Happy new year :) While eating breakfast this morning (corn, peas, beets, potatoes, carrots all sauteed with some garlic and eggs, gluten-free bread, and homemade cheese (made by my friend, Laura),
I compiled a list titled "Things to remember in 2011 & for life. 01-01-2011 9:16 AM". This list consists of many things that I have thought about in the recent past that I hope to never forget. The list serves to remind me of things such as: "take time to reflect on the purpose for the things you do", "record your dreams", "take a little time at the end of each day to reflect on everything you accomplished in a mere twenty-four hours", "appreciate simple things around you, like the first crocus of spring or a winter sunset", and "cherish the beauty & solitude of each morning. use this as an excuse to get out of bed.".
I am working on developing a gluten-free chocolate chip cookie recipe. Why? Because everyone loves the classic chocolate chip cookie, and those who cannot eat gluten are sure to miss it. I attempted twice to bake delicious gluten-free chocolate chip cookies on Christmas eve with no success. Both times, the cookies fell flat, spread out, and did not rise a bit. Oh yeah, they were also very crunchy because they were so thin (on the plus side, however, they did taste REALLY good) and cooked too long. Anyway, I realized that my problem was not adding enough baking soda to the recipe, and not mixing the flour/baking soda/salt/xanthan gum mixture well enough so that all ingredients were evenly distributed. So... I decided to try again tonight.
First, I decided that I needed a good starting point in terms of flour. I wanted to try a very large combination of gluten-free flours in hopes that the combination of their flavors would yield a desirable cookie. I have all sorts of gluten-free flours at my house, and am just starting to experiment with combining them. Here is what I came up with:
Gluten-free flour blend #1 (yields 8 cups of gluten-free flour)
4 cups brown rice flour
1 cup potato starch flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 cup sweet white sorghum flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup chestnut flour
3/4 cup almond flour
6 teaspoons xanthan gum
*Combine all flours VERY well so that the resulting blend is uniform in texture and color. If you can, sift the flours together. If you don't have a sifter (I don't), I would recommend mixing it with your hands so that you can feel when all of the flours and xanthan gum are incorporated.
After I made this *experimental* flour blend, it was time to come up with a chocolate chip cookie recipe!
I really like soft, chewy cookies, so I decided to bake the cookies at a higher temperature for a short amount of time. I based this decision on an article on this website, , which notes that the bigger the cookie, the more moist it will stay after cooking (a key to a soft, chewy cookie), so I should bake big cookies "for a shorter time at a high temperature to firm them up and minimize spreading".
Step #1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit
Another key to keeping moisture and fluffiness in cookies is BUTTER which is usually creamed with the sugar, egg, and vanilla.
I took out the standard 2 sticks (equivalent to 1 stick) of butter, which were frozen (I decided to stick them in a bowl of warm water to soften them because I wanted softened butter, not melted butter for my recipe- does anyone know of any other tricks for defrosting butter? This worked pretty well, but I got impatient and wanted to make the cookies, so I ended up putting the sticks of butter in a bowl and mashing them up as well as I could, and putting it into the preheating oven in 30-second increments. I would take the bowl out, try to cream the butter with a fork, and put it back in. The end result was that most of the butter softened, but a little bit on the edges had started to melt a bit.
Anyway, I knew that I would also need brown sugar (light and dark), vanilla, eggs, baking soda, and salt for my recipe. Here is the ingredient list:
2 sticks butter (softened!)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (packed)
1/4 cup light brown sugar (packed)
1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups gluten free flour blend #1
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
Looking back at the recipe now, I just realized that I only added half of the sugar I had intended to add! So I would actually suggest that you add an additional 3/4 cup of white sugar to the recipe because they ended up being much less sweet than a "regular" chocolate chip cookie is supposed to taste and could have really used a bit more sugar to balance out the taste of the flour blend. Here is what the recipe *should* look like:
Gluten-free chocolate chip cookies (yield ~a little more than 3 dozen cookies)
2 sticks butter (softened!)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar (packed)
1/4 cup light brown sugar (packed)
*3/4 cup white sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups gluten free flour blend #1
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
11.5 oz bag Nestle Milk Chocolate Chips
Okay. First step (after turning on the oven and not forgetting the sugar!) is to cream the 2 sticks of butter with the dark brown, light brown, and white sugars. Next, add the vanilla and eggs (beat one in, then the second). Set this bowl aside. In the other bowl, measure out 2 cups of the gluten-free flour blend you made earlier, and to it, add 2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt. Make sure to incorporate all of these dry ingredients thoroughly so that you don't have little chunks of baking soda here and there. If you can, sift these ingredients. After you are done combining the dry ingredients, add them to the wet sugar/butter/egg/vanilla mixture. Mix until dough is a uniform consistency, then add an entire 11.5 oz package (well I used technically less than a whole package because I couldn't stop eating the chocolate chips while I was baking!) of Nestle Milk Chocolate Chips. Mix everything together, then drop by rounded teaspoons onto a cookie sheet (I didn't grease mine, but you can if you want I guess). Bake for 7 minutes! No more than 7 minutes! Any minute more and they will burn! Trust your nose with these cookies! When you start to smell them cooking, that means they are done!
The cookies came out pretty good, but now I realize that you can taste the flour blend... it is a really interesting flavor- you can really taste the brown rice and chestnut flours.... I think it might be too chestnutty for me, but I really think that an addition of the 3/4 cup white sugar would do the trick- oh yeah, and I also forgot to put molasses in them! Well, these are a good starter cookie, I'd say, and now I have the other 6 cups of my gluten-free flour attempt #1 left to experiment with (I think it would make a really interesting pumpkin or banana bread, carrot cake, or oatmeal raisin cookies... hmmmm!).
