Sometimes I find myself itching to bake something. It usually happens over the weekend, thank the gods. When else would I have time to search the web for a good recipe for whatever I’m hankering for, prepare the ingredients (is there a law of nature which states that butter softens more slowly when you’re dying for a cookie?), get out the measuring cups and spoons, bowls, pan, whisk, follow the recipe, wildly diverge from the recipe, spill flour and sugar all over the kitchen counter, bake, cool, and finally, load the dishwasher, clean the counters and ponder mopping the floor. Believe me, just writing that ridiculous run-on sentence is nearly as exhausting as actually doing everything it describes.
Still, there’s something primally satisfying about the alchemy of baking. Think about it… a cookie is so much grander when you’ve made it yourself. Moreso when you follow the recipe only loosely, exchanging one ingredient for another, and adding in yet others. What happens when you leave out half the sugar? Replace it with honey? How about oat flour instead of wheat? Sometimes you wind up with a gloppy mess. Other times a tasty treat. You might create a Mona Lisa (OK, maybe Warhol’s soup can) or Frankenstein. It’s the definition of flying by the seat of your pants. Exhilarating. (Really!)
The main thing to remember is to keep the ratios more or less the same. If you remove a wet ingredient, replace the moisture you’ve lost. The same rule applies to dry ingredients.
These cookies are the fruits of a windy Sunday afternoon and a hankering for homemade chocolate chip cookies. I made two versions of this cookie, one with chocolate chips and the other with candied rangpur lime peel. As it turns out, I rather preferred the latter.
weirdo cookies
These cookies are loosely based on a gluten-free recipe from Elana’s Pantry. My goal was to make wheat-free chocolate chip cookies. I wound up with oat flour-cornmeal-cardamom-rangpur lime peel cookies. Pretty tasty ones too.
1 cup whole grain oat flour
1 cup almond flour made of blanched almonds
1/2 cup finely ground cornmeal
1 TBS light brown sugar or evaporated cane juice
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp ground cardamom
10 TBS melted butter
1 TBS vanilla extract
1/4 cup agave nectar
1 egg
a handful or two of candied rangpur lime or other citrus peel
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and line a baking sheet or pan with parchment paper.
- In a large bowl, sift together the dry ingredients except the citrus peel.
- In a smaller bowl, combine the wet ingredients.
- Add the wet mixture into the dry ingredients in thirds. After adding a third of the wet ingredients, mix until almost absorbed. Repeat with the remaining thirds.
- Add in the candied citrus peel and combine.
- Drop the dough onto the baking sheet by the tablespoon and flatten each one.
- Bake for 10-20 minutes. Ten minutes for a more tender cookie, twenty for a crisper one.
