Gluten Free Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies REBOOT

Sorry for that information confusion there folks! My draft went up instead of my real article, It didnt even include the recipe! Ahaha, now! Here’s for the real thing!

I can hardly believe it, after all these years of using blogs to help in my baking, I never thought I would be writing for one!

So I guess I should take the time to say, hello there! My name is Brittonie, and I’ll be your resident cooking guru~! I’m here to show you some of my favourite recipes, give some tips and tricks, and to be your smiling face in the kitchen! So let’s get right into it, shall we?

Something that has frustrated myself, and I know many others, is cooking for those with some sort of intolerance to different foods. This is daily life for me, since both gluten and dairy poses some problems on my health, and well, a lot of my family too. I often find that cooking is a bit of a pain… No, scratch that, a complete pain. At times, it is unbearable.

I’ve been a Pastry Chef for over three years now, and I’ve been cooking ever since I was little, and can I tell you, I’ve never really had much experience at all with cooking without butter and milk and flour or any of those staples. The closest we got to a gluten free dessert in the bakery was a coconut macaroon.

But all that changed about five months ago.

See, I had to have a little… sea change. Economic downturn, jobs and termites were the cause, and I ended up moving from the Western Suburbs of New South Wales, down to the Southern Highlands, where I am now living with my Aunt and Uncle. The temperature is a lot colder, and the public transport a lot less frequent. Both my relatives have a somewhat bad reaction to gluten and lactose, so I’ve really had to rewrite my whole cookbook.

This is one of the favourite recipes, and one of the easiest, and also, one of the easiest to modify, a plus is that is doesn’t make our insides feel like sin. It’s oh so yummy, and don’t stay for long around this house!

Gluten Free Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

Oven 180 Degrees Celcius, 160 fan forced

1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup castor sugar
1/2 cup melted butter or soy counterpart (I used Nuttlex)
1 egg
1 1/4 cup self raising flour or gluten free self raising flour, sifted
1/4 cup cocoa powder, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips
.
.
As I was saying, this recipe is a very simple one, and does not require a mixer, just a strong hand. I do adore one bowl recipes too. When I need a quick batch of biscuits, this is the recipe I use.

So preheat your oven to 160 degrees celcius if you’re using a fan forced oven, 180 if its regular.

Start off by combining the sugars in your bowl, so it looks a lot like beach sand. Easy peasy. Next, melt down your butter. The beauty of this recipe, is that I was able to use Nuttlex, Australia’s variation of soy butter. The only downside is that the final dough might be a bit wet, but that’s no problem in the baking.

Crack your egg into the sugar and give it a mix until it is all combined, then stream in your melted butter, and stir until it is all incorporated. You’ll end up with a caramel coloured soup, yum!

Next, we’ll add the sifted flour into the mix, I personally like to add the cocoa powder in, half way through adding the flour, so all the chocolatey goodness won’t have a chance to escape, but add it how you like. You will learn that I love chocolate as I post more and more… Mmm, chocolate.

Just a little note, you can also use gluten free flour in this recipe, like I have done here.

I would have much rather have used normal flour, it acts less like its a cloud and doesn’t turn your bench white, unless you’re working next to a pedestal fan… Don’t work next to a pedestal fan.

You will learn that I HATE gluten free flour, and I’m not scared to use such a strong word for the stuff. It turns many of my recipes to mere shadows of them selves, and it gets EVERYWHERE. Like talcom powder, it just goes poof. But, alas, this is what turns the recipe Gluten Free.

Fold through the flour, until the mixture is clear, then add the delightful chocolate chips! … Mmm, chocolate.

Now, you all must be thinking, only white chocolate chips? Where are the dark chocolate ones? Well, I must tell you, I have a habit, whenever I make anything with chocolate chips, which isn’t very often, its always a bag for me and bag for the mix. Well, I forgot the second bag of chocolate chips in my mad dash around Coles.

.. ahaha.

Moving on!

Now, whenever I make these cookies, I always make them HUGE, I love a good huge cookie. My aunt calls them Land of the Giant cookies. So if you want to go ahead and make giant cookies, this mix will make about 14, but make them smaller, and you will about 28 biscuits. Enough to feed the tribe.

Now, the Pastry chef in me wants to weight up the entire mix and divide it by 14 and get exact weight cookies. (A little back story on myself, I worked in a biscuit bakery for two years, were we made all the biscuits by hand. It was, and always will be, my favourite place to work, I miss it to this day, and Laurence Hopkins will always be my favourite boss.) But it’s good enough just to place heaps spoonfuls of the mix onto a sheet of baking paper on the appropriate tray. Baking biscuits at home isn’t supposed to be technical, its supposed to be fun! These puppies will spread just a bit, so I recommend baking 6 at a time for huge, and perhaps 8 for small.

We’ll bake these biscuits for 12-14 minutes, when you take them out of the oven, they will be soft, but leave the tray to cool for about 5 minutes, and transfer them to a wire rack with a spatula.

For this I think it’s good to have two trays going for the oven, recently I’ve had the time to bake my cookies one tray at a time, but if you are using two trays, remember to rotate your trays in the oven half way through cooking.

And you’re done! And you have a mountain of cookies to eat. With milk… or chocolate milk… or strawberry milk… or tea or coffee if you insist~

I recently gave this recipe to a friend of mine who’s child is allergic to everything in the book. I couldn’t imagine being a child and not being able to have a cookie, I was lucky enough to not have my intolerances impact me much as a kid.

This is partly the reason why I became a Pastry Chef, I want to make people happy with my sweets and treats, but to have a child say to their mother that they can finally be like the other kids, and have extra special chocolate biscuits just for them because of me? Well, that’s worth more than any award or medal or hat or michlen star I can be given.

All photos and drawings by me! See you next time! <3