Jam-filled Thumbprint Cookies (Gluten-Free)

Jam-filled Thumbprint Cookies (Gluten-Free)

Yesterday was our peanut butter and jelly baking day. A few days ago I used Target's Cartwheel to get 25% off of their Market Pantry Jam. With a new jar of jam, I need a recipe to make use of this new bargin. 

Having never made Thumbprint Cookies before, I was not expecting to like them, but these are really good! Good enough, that I had to go back and write down the recipe, since I was just throwing ingredients into the bowl rather haphazardly.

But, I am actually going to make this recipe, again!

These cookies are soft and chewy. They remind me very much of the cookies that are sold by Knott's Berry Farm. 

Having made them, now, I am thinking they would also work well with apple jelly and the addition of 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon. Perhaps, that will be the next version I make of these Jam-filled Thumbprint Cookies.

Ingredients:

2 cups fine milled almond flour

1/2 cup all purpose gluten-free flour

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup coconut oil

1 large egg or 2 egg yolks (for people allergic to egg whites)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup favorite jam

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

I made this recipe late in the day, after baking for hours. Therefore, I just threw all of the ingredients into the stand mixture. This avoided multiple bowls and allowed me to clean and make the dough at the same time.

To begin with, I put the almond flour in and let the mixer beat out the lumps. Then, I added the all purpose gluten-free flour. While these two flours blended, I straightened up a day’s worth of baking in my kitchen.  I put the sugar, baking powder and salt into mixer while it continued to spin away.

Without ever turning mixer off, I added the egg and vanilla and finally the coconut oil. The oil was added ¼ cup at a time. This makes for a very damp, oily dough.

Roll the dough into 1" balls and place on cookie sheet with parchment paper. Again, your hands will get very oily.

Yes, these are ‘thumbprint’ cookies, but I use a small spoon to make an indentation in the center of each cookie for the jam, halfway down or a bit more. Remember, oily. The spoon works great! Then, reform the cookie into a more even ball shape, as they tend to crack when you make the indentation.

Fill up the center of each cookie with about a 1/2 teaspoonful of your favorite jam. It is probably not a good idea to lick the spoon after filling each cookie, because even though the cookies will be baked, but the jar of jam will be filled with all of those germs. (This is my own personal reminder!)

Bake for 10 minutes. The cookies should be lightly brown on bottom.

Let cookies cool on pan for a few minutes or they will crumble apart, then remove to a wire rack and cool completely.

Makes about 30 cookies.

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Baking with the Husband

Thin and Crispy Gluten-Free Coconut Cookies
http://glutenfreeonashoestring.com/thin-crispy-gluten-free-coconut-cookies/



Spending the afternoon baking, the husband wants to join in the fun. He wants to bake some cookies that remind him of Christmas' Past. Still, being conscious of my dietary limitations, he looked up a recipe that was gluten-free, all on his own, and is baking up a batch by himself.

The recipe he found is from the blog, Gluten-Free on a Shoe String.

This project is 100% his own. (And, of course, the people from Gluten-Free on a Shoe String.) I love company in the kitchen.


The husband put ALL of the ingredients into the mixer before turning it on. Everything still mixed together just fine. Stand mixers are just perfect for him.

In typical fashion, this blog post is being written as we bake. I can tell you already, the 5 minutes he says these cookies need to bake is not nearly enough time. When we pulled them out, they were light yellow and not crystallized, at all.

They also have a very candy like sweetness, even using unsweetened coconut. I am adding two more tablespoons of coconut oil to his batter and some salted coconut chips, crushed. Hopefully this will cut some of the super sweetness down.

Otherwise, I think I would cut the white sugar down by a 1/4 cup and increase the salt by 1/2 teaspoon to try and cut some of the sweetness down. Then again, even as I watched, the husband was rather loose with the measuring, so perhaps his cookies and mine would be different in sweetness.

We also increased the baking time to ten minutes. We topped the cookies with some of the crumbled up coconut chips, as well. The added time added a nice carmelly edge to the cookies. Our recipe made exactly 27 3" cookies.

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Chocolate Suncheroos

We have worked on this recipe for a while now. After having many attempts turn out very flat and overly chewy, we have cut back on the amount of sunflower butter and used a smaller pan for our bars. 

Perhaps the reason it took so many attempts was because we usually make our  crispie rice bars with sugar and corn syrup. But, we thought we would start simple and go from there. A month and 6 pans of bars later, we have a tasty peanut-free, dairy-free treat.

Chocolate Suncheroos (Sunflower Seed Butter Crispy Rice Bars)

Ingredients:

2 Tablespoons dairy free butter 

1/2 cup sunflower seed butter

1 bag large marshmallows 

6 cups gluten free crispie rice cereal link

1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips*

1/4 cup butterscotch chips*

Directions:

Line 9" x 9" baking pan with aluminum foil. Spray with oil.

In a saucepan over medium/low heat, melt dairy free butter. Add marshmallows. Stir until melted. Remove from heat, and stir in sunflower seed butter. Mix in the rice cereal until evenly coated. Press the mixture into the prepared pan.

In a glass bowl in the microwave, melt the chocolate and butterscotch chips for 30 to 45 seconds. Stir. Heat another 15 seconds if needed. Stir again until smooth. Spread over the top of crispie rice bars. 

Chill until set and cut into bars or eat while warm and gooey.

*It is possible to order both dairy-free chocolate chip and butterscotch chips from Amazon. You can purchase dairy-free semi sweet chocolate chips from Ghirardelli retail locations, but the semi sweet chocolate chips from local grocery stores are NOT dairy free.

