Gooey Gluten Free Cookies

Colombe Jacobsen and Erin McKenna bake gooey gluten-free chocolate cookies.

Female: Simple pleasures like chocolate chip cookies are usually off limits for people who have wheat sensitivities but creative thinkers like Eric McKenna have made gluten free baking so much more enticing. Erin: It’s a challenge but experimenting with all of these different gluten free alternatives is actually really fun. Let’s start with the gluten free flour blend. This is garbanzo fava bean flour mix with potato starch and arrowroot, it is going to make these cookies nice and light. Female: And I’m sure it tastes nothing like beans. Erin: It doesn’t, then we have flax meal and this is really good for me, I really like it for texture but it adds a lot of nutrition and we have baking soda for livener and then we put in xanthan gum which is going to help these cookies stick together. Now let’s mix our wet ingredients. I really like to use coconut oil. You can get the deodorized kind that’s not going to smell unless you really like the taste of coconuts. Next is the applesauce. Female: So what’s the function of that in this recipe? Erin: The applesauce is going to make it really moist and really chewy. Give it that nice moist center that we like in the cookies and then our vanilla, kosher salt and then we get our unsweetened cocoa powder in, you can add the evaporated cane juice will help get all those lumps out. Female: How would you describe the difference between evaporated cane juice and regular old sugar? Erin: Refined sugar is going to be highly processed and bleached and treated with all these things that aren’t really great for your body. Evaporated cane juice is less refined than white sugar and not bleached so it’s actually a little bit better for your body. Let’s add the dry ingredients in now, mix it up. Female: This looks really chocolatey and delicious. Erin: This is going to be a lot easier to mix than traditional cookie batches because I remember when I was little, it was the hardest part like struggling to stir the batter and get the flour in a little bit at a time so it gets so stiff and you can see it’s almost like a brownie dough. Female: It doesn’t take much elbow grease. Erin: It looks like you have done a great job stirring. The best part are the chips. Go ahead even more if you want. I think we’re ready to pan this. Female: Let’s do it. Erin: Make sure to line it with parchment paper, these tend to stick to the pan if you don’t have it. So I like my cookies to be normal sized, not big ones but you can always make them bigger. This is what I prefer, it’s about a tablespoon and you just go ahead and lay it on your sheet. Female: I love it, it just slides right off the spoon. Erin: That’s because it makes a really thin and crispy cookie but if you want you can always put a little more flour like about a quarter cup and it’s going to make it a lot cakier and thicker. Some people like that better. Female: So our oven’s preheated at 325, how long do they bake for? Erin: 14 minutes. We’re going to put them in the oven and rotate after about 7 minutes. Female: They come out of the oven very soft so you need to let them cool for at least 10 minutes on the sheet tray. These smell wonderfully rich. Erin: So are you ready to try one? Female: I can't resist. Erin: Me too. Female: So gooey and chewy and these are fantastic. Erin: Thank you. Female: And there are more of Erin’s gluten free recipes on the website, check them out, see you.