If you love chocolate + mint, these gluten free chocolate mint chip cookies are for you. As a kid (pre-gluten free days) I loooooved Thin Mints (I was a Girl Scout for ~10 years!) and mint chocolate chip ice cream (still do). I’ve yet to translate this love into a towering gluten free mint chocolate chip layer cake (one day!), but I have made chocolate peppermint shortbread and have wanted to make a chewy bakery style chocolate mint cookie for a while now. Soooooo what better time to recipe test than the winter months right before the holidays! I ended up finding and using the Guittard gluten free mint baking…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
These are a family favorite and one of our mom’s absolute most brilliant recipes – gluten free or otherwise!! In this case, these gluten free chocolate crinkle cookies are a dream and a half and perfect for the holidays or for a year-round treat. These have a bit of a new twist on them, with more cocoa powder (and dutched!) than in the original Mama Lynn recipe, which give them a deeper chocolate flavor and a bit of a chew reminiscent of macarons that I just love. They’re also some of the easiest cookies on the blog, so as long as you have a few hours (the dough does need…
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Gluten Free Toasted Coconut Butter Cookies
Anyone else remember dark blue round tins filled with rustlely paper cups holding heaps of differently-shaped butter cookies? I do. They were incredible. They were the most perfect, melt-in-your-mouth cookies, each piped into delicate swirls or rolled in sugar or printed with a stamp. And they were impossible to eat just one of, in fact, it was customary to eat a quarter of your body weight both before and after the family dinner, resulting in greater rotundity and probably a stomach ache. I did push this limit one year and ate nearly an entire tin all on my own which had the disastrous consequence of feeling queasy everytime I saw…
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Gluten Free Chewy Glazed Molasses Cookies
I am a big fan of molasses. There’s something about the tar-like jar of deeply earthy, sticky, caramelly syrup that nestles perfectly into childhood memories, ghosts of holiday bakings past, and evokes that golden moment of a hot slice of cornbread slathered with butter, waiting for a smear of this edible black gold. It’s richer than other syrups, heavy with hidden flavors and notes you wouldn’t find in honey or maple syrup, and the silky depth of it’s dark ooze is far more dangerously fun than either. The molasses glaze I made for these chewy gluten free molasses cookies is by far one of my favorites (and I’ve made a…
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Gluten Free Gingerbread House
Some of my fondest holiday memories involve taking a hammer to a month-old, stale-as-all-get-out gingerbread house and watching chunks of dry gingerbread, rock-hard gum drops, and royal icing fly in every direction across the kitchen floor. If you’re also reminiscing about the utter destruction of something so beautiful and yet so inedible, this is a post for you. After years (a decade?) hiatus, we decided that we should make a gingerbread house this year. Being older and oh-so wiser, we figured we should construct an epic house, from our own template, with homemade gluten free gingerbread that we carefully piece together with hot caramel instead of the takes-forever-to-set royal icing.…
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Gluten Free Decorated Gingerbread Cookies
These may some of the most iconic cookies known to children across the Christmas-celebrating world. From finger-painted gingerbread people at age three, to a one-legged gingerbread fellow in Shrek, decorated gingerbread cookies hold nostalgia and holiday cliche in the perfectly-spiced, cookie-cutter package. So it seemed only appropriate that this year, of all years, we go back to our deepest, nearly-forgotten family traditions and make a truck load of gingerbread cookies and spend an entire evening decorating them and turning the kitchen table into a royal icing Jackson Pollock. This was actually our first time making homemade gingerbread dough in recent memory, so we totally underestimated how many gingerbread cookies could…
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Gluten Free Bourbon Balls
Thank goodness for Instagram, or I wouldn’t have even thought to make these delightfully indulgent holiday goodies last week! Calgary Glutenfree, another top-notch gluten free blogger, mentioned that their favorite way to use bourbon in baking was bourbon balls, and that sparked a full-fledged recipe hunt for how to make our own! I’d heard of these southern delicacies before but had regrettably never tried them, and after perusing various recipes, determined that I had everything I needed to make them right then and there. So I did. And I’m not disappointed with the result – quite the opposite! Now, apparently, the original bourbon ball was created by Ruth Hanly Booe…
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Gluten Free Chocolate Hazelnut (Nutella) Cupcakes
I have many more thoughts on hazelnuts now than I did three years ago. Despite growing up in Oregon, a region that proudly proclaimed this fragrant tree product its official state nut in 1989, I had little dealings with hazelnuts until I was about 17 and tried one of my all-time favorite ice creams at Zoey’s in downtown Ashland – the “Oregon Trail” (dark chocolate swirled with roasted hazelnuts and marionberry jam). My relationship to hazelnuts grew when, in college, I’d often scoop whole spoonfuls out of Costco-sized Nutella jars sitting temptingly in the dorm dining hall. But as many food relationships do when you become an “adult,” mine with…
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Gluten Free Roasted Hazelnut and Chocolate Snow Cookies
One of my dearest friends now lives a million miles away in the fairy-tale land of Vienna, Austria. Her moving was terrible news, until I considered the fact that this undisputedly meant that I had to travel to said fairy-tale land to visit her at least once a year. Not a bad deal. The first time I visited it was the second week of December, and Vienna, let alone us, was entirely frozen. Nevertheless, the city has a marvelous way of distracting you from the bone-chilling cold by decking itself in heaps of holiday lights and decorations, and by constructing myriad Christmas markets (or Adventmarkt/Weihnachtsmarkt) that seem to magically appear…
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Gluten Free Maple Hazelnut and Pear Upside Down Cake
If you’re like me, you’ve got two boxes of Harry & David’s “Fancy Gift Pears” sitting on your counter and you’ve already challenged your significant other to a competition for who can eat the most pear slices in one evening and there are still SO MANY PEARS LEFT. Thank you, mom, for these amazing pears, but what do we do with them now? We need to host a pear party. Or, look up recipes for pear desserts until inspiration strikes and you’re motivated enough to get off of the couch after work and toss this incredible cake in the oven. I promise you, it’s worth the effort. The main inspiration…
