Gluten-Free Baking Part II: Bob's Red Mill Shortbread Cookies and Chocolate Chip Cookies

I suppose I should have photographed the whole process, showing you everything, plenty for your tactile imagination to chew on. But this isn't The Pioneer Woman Cooks! or some other shiny cooking blog. All I have are photos of the baked cookies themselves, which don't much illustrate the difficulty of making them. You can see the paraplegic cat, and a few other limbs broken off. This could've happened at one of a few points: transferring the cut dough shapes from the counter to the baking sheet, transferring the baked cookies off of the baking sheet, and simply handling the cookies to eat them. The package told us, like the chocolate chip cookie mix of the same brand, that the dough would seem dry, and that we needed to squish it together with our hands, and to roll it out between parchment paper and plastic wrap to 1/4 inch. How exactly did we do this without the dough crumbling to pieces? With difficulty. The package suggests using a cookie cutter. It does not suggest the acrobatics involved in getting the cut dough to the baking sheet. We carefully removed the layer around the shapes, trying not to break the shapes themselves, and used a spatula--quickly, quickly--to lift them in one piece (or, if the maneuver isn't executed perfectly, several). Irregular shapes with lots of limbs sticking off didn't fare well. The pumpkins were okay, being essentially a circle with a tiny bit sticking off (the stem).

I've never made shortbread cookies, regular or no, but what was the structural integrity these cookies were lacking? Gluten. I imagine regular (dare I call them that?) shortbread dough would stay together easily enough that it could handled with less care than nitroglycerin, and that the baked cookies would not be so delicate that they faint when they see a mouse. (Of course, when I saw a mouse in my kitchen at night I might've hit my head I jumped so violently.)

I complain, but the shortbread cookies were good, if messy, to eat. How can you go wrong with something that's mostly butter? The texture was a little grainy, becoming not quite the fine paste in the mouth that I'm used to from regular shortbread, but rich and a little sweet, as they should be. A nice tea biscuit.

Apparently, all legumes taste similar. Bob's Red Mill is partial to garbanzo bean flour in gluten-free baking mixes. Their chocolate chip cookie mix is mostly comprised of it, at which our noses twitched in mild disgust. Garbanzo beans and chocolate chips? Ew. Why not, say, oats? (The funny thing about gluten-free baking mixes is that each has a completely different approach to achieving the texture and flavor desired. Some are mostly rice, some oat, some garbanzo, some teff. Usually the actual ingredients are downplayed; the end result is everything. Which is odd these days, when every "organic" or "natural" product is busy bandying its ("simple," "pure") ingredients.) We didn't trust it, but we did already open the package, so what the hell. The cookies turned out beautifully, melting into the pan in folds of buttery chewiness (sorry, no photos). The flavor was unexpected, but not at all unpleasant. I devoured five in one sitting. I gave two to my brother, who when I asked him what kind he thought they were said "they're peanut-butter chocolate chip, right?"

Mrs. Hudson's Biscuits II: Hiding Behind Photography

This recipe is vastly improved using the right ingredient, corn flour, rather than the course corn meal that made the first time like eating sand.  The photo of the finished product I daresay is beautiful.

There has got to be a better way to
spread this into a circle.

I'm not sure, however, if they're "good."  It may look like a moist, dense cake, but the corn flour ensures a flat texture that dissolves into a paste of silt in the mouth.  It doesn't really taste baked--it's more like a grain paste molded into a pleasing shape, like a corn halvah.

This time I spread the dough in a round pie pan, baking it as a sort of giant cookie, and then slicing into eighths once it was glazed and cooled.  Which admittedly makes far larger biscuits than called for.

It's only the texture I'm iffy about--the flavors of lemon and corn go well together I think.

Why did I try this in the first place?  Because the photos looked nice.  Now I've taken an appetizing (I think) photo, in a different way, of more or less the same thing.  If this weren't such an oddity, the world might be full of mouth-watering photos of it.  Culinary hobbyists' kitchens everywhere would pop out these sunny-looking treats.  The texture I've described as displeasing might instead be the subject of a poetics of delicacy.  Like chocolate, a few strange people would never like it, much to the confusion and even mild distrust of everyone else.  Or maybe not.  There's more to gastronomic phenomena than photography.

What did the gelatinous goodies of the 1950s taste like?  And I don't mean "what would they taste like if we made them today and tried them?"

Mrs. Hudson's Biscuits

I was warned that the results of the strange recipe given to me were equally strange. Two “strange”s in this limited vocabulary turns from “intriguing” to “bad.” So I tried making the much tastier-sounding (and looking) “Mrs. Hudson’s Biscuits” instead.

