Gluten Free Recipe - GF Lemon Drop Cookies

At long last, I have FINALLY found a GF sugar cookie recipe that I like!  Let us all shout for joy! It took a little work, tweaking a couple of different recipes to get one that worked for me, but let me tell you, these are good.  I'll first share the recipe for the standard drop sugar cookie and then the modification to turn them into lemon drop cookies.

GF DROP SUGAR COOKIES

First off, your ingredients...

- 2 sticks (one cup) softened butter
- 1 3/4 cups sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp. vanilla
- 2 cups asian white rice flour
- 1/3 cup cornstarch
- 1/3 cup sweet rice flour
- **1 cup - 1 1/2 cups GF baking blend **
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
- 1/2 tsp. salt

Alright, alright, alright.  Let's get this going.

- Preheat to 350 degrees and line your cookie sheets with parchment paper.  DON'T FORGET THE PARCHMENT PAPER.
- Mix your butter and sugar really, really well.  Beat the eggs in, one at a time, scraping the sides of the bowl in between.  Go ahead and throw in your vanilla too and mix it in.
- In the meantime... mix your rice flour, cornstarch, sweet rice flour, baking soda, xanthan gum and salt.

** OK, here's the tricky part.  I've found that recipes that work for other people, don't work well for me because of the flour content.  I added at least a cup of the GF Baking Blend that I know and love to the recipe to get the texture of the dough that I need.  You can try using just more white rice flour instead of the baking blend.  I recommend that you try it and bake it, a little at a time until you get the texture of cookie that you  are looking for.  If the dough is too gooey, your cookies will just melt and you'll end up with something that looks a lot more like a stained glass window than a midnight snack.  You want your dough to be the consistency of Play Dough.  For reals....

See this?  This is BAD.  You don't want your dough to look like this. Too gooey.

See this?  This dough is much thicker.  It balls up a little when you mix it in the mixer. I think I ultimately added 1 1/2 cups of Baking Blend to the original recipe.  It's a firmer dough that will hold up to the heat.  Do what you've gotta do to get to this texture, just keep track of what you're doing so that you can write it down :)

- OK, at this point, you can roll your dough into balls, place on that parchment paper and bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes.  

Before and After

- If you want, just stop right here.  These are fantastic cookies.  They are perfect topped with some pink frosting and sprinkles.

Now, the modification to make LEMON DROP COOKIES...

You'll need...

- Half a bag of lemon drops, pulverized.

- The zest of two lemons

- The juice of one lemon mixed with about a cup of powdered sugar - for the glaze.

- After you get your standard sugar cookie dough prepared, smash up about half a bag of lemon drops.  Then throw them in the mixer along with the lemon zest.

- Bake them for 10-12 minutes at 350.  Make sure you've got that parchment paper on those cookie sheets.  Remember that you're melting hard candy and it can make a big, sticky mess.  In the end, you should end up with something like this...

- Allow them to cool for a couple minutes before pulling them off the cookie sheet.  Place on a separate piece of parchment paper to cool and brush on some of that lemon juice and powdered sugar glaze that you whipped up.

Yum.

Then, dig in.  This dough refrigerates well, but you'll have to let it warm up a bit before you can form it into balls.  Good luck!  And enjoy!

Gluten Free Recipe - GF Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've tried so very many recipes for GF Chocolate Chip Cookies. SO many. And I've finally found the one! By Jove, I've got it! I started with THIS recipe, but I modified it. I always have to adjust the flour and xanthan gum content in baking, I think it's got to do with our altitude up here, but everything just seems to need more flour. After I adjusted the ingredients, I got a nice gooey chocolate chip cookie. It is BY FAR the best GF chocolate chip cookie I've had. Here you are....

1 cup softened butter

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 t vanilla

Cream in your mixer for a few minutes, then throw in

2 3/4 cups GF flour blend (click for recipe)

1 t baking soda

1 t xanthan gum

1 t salt

after those are mixed in, add your chocolate chips

You want to make sure that your dough isn't too gooey. You don't want it too stiff, but stiff enough to see where your spoon has scooped the dough out of the bowl. Does that make sense? It does, right?

Put the dough straight on your baking sheet and bake at 350 for 7-10 minutes. I took mine out at 8 minutes. Get em' outta there before they look done, that way you'll get your crispy outside and gooey middle.

And make sure you pull them right off of that cookie sheet or they'll start to stick. The time it took to take this picture was a little too long. One of them broke. Sad. I ate it anyway.

I always put them on a paper towel because I feel like it draws the unnecessary grease out of the cookie. It's psychological, I know, but it helps me justify eating so dang many.

Try these. They be good. I generally make a batch of cookie dough and keep it in the fridge so that I only make as many as we are going to eat in one sitting, but I made extra last night and they were even good this morning after sitting in a Tupperware all night.

Thank goodness. I don't know how much longer I could have lived eating only mediocre cookies.

Gluten Free Recipe - Perfect GF Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

Fact: I LOVE oatmeal cookies. I crave them. I think about them while I'm awake. I dream about them when I sleep. I feel empty inside when they aren't available to me.

A couple of years ago, Nestle made oatmeal craisin cookie dough that you could buy in tubs at Costco and Sam's. It was sooooooo good. It was the perfect cookie. Crispy outside, chewy inside. I'm salivating just thinking about them. It was around Christmas time and the tubs all said that it was a limited edition. We ended up buying, like 12 tubs of it and sticking it in our freezer, but eventually, we ran out. It was a sad, sad day. It was also the day that I started trying to figure out how to make my own oatmeal craisin cookie dough. I made at least 5 or 6 batches before I got them perfect. But I did it. I made the perfect oatmeal cookie. Take THAT, Nestle!

Then we found out that Brent had celiac. Grrrrrrr.

This was the first recipe I made GF and I think that I made it that night to show Brent that it wouldn't be so bad, we could still have cookies. I made it with "oat flour" which means that I threw a bunch of oats in my food processor and pulverised them. They turned out ok, but I've gotten better since.

I'm proud to say that now, I've managed to come up with perfect GF oatmeal craisin cookie. I make the dough and keep it in my fridge so that we can all have warm cookies at night after dinner. I also sneak bites of dough during the day when my kids aren't looking. Please don't tell them.

Here's the recipe. Value it with your lives.

1 cup softened butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

Mix together well in your mixer.

Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, mix together...

2 cups GF flour blend

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp. xanthan gum

1/2 tsp. salt

Add the flour mixture to the mixing bowl and mix on low until combined, then toss in...

2 cups rolled oats (we haven't ever had cross contamination issues with oats)

1 cup craisins

Ok, now to the baking. I bake them at 350 degrees. I preheat a bit in advance to make sure that the temperature is good and even in the oven before I throw the cookies in. It's a very scientific process. I'm a scientist. A cookie scientist.

Drop rounded tablespoons onto your ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Or less. I bake mine for 7. DO NOT OVERCOOK THESE COOKIES. I put that in caps so as to emphasize the importance of NOT OVERCOOKING THE COOKIES. You want them to be a little gooey in the middle, even looking a little undercooked when you pull them from the oven. Make them a couple at a time at first to test the timing, if you need to.

Here's a picture of mine fresh out of the oven. Yum.

This is what I ate for breakfast Saturday morning. It got me off to a nice, healthy start.

Why is it that no matter how much butter and sugar those cookies contain, I always feel like I'm healthy eating them because of the oats? Oats are deceiving like that.

And this is my baby eating my breakfast. Not cool.

Ok, now go make you some cookies and eat them for breakfast tomorrow morning. I won't judge.