Baking

Lately I have been obsessed with baking. I don't know why. Since I was diagnosed with Celiac and I can no longer have wheat I haven't baked much. Of course, lots of gluten free baked goods are not worth eating. They leave a gritty texture in your mouth, taste funny or don't look right. Which is a real bummer after you mix up 4 or 5 different flours that all cost WAAAAAAAAY more than regular old wheat flour.

My latest success was with cut out cookies. Yum! I stopped at this website and was pulled in by the photo. These really looked like the cookies I remembered from my childhood.

Now I have to confess that as a kid the only thing I wanted to do was decorate the cookies. And not with icing, where's the fun in that? Sprinkles. Tons and tons of sprinkles. The color sugar kind, the little round ones, jimmies, any kind of sprinkles.

And the worst part was that after the dough was made it had to be refridgerated overnight. Do you know how long that is to a little kid? It might as well be until spring. Ugh.

As an adult I learned to dislike rolling out the dough as well. Flour everywhere, dough sticking to everything and trying to get it all to the same thickness was near impossible.

And yesterday I found a great advantage to gluten free sugar cookies. No putting the dough in the fridge. And rolling it out was a snap. It's not sticky so there's no need for extra flour. I just plunked it on some waxed paper, flattened it out with my hands, and rolled the rolling pin across it once or twice to get it smooth. Easy, peasy. Which just leaves more time for decorating.



Gluten Free Christmas Roll Cookies
Recipe makes 2 1/2 dozen cookies (depending on the size of the cookie cutters)
Ingredients
1/2 cup shortening (I used butter flavored Crisco)
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups GF flour blend (I used Jules Nearly Normal Flour recipe)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2-3 Tablespoons milk

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375F. (I confess that I never do this. Once I get the cookies rolled, cut out and decorated, it will be at least another 30 min so I do this much later.)

2. Cream together shortening and sugar until fluffy.

3. Add the egg and beat for 2-3 minutes.

4. In a separate bowl, whisk together GF flour mix, salt and baking powder.

5. Add flour mixture to creamed ingredients and mix until well incorporated.

6. Add 2 – 3 Tablespoons of milk until perfect, non-sticky cookie dough is achieved.

7. Roll out cookie dough to 1/4″-1/3″ thickness.

8. Cut with your favorite cookie cutter and liberally decorate with sprinkles. If there are no sprinkles, what is the point?

9. Bake 6 -7 minutes until the edges just begin to brown. (My oven took 10 min to get to this stage.)