Hello! Happy Christmas week, dear friends. Today was cooky day at the beach...omg, another disaster. It's my own fault, I had forgotten the ghastly gluten free snowflake sugar cookies from last year. "He who fails to remember the past is destined to repeat his errors.". Um, yeah, so not laughing.
It started out so well, a chilly grey day, a gale blowing. Perfect for baking. I am not crazy about cooking but I love to bake.
I decided this year I'd make my mother's Snowball cookies. In my mind I was thinking, Fast, easy, smallish recipe. Always come out great, last a long time.
I've been making this recipe since I was ten years old.
Here's where things went wrong. Due to current dietary fads the cookies needed to be gluten free, lactose free, soy free. Possibly Paleo, Keto, and Vegan. Mediterranean! A challenge! I found lovely pecan bits and, most important, almond flour [gluten-free] , at Trader Joe's.
Instead of butter I used a vegan butter substitute spread, along the lines of margarine, but fancied up for the current food correct posse. [It has soy! But I was told it is okay. Well. Okay, then.]
Coconut sugar in the dough. Only 4 Tablespoons so it wasn't too important that coconut sugar is not sweet.
Mo and I sat and rolled up a couple dozen little bite sized balls.
It didn't take long. Two big cooky sheets. Pop in the oven.
Uh oh. Now the thing is, baking is a form of chemistry. You have to measure, you cannot estimate, guess or sub. And the word GLUTEN must hark back to the word GLUE, because without wheat flour containing gluten, recipes that normally bake up holding shape and form slowly ooooooze into formless flat blobs. We watched in dismay.
I went ahead and did the two layers of powdered sugar. I used pure cane sugar, there is just no reasonable sub, once a year, for real confectioners sugar. Even on crumbly blobs.
Maybe I'll experiment with a cake baked in my Swedish Dala horse mold [red, below]? I'm imagining the batter flowing over the sides of the mold, like lava. The mold, from IKEA, has no instructions or volume info. LOL.
I hope the market has nice mini cannolis
love
lizzy
gone to the beach....
PS Mo is on the naughty list! He was briefly unsupervised and he went in the kitchen, got the trash cabinet door [bungeed shut] off its hinges! He couldn't get the trash bin out, so he reached in and got all the garbage, spread it ALL OVER the entire kitchen floor. Thankfully nothing harmful was there for him to eat! This is new, he is hungry because he's on a diet? or bored?
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