More gluten free baking adventures

My mother has a recipe that she makes every Christmas, an old family recipe that's a favourite with everyone. She usually has to make a double batch, otherwise they disappear too quickly, and people complain. Since they are basically shortbread, I figured these would be easy to make, since many people make shortbread with rice flour on purpose because it makes it nice and crumbly, like shortbread should be.

Ha ha ha.

I made the shortbread with a bought brown flour mix that includes tapioca flour and potato starch to mimic the binding properties of gluten; I have had some luck with this mix, making baked goods that aren't too gummy as with xanthan gum, but aren't too dry either. (Case in point: I made pumpkin muffins the other day with it. They were GREAT the same day, but two days later were decidedly more sawdusty than their wheaten counterparts would have been. Still. Delicious. And still edible two days later, just a little drier than I prefer.)

So I mixed up the shortbread, and cut out the cookies and baked them and they all looked really pretty and all. And then I ate one.

They tasted great. They even had ok texture. But they were OH so crumbly and to be honest, a little dry.

I put them away, once cool, in a sealed container, thinking that I'd probably eat them or dunk them in tea or something (although that wouldn't have been a good idea. They would probably have fallen apart.) Alas, I made the mistake of putting the sealed container on top of the fridge, because it was the day that The Man was moving the dishwasher in and out, and we had a decided lack of counter space. Some banging about -- as the dishwasher went out and then a new one went in -- and then the opening of the freezer door ....

CRASH.

Yep.

What was interesting is that due to their brittle nature, not a single damn cookie from the almost three dozen that I made was in tact.

The Man was most remorseful. I was ambivalent. If there's one thing that helped me most on my experimental journey towards gluten free baking, it's the knowledge that failed baking attempts can always be frozen and used as bread crumbs. Or in this case, pie crust.

And this last weekend, we made the world's best cheesecake. With shortbread cookie crust. It was amazing. See how I'm making lemonade from the lemons?

Or ... well, you know.

The only downside of this story is that we don't have a six inch springform pan, and so had to make a 12 inch cheesecake. I say this and you'll take it as a mean it sarcastically, but I'm finding these days that unless I have a constant stream of decent food, I start feeling kinda gross again. Pregnancy is Fun! So having a lot of sugary-based food around isn't that great. Still. It's the holidays. I'm eating chicken AND cheesecake.

* * * * * *

I am off work this week, frantically (or not so frantically right now) trying to get Christmas all prepared, and one of the things I'm doing is more baking so there are more treats (apparently the last paragraph above has had NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on me). Yesterday I made peanut butter cookies which are sweet but OH SO DAMN DELICIOUS. I justify eating them with "peanut butter is good protein!" Never mind that there's more sugar than peanut butter in them. Seriously.

Anyway, those turned out rather well, and they are super easy and I am likely to make them again. Or I would, were it not the case that my child is not allowed to take them in his lunch, which is half the reason for making home-baked treats in the first place. Can't wait until the kid with allergies leaves next September!!

The cookies are just peanut butter, sugar, egg, baking powder, and a tad of vanilla. If you want the recipe, look here. (I added the vanilla. It's good.)

Today I made sugar cookies. The least sugary-sugar cookies I have ever tasted. (Recipe here.) They are pretty good, though, with a very nice texture. I think that I will probably ice them later, as she suggests, and then see how they seem.

All in all, it seems to be true that buying your own flours and making the complex concoctions if well worth the effort -- you get decent baked goods instead of crap, which is what happens with a lot of mixes. I suppose that's not all that different from baking with wheat -- there are a lot of crappy mixes out there. And if they aren't crappy, they aren't that good for you. So the amaranth-based sugar cookies are nice. Much nicer than similar cookies would have been with white rice flour.

It's an effort, but I think in the end, it will pay off.

(However, amusingly, or perhaps not so, both The Man and I are still kind of under this mindset that at the end of this pregnancy the gluten restrictions, like the alcohol / deli meat / raw sushi restrictions, will be lifted. It's an easy mindset to get into -- all kinds of things are restricted in pregnancy! And you have the baby and it's negitoro city, baby! And it's kind of hard for me to get my head around the fact that this gluten thing? MIGHT BE FOREVER. As in, I may never eat another cinnamon bun as long as I live. Which is a whole 'nother post, in and of itself, my gluten adventure, but it is kind of bizarre, really.)