125 g. butter

125 g icing sugar

2 tsp vanilla sugar or 2 tsp sugar with 2-3 drops of vanilla extract

1 egg

1 pinch of salt

juice and grated peel of 1/2 lemon

125 g. flour

125 g. cornflour
1 knife tip baking powder

butter to grease pan

Glaze
100 g. icing sugar
2 tbsps lemon juice

Whip the butter until it is fluffy, then slowly add the icing sugar;
Add the vanilla sugar, egg, salt, lemon juice and peel;
Add the flour, baking powder and cornflour slowly and mix well;
Grease a baking tray with butter;
Fill a pastry bag with the dough and press small biscuits onto the baking tray;
Bake in a preheated 400F oven for 10-15 minutes
Make the glaze by mixing the icing sugar and lemon juice. Brush biscuits with it, and let it dry.
Makes about 70 biscuits.

Measuring flour.

Some of the quantities are in grams. The postage scale I use doesn’t have grams. Here are the quantities (roughly) in ounces:

4 1/2 oz butter (about one stick and another tablespoon)

4 1/2 oz icing sugar (somewhat more than a cup)
2 tsp vanilla sugar or 2 tsp sugar with 2-3 drops of vanilla extract

1 egg

1 pinch of salt
juice and grated peel of 1/2 lemon (I used the entire lemon’s zest)

4 1/2 oz flour (a little more than a cup)
4 1/2 oz cornflour (about a cup)

1 knife tip baking powder
butter to grease pan

Glaze
3 1/2 oz icing sugar

2 tbsps lemon juice (I just used all the juice from the other half)

The sad fate of my hand-folded pastry bag.

Two oopses flopped down as too-late realizations (I suppose that’s what an oops is) throughout the execution of this recipe. One, in my enthusiasm for not having to go to the store, I used course corn meal instead of corn flour. That there was a difference didn’t even occur to me until I crunched down on a bit of the dough. Two, I preheated the oven to 350 F instead of 400 F. The first batch was baked at 350 F for the first five minutes. There’s not quite a third--a mistake, but not an oops: I tried to make a pastry bag to create the neat little shapes pictured along with this recipe that sort of resemble breasts, but as you can see from the photo, it, well, broke. I used a spoon and my fingers instead. Oh well.

Melted butter and icing sugar.

And one other, that may not have mattered at all in the end: the recipe said to “whip the butter until it is fluffy.” Not quite knowing how to whip cold butter, I melted it. Mixing icing sugar into this makes for a somewhat disgusting-looking, greasy mess. But as long as the butter has chance to cool a bit before the dough is baked, I don’t think it makes a difference.

They may not be the most perfect replicas, but they’re quite nice. The lemon flavor is pleasingly strong. My descriptors are very reserved.

Principles of Economy

A friend of mine found this strange recipe in The Sherlock Holmes cookbook: Or, Mrs. Hudson's storeside campanion formed upon principles of economy and adapted to the use of private families:

3 tbsp Butter
3/4 lb flour
6 oz sugar
1 grated lemon rind and lemon juice
2 eggs

Rub the butter into the flour; stir in the sugar and the lemon peel. When these ingredients are mixed, add the eggs and lemon juice. Beat the mixture well for a few minutes, then drop from a spoon onto a buttered baking sheet, about 2 inches apart. Bake the biscuits from 15-20 minutes in a moderate (350F) oven, until they lightly brown.

Who measures sugar by weight?  To me 6 oz seems like it isn't much at all.  The small amount of butter and sugar makes me want to classify these as a tea biscuit--something fairly bland but somewhat sweet.  But then there are the two eggs.  Two, for this little batch of dough?  They're bound to come out like dry, dense cakes (no rising agent here).  Who knows.

I doubt they'll look like these.

They appear to be a sorrier version of these very appetizing-looking "Mrs. Hudson's Biscuits."

Bored, and intrigued by the possibility that making these "biscuits" might surprise me, I think I'll make them tomorrow.  I'm tempted to take the literal approach and actually rub the butter with my fingers into the flour (something i've never done), rather than cut it in with a fork or a pastry blender.

aspiring to be rectangular almond cookies

What I did was...
Whisked together melted butter, quite a bit of both brown and white sugar, and an egg.  Added about a cup and a half of chopped almonds, and half a cup of "currant" raisins.  Added a little splash of almond extract, few large pinches of cinnamon, a quarter (grated off) of a nutmeg, and a large pinch of baking powder.  Mixed in handfuls of white flour until it became a very soft dough.  Baked tablespoon sized dollops at 350 F until a little browned.

What should be done is to make just enough dough to hold together the almonds and currants.  This dough should be sweeter and less starchy (mostly butter, egg, and sugar).  The dough should be formed into large shallow rectangles that are cut into strips like biscotti when just out of the oven.