Gluten Free Almond Butter Cookies

(makes about 30 cookies)

These buttery, delicate cookies will melt in your mouth!

3/4 cup almond flour
1/2 cup rice flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp fine sea salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), cut up
1 medium egg yolk
1/2 tsp almond extract

Place the almond flour, rice flour, cornstarch, icing sugar and salt into the bowl of a food processor and pulse a few times to combine.  Remove the top and add the butter. With a fork, beat together the egg yolk and almond extract in a small bowl. Pour the egg yolk mixture evenly over the top. Run the motor until a soft dough begins to form.

Form the dough into two cylinders about 6 to 7 inches long and place into the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and cut into slices just shy of half an inch thick.

Place the cookies about 2 inches apart on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or a baking mat. This dough will spread. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until the edges are nicely browned.

Remove from oven and cool on baking sheet; they break very easily while hot or warm.

Read more »

Failed Batch of Cookies

There was a time I rarely measured anything. I just added stuff to the bowl with a general idea of what was needed until it looked "right". Occasionally I had a disaster on my hands, but for the most part things almost always turned out...    really well.

In recent years I am finding it more and more difficult to bake a batch of decent cookies. My criteria has changed and I suspect as a result, the "chemistry" is off. This weekend for example, I wanted to produce a batch of buttery and flourless cashew cookies using less than half the amount of sweetener you'd find in a conventional cookie.

The cookies I made tasted ok. They were even sweet enough for me, but their texture was all wrong. They were more akin to small drops of cake batter, rather than cookies with crispy edges and soft centres.

I'll give this another try next month. I don't want cookies in the house again, before then.

Read more »