Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Dream

Since I’ve been trying to go gluten-free these days, I’m looking up recipes from the pioneers that have gone before me into the world of gluten free baking. I’ve been finding some really great recipes. One of those I tried tonight – chocolate chip cookies. Uh huh.

I used this recipe from over at the Tropical Traditions recipe site, www.freecoconutrecipes.com.  Since I’m also avoiding white sugar, I substituted the 1/2 cup sugar it called for with 1/3 cup honey. Everything else I followed to the letter (other than accidently adding too much salt – 1/2 tsp instead of 1/8 teaspoon, which made no difference that I could tell). From reading the reviews, I decided to use my small-ish melon baller to scoop the dough into 30 small balls, then used the fork I mixed everything with to smush them down a little bit. (This had the added benefit of adding nifty texture to the top of the cookies – reminds me of the peanut butter cookies I made back in the day with Mom.)

I baked for 12 minutes. Ok, the first batch I baked for longer than 12 minutes and the bottoms got a little burned. So the next batch got 12 minutes and they were golden brown and delicious. I was really suprised at how much the honey flavor came through, even more than the coconut even though I used coconut oil, flour and flakes. I think I could even make these sans the chocolate chips for like a tea cookie. Aside from being a bit dry, these were really fantastic cookies. Test subject Bill approved, and said that he even liked the dryness and told me not to try to fix it!

As an added note, these cookies were ridiculously easy. I had cleaned up everything I dirtied while they baked and was sitting there, waiting with my camera and a spatula when they came out of the oven. Total time from finding recipe to eating cookie was probably 30 minutes.