cookies

Scandinavian Almond Bars, GF for Your Eating Pleasure!

Christmas cookies are everywhere in my kitchen. In tins, Tupperware and cookie jars. This year I tried 3 new recipes; this one is replicating a particular cookie called a Scandinavian Almond Bar. It is somewhat crunchy and somewhat addictive. My guy snuck a bunch of them while I was at church Christmas Eve! It is a traditional cookie and apparently quite popular. I don’t know how I missed them! If you are not gf just use all-purpose flour and leave out the xanthan gum too. This is one of those recipes that is yummier than it seems like at first glance. Of late, I like bar cookies; less work usually and can look very uniform if you wish.  Fussy complex cookies can be exhausting; this is easy despite the long list of flours.

Scandinavian Almond Bars

Ingredients

1 cup brown rice flour

¾ cup gf oat flour

½ cup tapioca flour

¼ cup potato starch (NOT potato flour)

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp xanthan gum

¼ tsp. kosher salt                                    

 Directions:     Blend all dry ingredients in a small bowl; use a whisk.

Next: In stand mixer bowl: place 1 cup sugar and ½ cup butter, softened; beat until fluffy. Add

1 lg egg at room temperature; beat until blended in. Add ½ tsp. almond extract (I did more like ¾ tsp)

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Topping: 1 Tbsp. milk, ½ c sliced almonds

Icing:  3/4 cup powdered sugar, ½ tsp almond extract, 1-2 Tbsp. milk

Directions: Heat oven to 325. Butter a 9×13 pan. Make dough and press the dough into the pan evenly; use a sheet of parchment paper to do this; it will be very sticky. Using a pastry brush; brush milk over the dough and top with the sliced almonds. Press almonds lightly into the dough. Bake 20-22 minutes.  Remove when just starting to brown at edges. Let cool for 5-7 min in pan, cut into bars with a sharp knife. If too soft; let cool a few more minutes. Carefully move them to a wire rack. Let cool completely and drizzle the icing over the bars thinly; too thick and it will be goopy, too thin and the icing will drip off. Let sit a while until icing is firm.  Can be frozen once iced.  Enjoy!

Peanut Butter Cookies: Old School Beauties

I heard about recipes for three ingredient peanut butter cookies. I wanted something a bit more actual cookie texture (think less greasy) and with less sugar than the versions I have come across. So I decided to play with the proportions plus I wanted to add some gf flour. I cut the sugar by one fourth and dumped in a small amount of flour. To make sure my results weren’t like a brick I added some baking powder and to keep them from being incredibly crumbly messes I tossed in a touch of xanthan gum. The resulting dough was still a tad crumbly but when you scrunch up about a tablespoon with your fingers it forms a ball that can be flattened with a fork dipped in granulated sugar in the traditional cross hatch of all great peanut butter cookies.

The results: simple but tasty = peanut butter heaven. I must advise that I used chunky peanut butter. I don’t much care for creamy peanut butter so I try not to have to buy it for recipes. So I chunked it and my somewhat picky eater who doesn’t like chunky peanut butter was in love with these beauties. I am guessing it would work with creamy. Let me know how they turn out if you make them with a creamy peanut butter.

peanut butter cookies 001

To review, significantly lower in sugar than most three ingredient recipes, great flavor and texture and simple to make. Bonus: they still remind me of the peanut butter cookies of my childhood…which were full of all purpose flour! I used my typical flour blend; King Arthur gf blend but I am sure Better Batter or Cup for Cup will work. If your blend has gum in it no additional gum is needed so leave that quarter teaspoon out.

Note: if you love the salty cookie concept, sprinkle with coarse sea salt before baking. Either sweet or salty they are somewhat addictive, especially fantastic with a glass of cold milk.

cranberry apple pie and peanut butter cookies 008cranberry apple pie and peanut butter cookies 009

Chunky Peanut Butter cookies

1 cup chunky peanut butter
¾ cup sugar
1 large egg (room temp)
½ cup gf flour blend (I used King Arthur basic gf blend)
½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. xanthan gum

¼ cup sugar for fork action
Coarse sea salt (optional)

Directions: Mix first six ingredients well in stand mixer. Form into balls by squeezing in hand. Place on ungreased cookie sheet, press with fork dipped into sugar. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt if desired.

