I was sooo excited that my favorite all-purpose (Gluten free) flour came in the mail in time for Christmas cookies! No matter how I feel, or have felt, about this season, I always make Christmas cookies. When I was pregnant with Biggest E, Christmas was just a couple weeks before my due date and I was in full nesting mode. I made cookies until every single surface in my kitchen and dining room were covered in cookies. I sent some in with hubby to work, I sent some to a friend in Iraq, I even sent some home. I brought them into work, and I gave them to everyone I knew. There were that many. And in the years since, I have continued to make them by the tin full. I even collect cookie tins just for this purpose. Well, this year I was excited to find another GF family to exchange cookies with! So I set out to make my traditional sugar cookie cut outs and to try my Grandma’s famous recipe (seriously, we’ve all tried copying it, but no one’s ever taste just like Grandma’s!) for molasses cookies. I know this doesn’t sound like a feast, or something to turn into a blog post, but here’s the catch. We’re a gluten free household (no cooking with gluten in this house. period.) and this is our first Christmas gluten free. January will mark a year gluten free, and really in the world of cooking, one year is not that long. So while I feel I’ve mastered lots of different ways of cooking and have gotten my family to try (and enjoy!) lots of new things, baking is always touch and go. I’ve made some cookies and some cakes with some success, but nothing exceptional. And baking has never really been my thing, even before going gluten free. So enter a world with whole new flours, and gums, and weirdness… but me being me, I just expecting it to turn out. Enter my first batch, the molasses. Flop. They tasted good, but did not look good. These were definitely not the puffy, chewy goodness my grandma makes. More like ginger snaps than anything. So I tweaked it a bit and threw it in the fridge to chill. Then they turned out. Not quite the same as Grandma’s, but waaay better than the first batch! And three cookie sheets in, I think they’re started to taste more like Grandma’s!
I started on my sugar cookies, which I thought I’d made before… apparently not, or at least not the way I did tonight. They were a bigger disaster than the molasses. I coulda cried. I didn’t, but I coulda. So, I poured over hundreds (ok, maybe not hundreds, but seriously, like fifty, maybe a hundred. I don’t know. It was a lot.) of recipes and gluten free cooking how to sites. I tweaked my recipe, I chilled it, I prayed. And hallelujah! Out came beautiful, puffy, perfect, yummy, just-like-normal sugar cookies! Perfectly formed Christmas trees, four-legged ginger bread men, and stockings that actually look like stockings! Pleased as punch does not begin to describe my elation! I am a gluten-free super mom! I even made a giant train cookie (for Biggest E) and a giant turtle cookie (for Miss E)! And in all honesty- I’ll probably make more of these cookies before the week is out! Or maybe next week, I’m trying not to get carried away! So I couldn’t find my camera to take a decent picture (or at least attempt to), but I grabbed my camera and at least you can see these beauties in all their glory! (And mine!)
laborofwonder 
Hooray! They look great.
thank you! I was pretty proud of myself! 🙂
[…] so some of you may remember this year’s Christmas cookies, or my first Gluten Free Christmas cookie experiment. Thankfully there were only a couple of […]