Live and Learn, Right?

I know it sounds cliche but if we didn't live and learn, we would never grow. Today's lesson was something that should have been so simple that I probably should have known I was making a mistake before I even tried. An old pro at the game of GFCF living probably would have scoffed simply at the notion of what I did. Not me, I have to believe things will work the way I want them to work. Just call me stubborn.

The plan was to make chocolate chip cookies - the gluten-free and casein-free kind, of course. Like all good cooks do prior to measuring and mixing, I was getting all my ingredients out and arranged in order of use in the recipe. It was at this time that I discovered I was out of sweet rice flour, a common ingredient in GFCF baking and one called for in my favorite GFCF chocolate chip cookie recipe. I stewed over this for awhile knowing that all the snow falling outside would most likely prevent me from getting out after naptime was over. But then, I had a brilliant idea. And I use the word "brilliant" very loosely because, as you will see, the idea wasn't so brilliant after all.

It occured to me that the reason companies like Bob's Red Mill make gluten-free all-purpose flour mixtures is so that those of us eating this way can take the easy way out sometimes just like regular folks and not have to mix thirty-two different flours just to get a flour mix that will produce an end result somewhat resembling it's gluten-loaded counterpart. So my brilliant idea was to substitute a regular recipe for chocolate chip cookies (I was using the one on a bag of regular chocolate chips that are still hanging around here until I can "let go.") in for the GFCF version I normally use. I would then substitute Bob's Red Mill gluten free all purpose flour mixture instead of the flour called for in the recipe. The butter sticks would be replaced with vegan sticks and the chocolate chips with a bag of Enjoy Life chocolate chips. By the way, LOVE those! They are one of the few things I have found that I honestly cannot taste a difference between the regular version (with casein) and those.

Okay, so I've got my recipe ready, my ingredients all set out, measuring cups and spoons ready to go, and the oven preheating. So now I begin....

I put all the flour replacement mixture and dry ingredients together. Then I begin "creaming" the vegan butter replacement sticks, sugars, and gluten-free vanilla (which, by the way, costs $11.49 for 2 ounces! Someone PLEASE tell me there's a better way!). Everything is going fine until the mixture starts to come together....only it's not really coming together. It's mixed but it looks like, well, like when you've made an alfredo sauce and you've cooked it too long and it "broke." No problem, this is only the first step so I keep marching on.

Next, I add the eggs. Hey, now my mixture is looking a bit better and more like what I'm used to from making cookies the old way. With three steps, I add the dry ingredients mixture into the creamed butter, sugars, and eggs. This stuff is looking better all the time. By the time I get the flour mixture all blended in and the chocolate chips added, I have just enough time to get enough dough dropped on my pan to make the first batch and clean things up before the oven beeps.

Everything gets cleaned up, the oven beeps, the cookies go in the oven, and I'm loving this home stretch period. It's the time when you know in a few short minutes you will be stuffing your face with cookies. Seven minutes pass and I take a peek in the oven. Unfortunately, at the very same time my mouth was watering in anticipation of a chocolate chip cookie pigout session, I realized my brilliant idea wasn't brilliant at all. I opened the oven door to see the flattest, most pathetic looking chocolate chip cookies probably ever made. Just by looking I could tell they weren't done yet so I still wasn't losing hope. Two minutes later...I open the oven door again. Now the edges of the cookies had migrated so far from their original centerings that some of them had fused together to form cookie amoebae - but they looked ready to come out.

As I always do with cookies, I let them set on the pan for a good minute or two before trying to remove them with a spatula for transferring to a wire rack for cooling. No go, these cookies were still too soft. Another two minutes go by and I try again. Another no go. So here is where my next idea comes and this one was actually pretty good as it turns out. Okay, a little background first: I have this thing about baking cookies directly on a cookie sheet, as in, I don't do it. Yes, I'm a snob. Yes, I use parchment paper just about every time I bake any kind of cookie or pastry. So anyhoo, my idea is to remove the whole piece of paper with cookies intact and place it on the wire rack to cool. I do it successfully and then comes the question of how to cook the rest of the dough. Trashing almost an entire batch of cookie dough in any instance would be a travesty but trashing a batch of dough made with GFCF ingredients would be simply unconscionable considering the cost.

Without a piece of parchment paper to cover my cookie sheet, I am left with a perfectly clean pan to put back in the cabinet OR dump the entire batch of cookie dough on. So that's exactly what I do. I pop it in the oven, set the timer for fifteen minutes, go in the other room and plop out my breast for DD who still breastfeeds, and I wait.

BEEP! The timer goes off. I get the pan out and what sits before me is one of the best-looking pans of "(Not so)Tollhouse Pan Cookies" I've ever made. Being the eager taste-tester I am, I immediately cut off a square to find that they taste as good as they look. I think even a hardcore cookie snob would have been hard-pressed to to know these were GFCF had they not been forewarned.

Lesson learned: There's a good reason so many GFCF cookbooks have recipes calling for common GFCF ingredients to duplicate regular recipes, rather than people using GFCF mixes in non-GFCF-adapted recipes - the results just won't be the same. Were these cookies good? Yes. Would I make them like this again? Not in a million years. Will I use my favorite GFCF chocolate chip cookie recipe the next time? Yes. And if I happen to be setting my ingredients out to make them and find I am out of something, I will take that as my clue that I just wasn't meant to eat chocolate chip cookies that day.

By the way, the GFCF recipe I mentioned that is my favorite is called "The BEST GF Chocolate Chip Cookies" and is found in Special Diets for Special Kids by Lisa Lewis.