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.)

Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am in love. Serious love. The kind that inspires me to write blog posts and fantasize about my new love all hours of the day and night. Ahh...chocolate chip cookies. I hear you, you are thinking "Cookies? She's in love with chocolate chip cookies? What is the big deal?" Ah...let me explain. Hang in with me, it will all make more sense in a minute.

First you need to know I cannot eat any gluten. What's that? It's a protein found in wheat and other grains. That means no flour. No bread. No cake. No donuts. No cookies. Well...at least no bread, cake, donuts and cookies like I used to eat, back when I could have gluten. There are gluten free products on the market that use other flours (like potato, tapioca, rice and bean) to try to duplicate baked goods that have gluten. It takes about 5 minutes on a gluten free diet to figure out that they just aren't the same. The texture is often gritty and the taste isn't the same. The gluten free products are often really crumbly too. When I want a good cookie, a bite of crumbly sand is just not what I had in mind.

Recently Betty Crocker put out a new line of gluten free baked goods. You buy the mix and can make baked goods at home. I was a little skeptical but since they were offering a coupon for a free mix I decided to give it a try. (If you want a coupon for the free mix call General Mills at 1-800-446-1898 and select option #4 on the main menu.)

Now part of the fun of baking at home is licking the beaters. I tried this and was sorely disappointed. The dough was gritty and did not taste the way I remembered cookie dough. My heart sank but since the dough was mixed up and on a cookie sheet I slid it in the oven anyway. By the time I pulled the cookies out my expectations were pretty low. But being the optimist that I am I poured two glasses of milk, put some cookies on a plate and my friend and I both took bites of fresh-from-the-oven cookies. It was love at first bite. It must have been for my friend, who is also gluten free, because she looked at me and whispered conspiratorily, "Oh...our lives just got so much better!" Amazingly these cookies are good fresh from the oven and cold, another rarity for gluten free baking. And they taste like the Nestle Tollhouse cookies from my childhood. Ah, such bliss. Oh, and I haven't even told you the part I am the most excited about. I will actually get to bake cookies with my son. Cookies I can eat with him without getting sick and cookies he will want to eat too. I will be able to have those precious moments of baking with him as a child. I can't wait!