A Kitchen Experiment

I enjoy baking. For the past several years, I make it a point to give out cookies to my friends at Christmas. Though for some reason, these last couple years have had me so busy I've not been able to bake. But anyway. These cookies include - typically - snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, and various types of cookie bars and other recipes I'm in a mood to make.

Chocolate Chip Meltaways

This year, I wanted to make as part of my best friend's Christmas gift applesauce cookies, chocolate chip meltaways, and snickerdoodles. Great. I've got all three recipes and I can easily make them. The problem? My friend currently has several different food sensitivities and apples and gluten (including rice & almond) are among them. So this was a dilemma. What was I to do? I did a google search for a gluten free snickerdoodle recipe. I found several. But the one I used was found here. They are the closest to the ones I make, so I figured it'd be the best to try. I'd also found Bob Red Mill's Gluten Free All Purpose Flour that wasn't made with rice or almond. So I made sure to have that with me. The applesauce and the chocolate chip meltaways were not actually gluten free recipes. I just substituted the gluten free flour for the regular flour.

So on Christmas Day, I was at my mom's. I'd brought a big bag that had the Apple-Peeler-Corer-Slicer and all of my ingredients for the three cookies. I knew that I wouldn't actually be able to bake the cookies at Mom's because of issues with the oven door swelling and sticking once the oven was hot, but I could mix up the dough. So I did. We had to improvise where to attach the apple slicer since I'd forgotten to bring the stand it goes with. So I clamped it to the side of the bar and got to work.

Snickerdoodles

First I mixed up the applesauce cookies. The dough looked like it was supposed to, which was a good thing. Then I did the chocolate chip meltaways. This dough didn't look quite like I was used to. I decided to sample the dough for these by licking the beaters. Big mistake! The dough was bitter and not sweet at all. Mom found that out too when she sampled it as well. We were both thinking "I sure hope these things turn out." The snickerdoodle recipe was the last one. My aunt sampled it. Her reaction was the same as ours.

I got home around 8:15 that night. Turned the oven on so I could bake the cookies. I did have to be at work the next day. I spooned the applesauce cookies onto the baking stone. Put them in the oven, and when I took them out 10 minutes later, they looked right. So I moved them to a cooling rack and got the sugar mixtures ready for the snickerdoodles and the chocolate chip meltaways. I was tired and was only going to bake about 12-15 of each. The rest of the dough could sit in the freezer. I got them ready and put them in the oven. When I took them out, I was very impressed with how they turned out. They had expanded more than usual, but they looked how they were supposed to. The two pictures are of the meltaways and the snickerdoodles. So I sampled them. Surprisingly, all three tasted pretty good.

I packaged them up and took them to my friend's house the next day. She loved them! So did her family. But I learned the lesson of not sampling gluten free cookie dough!