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[darkemeralds]

I found Garam Masala Chocolate Ginger Cookies via this post by aquinasprime in omnomnom, and instantly changed my office party potluck plans from Crack Pie to these little darlings.

(For those who don't know, as I didn't know: The composition of garam masala differs regionally, with wide variety across India. Some common ingredients are black & white peppercorns, cloves, malabar leaves, long pepper (also known as pippali), black cumin (known as shahi jeera), cumin seeds, cinnamon, black, brown, & green cardamom, nutmeg, star anise and coriander seeds. Thank you, Wikipedia. I sent a donation.)

Oh my lord, they're good. Spicy, warm, dark, crisp... I made up the dough last night and baked a trial of four cookies, two snowflakes and two teddy bears. The snowflake I ate was excellent.

Like most gingerbread-style cookies, these aren't super rich (and would probably be just as good with a third less butter), so the calorie count per cookie is reasonably low--100 or so, not counting frosting, which I haven't added yet. I made them gluten-free with excellent results.

Comments

[executrix]

Also, y'know what's really good with garam masala? Very-slightly-sweet cookies/biscuits made with yogurt, your favorite gluten-free flour blend, and the spices.

[darkemeralds]

That sounds good. Would you leaven them? Like, baking-powder chocolate spice biscuits (in the American sense of "biscuit")?

The beauty of gluten-free baking, I've discovered (among its many tricks and drawbacks) is that you don't need to worry about overworking the flour in recipes depending on unactivated gluten for their tenderness (pie crust, biscuits...)

The down side is that things just don't hold together very well. But hey. I can eat them without heartburn, and that's a win.

[executrix]

About as much leavening as a cookie/British-type biscuit, not enough for a Southern-style biscuit--it's like a higher, softer cracker.

[darkemeralds]

Yum!

[sffan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the gluten-free options! Now I just have to get off my lazy ass and start trying out some of your recipes ;)

[darkemeralds]

Gluten-free baking is kind of fun. I experimented quite a bit, then settled on Shauna Ahern's Gluten Free All Purpose Mix, which I've gotten pretty confident in using to adapt regular wheat-flour recipes.

For the rest of cooking: pasta so far is a no-go--I haven't yet found a GF pasta that's worth eating. Everything else is easy. Potatoes and rice are not a hard way to go (at least not for me), cornstarch is a good thickener, and really the only thing I miss are croissants. Sigh.

[executrix]

If you had a splendiferous GF croissant in front of you, you probably wouldn't eat it anyway because of all the butter! But I know I've seen GF croissant recipes from reliable sources.

Also, this time of year is good for a hearty dish of kasha, which not only is GF but isn't even really a grain.

sffan: Ahern says that the real key to successful GF baking is weighing ingredients instead of trying to eyeball them in a measuring cup.

[darkemeralds]

Kasha is buckwheat, isn't it? (Why yes, she answered herself after looking on Wikipedia. Yes it is.) Buckwheat groats are part of my eight-"grain" hot breakfast cereal (the other seven are corn, rice, sorghum, oats, flaxseeds, millet, and quinoa) and it's delicious and filling. And protein-y.

If I see a splendiferous GF croissant in front of me, I'll eat it and cut elsewhere. But my standards of splendiferousness are pretty high. I lived in France.

SFFan: definitely use a kitchen scale for GF baking. Weighing rather than measuring my flours has been the key to successful results.