though, or what is best to substitute it with.

I've used a few pre-mixed flours, but not had much luck with them. Again, they're mostly rice-based and generally taste a bit funky.

I reckon just give it a shot - maybe make a half-sized pudding if you have a smaller tin? The amount of liquid you need might be different, so just add gradually until you get a familiar consistency.

The waffles were good! We just go an iron, so it was my first time making them. I don't like using pumpkin when baking so I made them with bananas, yum!

Edited at 2010-09-25 05:31 pm (UTC)

I've been told that sorghum is close to millet, does anyone know more about this? I really can't afford to buy yet more flours, and I don't have the space either. Good to know that it's not just me with the pre-mixed flours, though. I think I'll keep the weird Dove's Farm one for white sauces and use something else for baking, though of course I still have to work out what. If I get a space in my cupboard, I'll keep an eye on the local Indian shops. One snag is that I recall they sell huge quantities, I once had a 5kg sack of gram flour which eventually had to be thrown out.

I just checked the soya cream to see if I could sub it for soya milk, and it has wheat syrup quite high up on the list of ingredients, so I think this whole idea is getting shelved and I will have to get someone to exchanged the dratted soya cream. Although I might try to get to another health food shop some time and see if they have a GF brand, I'm rather taken with the idea of resurrecting this recipe some time. Not only is it delicious, but it brings back lovely memories of going to the Lake District as a child, as it's a regional dessert there.

I bake pretty regularly with sorghum and millet flours (I'm in the US, so it's easy to get here!) and I wouldn't call them a great sub for one another. I can get away with using far more sorghum flour in a baking mix than millet flour, since it's lighter, and tastes (to me) more like wheat flour does.

I think the closest sub would be gluten-free oat flour, to be honest, if you can do gluten-free oats and have access to them.

I trotted out to the local HFS and unfortunately there were no GF flours at all, so I am going to have to make do with what I already have. I decided to risk the soya cream for the sauce, since my nutritionist has said that I'm ok with gluten as long as the quantity is very low, generally less than that of the salt. By the time we're talking about 3tbsp of soya cream over an entire pudding, I think the amount of wheat syrup will be that low. Although unfortunately the sales assistant at the shop left out the soya cream when putting everything else into my bag, and I'm disabled and not up to second trip to the shops today, so that might be put on hold yet again!

And how did I forget that I have cornflour (cornstarch to Americans, I think) in the cupboard too? I have looked up some other GF sticky toffee pudding recipes to see how they worked around the flour. One is here and the other here. I'm also finding this page to be really useful for getting the hang of GF flours in general. At the moment, I'm tentatively thinking chickpea flour, buckwheat flour and arrowroot, and perhaps a little xanthan gum, or maybe a bit of egg replacer. I do at least know that I like chickpea and buckwheat flour together in pancakes, the flavour is good there, and that when I added egg replacer and soya milk, they behaved well in terms of texture too.

Right, I now have oat cream which is wheat-free, although the sodding custard turned out to be mostly wheat so I will have to use the oat cream or else make up my own custard. I will attack this later. If I do go for a buckwheat/chickpea mix, any opinions on ratios?

OK, I adapted your last recipe. Currently mixed up in a small tub are:

3/4 cup buckwheat flour
3/4 cup chickpea flour
1/4 cup soya flour (found it lurking at the back of the cupboard and have memories of it doing good things in chocolate cakes)
1/2 cup arrowroot
1 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1/4 cup baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

I will now put everything back in the cupboard, wipe up the flour which was attempting to get EVERYWHERE, and make lunch.

...oops, you said teaspoons of baking powder, not tablespoons. I've just buggered that up. I've added in another cup each of buckwheat and chickpea flours, the rest of the arrowroot (not much), the last bits of egg replacer (again not a huge amount, but at least it's a good blend of potato and tapioca flours), and another 1/2 tsp of xanthan gum. At the very least, it should be good for pancakes.

Note for me and anyone else who wants to try this recipe: it worked! My first bit of successful gluten-free baking! In some mouthfuls there is a very slight taste of chickpea flour and/or bicarb of soda, so next time I propose using less chickpea flour to more buckwheat flour, and replacing half or all of the bicarb of soda with baking powder. But it was light and moist and toffeeish and utterly delicious, and I have most of it frozen in individual portions in freezer bags. Mind you, I'm not entirely sure what would be the best way to defrost it. Microwave until warm, or put in the fridge overnight and eat cold? I know that wheat-based products tend to go hard and unpleasant in the microwave. Do GF baked goods suffer from the same problem?