I went into this recipe with some trepidation, dear readers, because I am a self-confessed cookie butcherer. Bear in mind I haven’t eaten a cookie, gluten free or otherwise in months and back in the day when I baked the tasty little buggers I nearly always burnt them to a crisp. I can make a 9 layered Doberge cake with no problem and pies from scratch but Lord help me if cookies don’t just hate me. But we all have to try try and try again so I grabbed the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from the June/July issue of Living Without and got to town.

This recipe calls for either quinoa flakes or GF oats. I am not a celiac patient so since I already had a drum of oats in the pantry I didn’t go buy GF specified oats. I’ll trust you’ll know yourself as to whether or not to risk it.  The good thing which came out of this was that my dear husband discovered that oatmeal does not come from a paper envelope and in fact it is I, not the Quaker Elves, who puts the raisins and maple syrup and whatnot in his bowl.

Let me admit that I learned a lot with this recipe and am going to share my mistakes with you. I do not own a blender or food processor at the moment so it took a heck of a lot longer to get through this recipe than it would have had I had such a thing on my counter. As it is, I do have a mortar and pestle and so crushed the oats in little batches.  The only difference I can ascertain is that my cookies came out more like oatmeal raisin cookies in texture rather than soft Tollhouse-like biscuits. That’s all right though; I like crunchy cookies better.

For heaven’s sake follow the directions. I’m not particularly good at that and I’m the substitution queen because frankly I never read the whole recipe before I start to see if I’ve got all the ingredients. I am slowly learning to get it together!

This is not a difficult recipe for anyone to master. There aren’t a ton of ingredients but I will caution you to pay attention to the amount of  xanthan gum used. I used a blended GF flour which called for a lot less gum than the recipe itself called for so I went with the package directions.

The finished product here has 110 calories per cookie but a word of caution to those avoiding sugar: this recipe calls for quite a lot of sugar.

Since I didn’t use a blender to grind up my oats, the batter here is probably a lot more lumpy than what it should be. With all that sugar the actual dough doesn’t taste all that sweet so there wasn’t a whole lot of bowl-licking. Which is probably best for everyone’s hips anyway, lol.

HowStuffWorks advises to always chill your batter but the recipe didn’t call for this. As I’ve never made GF cookies before I decided to cook 1/2 of the dough and chill 1/2 of the dough for 1 1/2 hours before baking. The unchilled dough didn’t seem as thick as the recipe indicated it would be but again this might have to do with the oats’ consistency.

Now here’s the unchilled batter all ready to get baked into yummy yummy cookies. This is where I must reiterate to follow directions. I made these on a Saturday morning in my jimjams and wasn’t about to get dressed and get the parchment paper I should have been using on the cookie sheet. So this first batch was made with a cooking spray-coated dark sheet.

And apparently these cookies very much need the parchment paper to be a success. The edges burned right to the sheet and the middles didn’t cook.When I scraped them off I saved the edges to crumble up over ice cream.

Okay, just to be fair I adjusted the oven a little. I can’t really adjust the racks very much so the first batch I had baked on the bottom rack. This one I moved to the top rack and while they still didn’t rock like the magazine photo, at least I got them out in whole chunks from the baking sheet.

It was about this time that I dragged my butt out to the convenience mart and got a roll of waxed paper to try and save the rest of the batch so I wouldn’t waste the $5 blended flour I’d tried out in it. And no, I did not include photos in this post of the absolute wreck I made of the kitchen when I dropped an egg on the floor and burst open the bag of $5 flour all over the sink.

Ahhh-success! Here’s what I did differently: used the waxed paper like the recipe indicated to, chilled the dough 1 1/2 hours and dropped smaller portions of dough onto the sheet. These came out lovely and didn’t stick to anything; their texture was chewy and just the right blend of dough and chip.

Tasty Factor: even done wrong these are tasty cookies and would probably be even better using a blender

Poopy factor: Husband (a self-admitted gluten free hater just on principle) says: Not bad when you follow the directions (read: as good as he’s going to admit to.)