After a day of rest, I’ve returned to my baking experiments. My sister is sensitive to gluten, so I’ve been trying out a few gluten-free cakes and cookies that she can enjoy this Christmas. She traditionally hosts our Polish Wigilia (Christmas Eve) celebration and ends up having to limit her intake of the wonderful breads and cookies she lays out for us at the end of an evening. Well, that’s not fair! These days I’ve got the time and, mostly, the energy to make sure she has some treats she can enjoy. I found a recipe for Gluten-free maple and pecan shortbread cookies on the King Arthur Flour website and decided to give it a try.
I started yesterday, but crashed out halfway through the afternoon. I had laid out all my ingredients, then dropped in bed where I stayed most of the rest of the day. I dragged myself downstairs to at least mix the cookie batter and form it into a log. From there I put it in the fridge to firm up and then went back upstairs for the duration. I woke up feeling much better today, so decided to bake up those patient cookies the first thing after breakfast. The first thing I noticed once I started slicing them was how good they smelled – raw! The smell reminded me a bit of coconut, even though there wasn’t any of that in the recipe. I used almond flour, along with vanilla, maple syrup and pecans so maybe some combination of that produced the heady scent.
The cookies were easy to slice since they contained butter, which firmed up the dough in the refrigerator overnight. I sliced and then placed them on my silpat cookie sheets to bake. There came that wonderful smell again, this time emanating from the oven. Frankly, I was expecting them to taste like cardboard, which is my usual experience with gluten-free products. Thankfully, I was wrong. I bit into a cookie after lunch and reveled in the taste – again, with coconut overtones even though there was none of that in the ingredients. The cookies weren’t too crumbly, which is another problem with gluten-free products. I’m assuming the three tablespoons of butter in the dough played a part in that. They were, in a word, delicious! These cookies are definitely driving with us to Buffalo for Christmas. Even better, these cookies are supposed to get even better as they age. Even better than almost perfect? Oh yes. I tossed a bunch of them into the freezer to age in peace for a month or so. We’ll see how they taste by the end of July. I’ll let you know!
Want to try these for yourself? Click here for the recipe on the King Arthur Flour website.