Delicious Gluten-free Cookie Recipes

1. Introduction: Hello. My name's Barbara. Welcome to my class on Skillshare. Hi. My name's Barbara. I'm the founder of Badass Cakes in London. I'm also the author of two books, sweet soul baking and simple delicious gluten free, which you can find on Skillshare. Now, I've been a chef for many, many years. I've worked in some of London's finest establishments like the Ritz Hotel, the Savoy Hotel, Mossimans and I've also worked in France and other places around the world. I know how difficult it can be to be gluten free. I'm also gluten free. As you know, if you're following a gluten free diet, most foods are naturally gluten free, whether that's vegetables, fish or meat. But when it comes to baking, it's about finding the right ingredients and the best recipes. And hopefully, I've got a good recipe for you here today. You might not be gluten intolerant. You might be making something for a friend or family member. But don't worry because all my recipes taste delicious and whether you're gluten free or not, sometimes you can't help. So today in class, we're going to make a simple gluten free vanilla cookie. We're going to elevate that to a sandwich cookie, and then we're going to split the basic recipe into two. You'll have half chocolate, half vanilla. We're going to put those together to make a beautiful pinwheel biscuit. So at the end of class, I'll give you a class project. I would love for you to experiment with different flavors. Why not try some ginger O some zest, maybe lemon, orange, lime, or even grapefruit. I'll see you in the next class. 2. Ingredients and gluten-free tips: Welcome back. Let's go through our ingredients. So the ingredients are 200 grams of caster sugar or one cup. 225 grams of butter, salted or unsalted. One cup, one large free range egg. And 360 grams of plain gluten free flour, and minus a blend of maize, rice, tapioca, potato, and buckwheat. You can use sorghum, millet, or buckwheat. We also have half a teaspoon of baking powder, one teaspoon of vanilla, and a quarter of a teaspoon of salt. And 35 grams of cocoa powder. I'll talk you through the ingredients we're going to use to decorate the cookies in that class. So remember, if you're baking or cooking for someone that's celiac, the tiniest bit of gluten in their food can be very, very serious. Now, if you live in a multi diet household, one thing you have to be careful of, and that's cross contamination. So when you're making your gluten free items, just make sure that you wash down all the surfaces, all the equipment you're using, and just be very mindful about how you move around the kitchen. A great way I found to be able to look after my gluten free friend and also myself is to label all the equipment that I'm using for my gluten free baking. For example, all the equipment that I use in my kitchen for my gluten free baking is color coded with a red sticker. You could use a colored elastic band, some twine, whatever works for you, but just make sure that that cross contamination is kept to a minimum. When you're reading your ingredients list, if it contains wheat, barley, oats, or rye, it's not gluten free, and you have to look for an alternative. Make sure that all the ingredients you're using are also gluten free, and watch out for those hidden items. It's really important to read your ingredients list. I'll see you in the next class. 3. Preparation and baking: In this class, we're going to make the basic cookie recipe. I'm going to start by creaming the butter and the sugar until it's light and fluffy. So, into my mixing bowl, I'm adding all of the butter, and I'm using salted butter. Make sure you scrape it all out. And to that, I'm going to add the 200 grams of sugar. Don't forget to stop it halfway through and scrape down so that you're incorporating all of the ingredients. And now we're going to add the egg. And now we're going to add the rest of our ingredients. So I'm adding in the plain flour. Some of you will know that as all purpose flour, the baking powder, the salt. I love adding salt to my recipes. It just highlights all the flavors that are in there. And finally, the vanilla, we're going to put that in as well. This is going back on the machine, and we'll mix it until it pulls together. These are all the ingredients mixed together. As you can see, they've held together really nicely, and it's not too sticky. You can roll it. That's the consistency you want. We have our cookie dough ready. It's a beautiful consistency. It's only taken us about 10 minutes to make. Now I'm going to take out two thirds of the vanilla recipe, wrap that up, and leave a third in the bowl for the cocoa powder. I like to try and keep it square. Press it down with your hands. It doesn't have to be perfect at this steak. Roll it over. And that's going straight in the fridge for about 15 minutes. The doughs out of the fridge, we're going to roll it out to a nice thickness, maybe a quarter of an inch thick, and we're going to cut our cookie shapes. One great idea for stopping your dough, sticking to your rolling pin is to add another sheet of parchment or baking paper to the top of your cookie dough, and then just roll from there, press it down, and just keep rolling until you get that thickness that you want. You may have to turn it from time to time just to keep it level and keep it smooth. And don't be afraid to take the top of the paper off so that you can see how far you've gone. You've got a bit of a way to give. Press from the middle out. The same amount of pressure on both hands, if you can. Maybe a couple more rolls, just make it a little bit thinner and they'll be good to go. One final turn. And let's cut our cookies. I'm using two different shapes today, the fluted one, which we're going to use for our sandwich cookies and the heart shaped one, which we're going to use for our sugar cookies. Press all the way down and lift straight up. Peel away the excess. There you have a beautiful cookie for your baking sheet. With the cookie dough that I have left, I'm going to re roll them for the fluted cookies or the sandwich cookies. This beautiful recipe is very, very easy to use and holds together really well for a gluten free cookie. We start all over again doing exactly the same thing to roll out until we have the thickness that we desire. I'm going to be using my flutter cutter for my sandwich cookies. And just to help them not stick to the pastry, I'm going to dust them in my gluten free flour. Press straight down and up. An apple. Remove the excess, pastry or dough. So that you can seal In order to see the little surprise that we have in the middle of our sandwich cookies, we're going to cut a little hole in the top biscuit. So we're going to do that now before they go in the oven. So make sure your cutter is in the center of the cookies. Oh so for our simple