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Chocolate Coconut Barley Cake

Today, I thought I would try something completely on my own. Since it's Thursday**, Natalie is off at school for the whole day. That leaves me in the kitchen alone. I have this bag of barley flour that has remained unopened since we bought it. So, I thought it was time to try a NOT gluten-free recipe. This one is starring Chocolate, of course.



**Now that it is Friday, we are, of course, reworking the recipe. The original recipe attempt is way down at the bottom of this post. While the cake has a nice sweet chocolaty favor, it is very dry and crumbly. This seems to be a problem with anything we bake without wheat flour. 



It also lacks that coconutty flavor that I thought would come through from the oil and the coconut milk. Since the coconut flavor is buried beneath the chocolate cocoa flavor, we are adding an extra pop with unsweetened coconut. The one thing the cake is, is sweet, so we don't want to add anymore sugar. Thus, the UN-sweetened coconut.

We added a starch to our flour to try and work on the crumbly texture, along with coconut creme, instead of coconut milk. Additionally, we increased the amount of oil in the cake. We did this mostly to offset the addition of moisture the shredded coconut would remove from the cake. 

Finally, we are playing around with mayonnaise and egg yolks, trying to find a good balance to replace the missing egg whites from the dough.

To keep this cake moist, we are also cutting down the baking time to around thirty minutes. And, finally, I am going to try an old baking trick I haven't done in years. By using two inch strips of towel, or terry cloth, soaked in water and pinned around the edges of the cake pan, the cake will bake more evenly, keeping the edges of the cake from cooking faster than the center. 

Adding the shredded coconut gives it a nice nutty coconut punch. This is a denser cake that reminds me of Hostess Sno Balls. I have always loved those, so I think this is a fabulous thing. That is also why we are going to work on making a marshmallow frosting to go with this recipe, next.

Chocolate Coconut Barley Cake

Ingredients:

3 egg yolks

6 Tablespoons mayonnaise (yolk only type)

1 cup coconut oil melted

2 cups white sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 1/2 cups barley flour

½ cup potato starch

3/4 cup cocoa powder

½ cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 can coconut cream
1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Directions:

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Use 9" x 13" baking pan. Coat with nonstick spray.

Beat sugar, egg yolks, coconut oil and vanilla together until smooth and creamy. In separate bowl, stir barley flour together with cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt. A fork works well for this blending process. Add unsweetened coconut and stir until blended. 

Add the tablespoon of apple cider vinegar directly into the open can of coconut cream and stir together. Set aside for two to three minutes. This will create a mock dairy-free buttermilk for the cake.

Mix half of the dry flour mixture into the moist sugar mixture slowly. Add half of the coconut liquid sugar mixture while mixing. This works really well with a stand mixer. Or add liquid and then mix. Add rest of dry mixture and beat into moist sugar mixture and then finish up with rest of the coconut liquid. Blend until everything is well combined.

Pour batter into oiled pan and bake for 28-30 minutes. Cake is finished when  top springs back when lightly touched. 

Original attempt:
4 egg yolks

1/2 cup coconut oil melted

2 cups white sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

3 cups barley flour

3/4 cup cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 can coconut milk

1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar

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Sunflower Butter Cookies

Working on our first recipe, we thought we would start with something easy. Easy, like one of those three ingredient peanut butter cookie recipes. How hard could those possibly be to alter into a allergy friendly recipe?

Since these recipes are being created around my personal allergy issues, we chose to create Sunflower Butter Cookies using sunflower butter, egg yolks (as my allergy, thankfully, is only egg whites) and brown sugar. 

Natalie separating egg yolks from whites just like the food network taught her!

We started with:
 
     1 cup sunflower butter (We used Trader Joe's Sunflower Seed Butter)
     1 cup brown sugar
     2 egg yolks

Then, we beat all three ingredient together for a few minutes. This was our first mistake. And should have been the beginning of our realizing that 'easy' was probably not the word to use for our first attempt at creating a stack of recipes.

By the time Natalie had two cookies on the tray, we realized that the dough was too stiff to work. The two already rolled cookies went back into the bowl, and we tried again. 

This time, we added a tablespoon of coconut oil to make the batter smoother and not so tight. The coconut oil, also from Trader Joe's is currently is in complete liquid state in my August California kitchen. I also keep a jar in my refrigerator. The coconut oil in that jar is solid and white.

After adding the oil, we again, roll out the sunflower butter cookies, 12 to a pan. These are placed onto parchment paper. There is enough oil that an un-greased pan should work fine. Then, pressing them down with a fork, like peanut butter cookies, we place them into a 350 degree oven. Before doing so, we have sprinkled half of the cookies with sea salt and left half plain.

 We cook them for 8, then 10, then 12 minutes. The cookies look dark, but that is just a combination of the brown sugar and sunflower butter. The taste of these cookies is good, but the texture is like sawdust. Not pleasant, at all!

Adjusted recipe:

Sunflower Butter Cookies
     1         cup sunflower seed butter (We used Trader Joe's Sunflower Seed Butter)
     1         cup white sugar
     2         egg yolks
     1 t       vanilla
     3T       coconut oil
     1/2 t    baking soda
                sea salt to taste

Mix sugar, coconut oil, egg yolks and vanilla together in bowl. Beat together for several minutes until smooth and glossy. Add in baking soda. Mix until blended. Blend in sunflower seed butter. Mix until smooth. Roll into 1 inch balls. smash with fork into criss cross pattern. Sprinkle with sea salt, if desired. Bake in 350 degree oven for 8-10 minutes or bottoms lightly brown. Let cool on tray. Very fragile while hot. Makes 24 cookies.

These are pretty sweet cookies. I think that will vary depending on the type of sunflower butter that is used. But, not bad for a few hours worth of work. Definitely not a three ingredient recipe, though. And, way more work to tweak it than we thought it would be, but for a peanut butter cookie lover, this will work!

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