Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies, Converted

I have a friend who is a true foodie. She enters recipe contests and wins them. She's got a new blog where she is taking on the challenge of feeding her family of 5 on $75 a week.

Today she posted a recipe for these:


Oh. My.

It was good timing because I "needed" to make cookies today. Her recipe was a good candidate for a gluten free makeover, so I tried them.

Oh. My.

There is a reason she does well in recipe contests. These are amazing. Its a good thing I have quartet rehearsal tonight with three guys who like cookies because these are dangerous.

When I look at converting a cookie recipe, there are a few clues as to how easy it is going to be. If I want to be virtually guaranteed of success the first time (i.e. I'm feeling lazy), I look for these characteristics:

1. A cup of flour or less in the recipe. Why? Because if it doesn't have much flour to begin with that means the cookie is not depending so much on gluten for its structure. It also means that its not depending on wheat for taste (think shortbread).

2. Bar cookies are a good bet, because they are contained in a pan with sides. My baking flops tend to be spectacular messes that run off the side of the pan and make the whole house fill with smoke. Most of the time they taste pretty good, they just have no structure. Bar cookies have four solid walls of built in structure.

3. Clues in the recipe that point to good structure. If a recipe instructs me to flatten a cookie with my hand or a fork it is a good sign that most likely it is not a dough that will flatten out on its own (and run all over my oven.).

This particular recipe met two of my three criteria for an easy conversion so I went for it. Actually, I felt so confident about it that I doubled the recipe. As you can see, it worked really well. For the flour I measured by weight and substituted part Pamela's mix and part coconut flour.