Gluten Free & Vegan Peanut Butter Lace Cookies

My favorite store-bought gluten free cookies cost $10.99 for a small bag. Though they cost a small fortune, once in a blue moon, when the mood strikes, they are worth it. However, when I spotted them last week in Whole Foods, I stopped to read the ingredients before tossing them in my shopping cart and realized I would have to give them up since I am no longer eating animal products of any kind. I needed to come up with a gluten free, vegan cookie, and fast. Bingo! I found a recipe for Low Fat Peanut Butter Cookies. With a few alterations to make them gluten free, voila, I made some oh yeah these are delicious Peanut Butter cookies. I replaced the whole wheat flour in the original recipe with three ingredients - brown rice flour, potato starch, and tapioca starch - I cut the flaxseed meal in half and replaced what I eliminated with almond flour - and I added xanthan gum, a necessary ingredient in gluten free baking.

For those of you who want to give this recipe a whirl but don't have the flours used for the GF flour mix in the recipe, I would bet you could sub in any GF all purpose flour, of which there are thankfully many available. If you don't have almond flour or flaxseed meal, play around with the ingredients. Use more of the Gluten Free flour mix, or more of the oatmeal. Or use all flaxseed meal and eliminate the almond meal. Experiment, don't be afraid. You might come up with your very own concoction!

Note: these are not like crumbly, thick peanut butter cookies - they're much thinner, sort of like lace cookies, thus I changed the name of the cookie from Peanut Butter cookies to Peanut Butter Lace cookies. I also think it would be a good idea to try them with other types of nut butters, as recommended by Make Love In the Kitchen.

Peanut Butter Lace Cookies
adapted by Ellen Allard from www.myvegancookbook.com
(click here for printable recipe)

1/2 cup Gluten Free Flour Mix (see below)
2 tbsp flaxseed meal
2 tbsp almond meal
1/2 cup GF rolled oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tbsp applesauce
1/4 cup maple syrup (agave syrup would be a suitable substitution)
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix all the ingredients in a large mixing bowl, stirring well to incorporate everything together. Drop the dough onto either a greased cookie sheet or a parchment paper covered cookie sheet. Dip a fork into a glass of water and then press the tines of the fork into the surface of the cookie to create that oh-so-authentic peanut butter cookie look. Dip the fork into the water before pressing each cookie.

These took 15 minutes in my oven. I let the tray sit on the counter for about 5 minutes before transferring the cookies to a cooling rack where they sat for about 3 seconds before one of the cookies jumped into my hand, whereupon I gobbled it up. And then I had another. I almost went back for a third cookie, but it was 11 PM!

BTW, next time, I'm going to add chocolate chips. Vroom, vroom, vroom.

Gluten Free Flour Mix
from Annalise Roberts Gluten Free Baking Classics

For 3 cups mix, blend the following:
2 cups brown rice flour
2/3 cup potato starch
1/3 cup tapioca flour

Cookie Monster has nothing over me:).