vanilla cookie, we're going to finish some of them with sugar. It's granulated sugar because the grains are bigger than caster sugar. And when it cooks in the oven, when it bakes, it's going to crystallize and you get that lovely crunch on top of it. So all we need is our cookies that we cut out into our heart shapes and our sugar. Take your cookie and your sugar. Just dip the cookie into the sugar you might need some help? We're now about to add the cocoa powder to the cookie dough we have left in the bowl. And that is going back on the machine to give it one last mix. As before, we're going to roll this up in our grease proof paper. As you can see, with the addition of the cocoa powder, it's a bit firmer than it was, but still good to go. I'm making it square just because that's what I do. If you end up with a round, that's okay. Pop that in the middle of your paper, press it down. Fold that up and put it in the fridge. There we go. I've rolled out the vanilla and chocolate dough. We're going to put those together to make our pinwheel. But what I've done is I've rolled out two lots of vanilla and one chocolate. You can use any combinations you like. You may only want to do one layer of vanilla and one layer of chocolate. But I'm going to show you how I put bind together and you can do the same. So it doesn't matter about the shape. It can be roughly the same size, but this is okay. So we have one vanilla layer. You don't need any water or anything, and then we're going to add the chocolate layer to that. As you can see, the dough is very, very pliable. Just press it into the vanilla. And then I'm going to add another layer of vanilla paste. Peel off the Patra. And there we have it. Like I said, they're not all the same size, but we're going to cut straight lines anyway, so that won't matter. And this is not exact. Of course, you can do it exact if you prefer. And these pieces will not be wasted. Don't worry about that. There we go. We have a nice square. And now we're ready to roll. Firstly, score the top layer of your cookie dough, which is the vanilla with your knife, just to help the bend when we roll the cookie dough. I'm pressing it in. Again, just to help the roll. Can you see that? And I'm using the paper to guide the roll, and it's quite tight. So hold the paper down and press either from the side or from the front and just roll. And you should have a log shape just like mine. So now it's rolled, we're going to wrap it up, put it in the fridge, and let it set, and then we're going to cut them into cookies and bake them. We're about to slice our pinwheels and put them on the baking tray and get them ready for the oven. Just a little tip. When you're cutting your cookies, make sure that you don't cut straight down, put the point of your knife slanting downwards, and then you cut in one smooth motion, and that'll give you a smooth cookie, nice and smooth one action. These are gorgeous and giving them some space on the baking tray, although they shouldn't grow too much in the oven. Now, all these cookies are going to bake at 3:50 or 180 gas mark four for 13-15 minutes depending on your oven. The cookies are out of the oven and they look and smell incredible. So these are the vanla cookies that we made earlier. You can eat them as they are, or you can sandwich them together, which I'll show you later. These are our pinwheels. How fantastic do they look. And in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to decorate your cookies. I'll see you in the next class. 4. Decorating your cookies: Welcome back to class. In this lesson, we're going to decorate our cookies, and I'm going to show you how you can get a variety of cookies from one basic recipe. To decorate our cookies, we're going to use icing sugar, lemon curd, caramel, guava jam, and sprinkles. So the first job is to dust the tops of our sandwich cookies with icing sugar. So the first cookie we're going to fill are our lemon curd cookies. And I'm going to fill this piping bag with lemon curd, and I'm just using this jug to help me as another pair of hands. I've turned it over to give it some stability, and I'm just going to pour in two tablespoons of lemon curd. Twist the top of the bag to tighten and wrap your fingers around. Cut a very small tip so that you can get the curd out. You don't want it too big. Otherwise, you'll get too much curd on your cookie. Now, let's start to fill them. Perfect. For the second cookie, I'm using guava jam or guava jelly. You can use strawberry jam, raspbery, blueberry, whichever you prefer. But just remember to mix it in the bowl before you add it to your piping bag. And finally, we're going to use the caramel. Now, if you don't have caramel, you can use chocolate ganache exactly the same way as we're going to do now. These are our finished vanilla cookies. This one we finished with sugar and this one without. Which one do you prefer? You can eat them both exactly as they are, and they will taste delicious. But I wanted to elevate them a little bit today and show you how you can make them into a sandwich cookie. And we're going to use this one. Just go around the cookie with your filling, and you can use chocolate ganache, caramel, any filling you like, buttercream. And make sure you don't add too much filling to the inside of the cookie because what we're going to do now is we're going to press the other side of the cookie down so that the filling oozes out the side. And you only need to worry about this if you're going to add sprinkles to the outside. Now, as you can see, we need a little bit more filling on the outside, so don't be afraid to add a little more, just to make sure that those sprinkles stay in place. Here we go. And then we're going to press them into our sprinkles. These are the sprinkles I'm using today, but you can use any sprinkles you like and even them them for different colors, different occasions. Beautiful sandwich cookie. How lovely is that? Ooh. W one shall I choose? They're all so delicious. But I think I'm going for the pinwheel. Crunchy. Not too sweet. Beautiful flavor. I'll see you in the next class. Oh 5. Thank you and class project: They look fantastic, don't they? I hope you've made them, and yours do, too. For your class project, I'd love you to experiment with different flavors, whether that's ginger, nuts, coconut, lemon, lime, orange zest, even grapefruit zest, you can mix that into your batter and post your pictures so that we can all see them. Thank you for taking this class. I have two other classes on the Skillshare platform. All the information about those is below. If you've enjoyed this recipe and you'd love some more of my gluten free recipes, why not try my book, simple, delicious, and gluten free. It's available on Skillshare, and you'll enjoy snacks, breakfasts, dinners, all sorts of recipes that you can entertain your friends with.