We found out a few weeks ago that my husband may be allergic to wheat. Seeing as his diet revolves around the enjoyment of gluten, this has ruined his world a little bit. In that first week after getting the news, he would randomly and with great regret announce things, a propos of nothing, that he could now no longer consume. One evening when he was loading the dishwasher, I heard from the next room the sudden outburst: “Cinnamon rolls!” Then a grumble and maybe an expletive. He’s taken to craving sourdough bread.

The Fairy Princess Badass and I decided we would try to find a way to make wheat-free cookies for him. The best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever eaten were made with rice flour, so I thought, Sure, I can do this. Of course, when I’d learned of this and tried to make those cookies, substituting rice flour instead of all-purpose and making no other changes, the result was a textural mess. This time I went to the Internet (or internet now, if you pay attention to the AP). I read a bunch of different kinds of wheat-free chocolate chip cookie recipes and people’s comments about how they’d modified said recipes. Then I cobbled together something that was like them that sounded like fun. Then I went to my pantry and figured out what ingredients I actually had and modified it a little more. I suspect I will continue playing with this one.

The cookies turned out beautifully and were quite tasty. The FPB wanted to use some cute cookie molds she’d gotten for her birthday, but I don’t recommend it with chocolate chip cookie batter because it’s lumpy and doesn’t really conform to shapes well. (The batter does, however, taste delicious.) This batch yields about 3-4 dozen medium-sized cookies.

If you use this recipe, post in the comments here and tell me about it. I’m also interested to know what variations you might experiment with, so do tell!

Wheat-Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes That Taste As Good As Their Glutinous Brethren

ingredients:

1 ¾ c. rice flour
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
½ stick (real) butter (softened)
¼ c. refined organic coconut oil
½ c. white sugar
½ c. brown sugar
1 ½ tsp. vanilla extract
2 large eggs (almost room temperature)
1 package chocolate morsels
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 dash nutmeg

process:

Combine the rice flour, salt, and baking soda in a bowl. Set aside.

In a mixer, combine the butter, coconut oil, white sugar, brown sugar, eggs, and vanilla till just kind of gooey.

Add the flour mixture one giant spoonful at a time while the mixer is going on a slowish speed.

Add the chocolate chips while the mixer is still going.

Add in the cinnamon and nutmeg while the mixer is still going.

Turn off the mixer and scrape the bottom and sides of the bowl to make sure no part of the batter is left out of the mixing, and give it another spin if needed. Cover the mixture and put it in the refrigerator for two hours. (This is an important step that will prevent your finished product from having a grainy, crumbly, disappointing texture.)

When it’s time to bake the cookies, preheat your oven to 375 degrees. (I use a convection oven so I can put three cookie sheets in at once, but this means the oven will burn hot and things will cook faster. Moderate your cooking time, if need be, based on the kind of oven you’re using.)

Put roundish clumps of this glorious batter onto parchment paper on your cookie sheet. (Parchment paper is the best! The cookies will slide off it when they come out of the oven without fighting you and turning into a crumbly, disappointing mess. You won’t even need a spatula. It also makes the cookie sheet clean-up effortless.) Make sure you put the raw cookie blobs at least an inch apart, since they will spread and flatten out a bit in the oven.

Bake the cookies for 8 minutes or until golden brown.

When you take them from the oven, you can lift the whole sheet of parchment with the cookies on it and set that on a cooling rack. They should be ready to eat in just a very few minutes.

Enjoy!