Bake at 375 for 9 to 11 minutes. Watch carefully – they burn easily. Let stand one minute before lifting off with pancake turner to a cooling rack. Eat and enjoy these gems of cookies…you will be taken back to your childhood.

 

Date Pyramid Cookies: Delicious Pastry

These filled cookies called Klaicha have a center of chopped dates and a hint of butter and are fairly low in sugar and surprisingly tasty. After just 24 hours since they came out of the oven and cooled off, I think I am addicted. They are shaped a bit like tiny pyramids, you use a dinner fork to press on them on opposite sides to flatten them while creating ridges reminiscent of peanut butter cookies. The dough is made from buckwheat flour, brown rice flour, almond flour and tapioca flour with brown sugar and butter. Spiced a bit with cinnamon, cardamon and anise seeds which give it a subtle middle eastern flavor profile when combined with the date filling. They are Iranian in origin, and I have no idea how to pronounce the traditional name, so I am just calling them date pyramid cookies, no offence Iran! I like that there isn’t a ton of date in each cookie; my sister Margie used to make these tasty date bars but honestly, I always thought they had just way too much date; was an overwhelming flavor in my humble opinion. Date pyramid cookies; just the right amount and a pleasing hint of spice. Date cookie perfection.

I enjoy their slightly crunchy exterior and soft date center. I like that they are fairly low in sugar (the date filling sweetens them up a lot) and that Klaicha are made with whole grain flours for most part. Forming them is a bit of a task. Half way through I returned them to the fridge to harden the dough and stop it from being a sticky mess on my hands. That said, it didn’t take long to do all 25 of them. Definitely a keeper recipe for the flavor, the texture and the relatively low sugar.

KLAICHA DATE PYRAMID COOKIES

Ingredients

1 cup brown rice flour

1 cup almond flour (not meal)

½ cup buckwheat flour

½ cup tapioca flour

¼ rounded tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp ground cardamon

½-1 tsp. anise seeds

1 ½ tsp. xanthan gum

Pinch sea salt

9 Tbsp. room temp (firm) butter cut into 12-15 small pieces

½ cup brown sugar

5-7 Tbsp filtered water

Filling: 1 cup plus 1 Tbsp. chopped dates, 1 ½ Tbsp butter

Directions: Put flours, spices, salt and gum in stand mixer bowl. Cut in butter with either the stand mixer paddle or a handheld butter cutter until butter is in tiny pebbles. Add sugar, blend. Add water as mixer turns slowly; a steady stream.  Use all of it or less; you want it to come together into a slightly crumbly dough. Chill 30-60 minutes. Mix dates and water in sauce pan; cook covered on low for 5-7 minutes until softened and butter blends in; stir frequently. Let cool.

Form cookies: a chunk the size of a large walnut formed into a ball, squash it down with your thumb or index finger; place 1 tsp date mix in that depression and push dough up to form it back into a ball. If you use too much date filling it will be very difficult to get the dough to wrap completely around the filling. Once done with that step, use a dinner fork to press on opposite sides of the ball to leave ridges on those two sides. Place on lightly sprayed baking sheet. I kinda gently scrunch them down so they have a flat bottom. Bake at 325 degrees for 30-32 minutes until light brown. The bottom of the cookies should be browned but not dark. Let them cool on the sheet. They get a bit crunchy by the time the cookies are fully cooled. I store mine in the cookie jar and a few in the freezer for when these run out…gf cookies rarely keep well so I always freeze some. Great with a cup of tea or coffee. I dare you to eat just one.

Graham Crackers 2.0…. GF and BETTER

Graham crackers make great pie crust for unbaked pies. And for cheesecakes. But GF ones are kinda lacking in the texture and flavor department if you eat a whole one; so hard on the teeth and they are soo expensive for the few you get. So I finally decided to try and make my own. Read a few recipes and then modified to make them my own. These are made with Earth Balance spread as I had some I wanted to use, no eggs; practically vegan; just the honey is an issue.

