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Desserts Uncategorized

Bacon Banana Cookies — Sweet, Salty and Smiley

This week, I dared some friends to make a recipe that struck me as being a bit outside the box — strawberry leek quesadillas.  I invited them to write a guest blog post about the experience…stay tuned to see if they deliver the goods!

In the meantime, not to be left completely inside the box, the littlest chef and I made these Bacon Banana Cookies. If you’re a fan of your sweet and your salty in one package, these are for you!

We are celebrating the Chinese/Lunar New Year tonight (more on that menu soon), so I am teaching the littlest chef about the symbolism in the shapes of foods eaten for the Chinese New Year.  These cookies are not Asian by any stretch of the imagination, but they do use bananas, which are shaped like a smile. If eating these cookies makes us smile in the new year, the Chinese would definitely approve!

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Breads, Muffins & Other Baked Delicacies Desserts Uncategorized

Cookies for Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is high on the littlest chef’s list of favorite holidays, so we will be hosting a little party to make Valentine’s Day themed cookies again this year.

Our cookies will include:

  • Decorated Roll-Out Sugar Cookies
  • Chocolate-Cherry Slice ‘n’ Bake Cookies
  • Linzer Cookies

Details to follow!

Categories
Desserts

Holiday Cookies, Gluten-Free Recipes Triumph!

 

Last Saturday was our holiday cookie decorating party and the third year that we’ve made holiday cookies with the littlest chef.  This time, we had two of the littlest chef’s friends along for the festivities (think:  sugar x 3 little girls).  Because one of KC’s honorary Aunties (and our chief cookie icer) has been avoiding wheat as of late, we mustered up our courage and made 4 different gluten-free cookie recipes with no time for practice runs (alright, we did make one batch of regular cookie dough in case all of the others were a complete flop).  I’m happy to report that all of the gluten-free recipes worked beautifully, and honestly, I would not have know they were gluten-free if I’d not been the one mixing the dough.  For all of these recipes, I substituted a gluten-free flour blend available from Nutsonline.com for all flours/starches called for in the recipes.

Here are links to the recipes and pictures of the results:

Gluten-Free Chocolate Crinkles

Gluten-Free Molasses Ginger Cookies

 

Nighty Night Cookies (naturally gluten-free, as they contain no flour)

For this recipe, I substituted pistachio meal for the chocolate chips to make pistachio nighty nights.  They were so delicious that I don’t have a picture to share.  They got eaten too quickly!

 And, lastly, the Gluten-Free Lemon Sugar Cookies, which were expertly rolled out & cut by one Auntie, and decorated by 3 little girls and 2 more Aunties, for numerous edible masterpieces!

 

Lots of people who eat a gluten-free diet assume that they can’t partake in holiday food traditions like Christmas cookies.  If you’ve got a gluten-free eater in your life, make them some of these cookies and watch the smiles form!