Tags
baking, celiac, cookies, dessert, food, g-f, gluten, gluten-free, gluten-intolerant, x-f, xanthan-free
I’ve baked a decent amount this month, but I haven’t had time to blog about any of it until now – sorry everyone! Beyond the usual, I had a birthday to arrange and enjoy, as well as a nearly-week-long visit from a close friend. Fear not, though, for I have taken photos of four of the five things I’ve baked in my absence, and the fifth is still 75% in tact! This has been a delicious month, involving 2 cookies, 2 cheesecakes, and 1 almost-flourless chocolate cake. Oh yes.
This is a revisiting of a recipe I tried fairly early on in my g-f baking experiments, My Baking Heart’s Double-Almond Chocolate Chip Cookies, which is vegan as written. It was one of the first chocolate chip cookie recipes I tried which worked, but it didn’t hit the spot because it doesn’t taste like chocolate chip cookies normally do – which, if you look at the ingredients list, makes absolute sense. There isn’t any brown sugar. They were scrumptious cookies and were devoured by me and a gluten-eater far more quickly than I would have liked, but they did not suit my need for chocolate chip cookies. However.
I was not seeking regular chocolate chip cookies this time. Indeed, I did not want chocolate in these cookies at all. I wanted a lightly-spiced cookie which I could eat and also use for a cheesecake crumb crust. Modifications include omitting chocolate and chopped almonds, switching in honey for agave, and spicing the cookies with some combination of nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, and cloves.
They turned out quite well, but I was reminded of the other thing I had noticed with the first round, but had forgotten – the canola flavor is noticeable in these cookies. I’m not sure what the best fix for this would be – whether to switch to another oil (or even butter), or combination of oils, or maybe up the extract or lessen the amount of oil. These cookies were quite soft and lightly gooey, which was pleasant, and also very flat. They also worked phenomenally well in the crumb crust, which was my greatest desire with this batch.