Pretty easy to make in my stand mixer. Then you roll out between two sheets of parchment and use the pizza cutter to draw lines between them. Can prick with a fork to form perforations. They will be soft and take the impressions of what you draw on. They do puff up some in the oven; beware edges falling off: a bit fell off one edge of my sheet of crackers and burnt up. Stinky when burnt!

graham crackers unbaked

Not too excited before baking, rolled out between parchment paper, kinda sad looking.

graham crackers out of oven

Freshly baked. Still soft and un-separated from other crackers.

GF Graham Crackers

Ingredients:

1  1/2 cups King Arthur Basic GF blend

1/2 cup brown sugar

1  1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/2 cup butter or Earth Balance spread; cold

1 tsp. vanilla

3 Tbsp. water

3 Tbsp. honey

Directions: Put dry ingredients in stand mixer bowl. Blend. Add butter cut in cubes; blend until crumbly. Add vanilla, honey, water. If needed add an extra tsp of water.

Lay out a sheet of parchment paper on big baking board. Blop out batter on it. Top with another sheet of baking paper and roll thin to fill the space. Cut apart with a pizza cutter to make 15 cookies. Poke with a fork to add perforations as desired. Bake at 325 degrees for 17-20 minutes. At 17 minutes they will be soft cookies. 20 is needed for crunchy ones to break up for pie crust or to make s’mores with.  Let cool in pan 10 minutes then cool completely on drying rack. Store in plastic bag to keep moisture out.  They are delicious all by themselves. The homemade s’mores turn out well too!graham crackers on plate

 

Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies and Range Decisions….

 

We baked cookies last Tuesday which was a snow day for both of us. That was fun; my grandson helped form the balls to make chocolate chip peanut butter oatmeal cookies.  Gluten free of course. They were very simple to create and very tasty. Look on pinterest and you should find them! https://glutenfreeonashoestring.com/gluten-free-oatmeal-peanut-butter-chocolate-chip-cookies/

chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

They baked fine; yummy mildly peanut buttery…we ate a bunch and then I tried to bake a quiche a few hours later for our supper. Neither oven would turn on, there had been troubles of late; had to run the broiler the other day to get it hot and then oven came on.  No such luck today.  I ended up broiling it in the upper oven which has that capability. Scorched quiche; yummy in the less than black area of it…at least we were able to enjoy a supper before I set out to find a new range. I have gas heat and a gas stove. Love gas cooktop; loved my gas oven a bit less; my now defunct ovens always had a lot of difficulty maintaining a set heat. scorched quiche

I did a lot of research and settled on a Frigidaire one oven with 2 power burners, 5 total burners, grate top for sliding pots from burner to burner and it goes the full top so more room for a big pan. I also wanted self-cleaning and a convection oven. Got that and even a quick preheat cycle. The range got here in only 3 days and it was installed within 30 minutes of the truck arriving.

So far, I love it; nice even heat in oven; holds temp and is certainly not lower than correct temp I set it for. Range top burners heat well and the timer is easy to set. I haven’t tried the convection setting yet but I plan to!  I baked some tartlets; put the shelf down to the very lowest it goes; just above the metal bottom. My tartlet crusts baked perfectly; can be difficult to get a browned crust when baking gluten free pie dough in a regular oven. My old range had a smaller upper pizza oven which was awesome for pies and pizza because of the bottom heat which cooked/browned them perfectly. But double oven equals double the price. Just not doable or justifiable. I got as much range as I could afford and I am very satisfied so far.  My biggest hint for regular ovens: I strongly suggest you bake all pies at the lowest level of your oven for a nicely brown crust.

stove

I think it’s a beauty!!

Do your homework in researching ranges and be sure you are clear on what features you really want so you are satisfied with what you bought rather than wishing for something you might have selected…

Aiden and me

No more scorched quiches or under baked pies. My new range is wonderful and we are a pair of happy bakers!