Gluten Free Sour Cream Sugar Cookies (Christmas Cookies)

It's that time of year again!  Time to put up Christmas decorations and fill the air with the wonderful aromas of Christmas baking.  This time of year can be frustrating for a new celiac since the majority of your favorite recipes are now off limits for you.  And who wants to bake their favorite recipes just so everyone else can enjoy them?  Here's the good news: there are a lot of GF food bloggers out there and chances are at least one of them has put up a recipe similar to yours, but gluten free!  This one is a Christmas classic in our house.  I posted it last year (you can see the original here), but last year they turned out as drop cookies.  Not quite what I was going for.  These cookies were meant to be cut into little stars and Christmas trees and circles with pretty scalloped edges!   This year I looked back at my recipe and wasn't totally satisfied with it.  As I become more familiar with GF baking I start to "assign" certain flours to certain types of recipes, and this one just had too much sorghum in it.  Sorghum is a heavy flour, but it behaves very similar to wheat flour.  So I divided it in half and put in some brown rice flour instead.  These turned out so beautifully!  The dough was pliable and rolled out thin, and the cookies were delicious!  You would never know they were gluten free.  That, my friends, is success.  

Sour Cream White Cookies - Grandma's Cookies

Ingredients

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup lard or butter
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1/2 cup milk
• 4 eggs
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 3 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp xanthan gum
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 6 cups GF flour: 
• 1 1/2 cups soy flour
• 1 1/2 cups tapioca flour/starch
• 3/4 cup sorghum flour
• 3/4 cup brown rice flour
• 3/4 cup sweet rice flour
• 3/4 cup potato starch

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Cream together butter and sugar
3. Add sour cream, vanilla, and eggs
4. In a separate bowl whisk together dry ingredients
5. Alternate adding dry ingredients and milk, mix just until blended.
6. Section your dough and roll it out on a floured surface (I use sweet rice flour for this) until it is about a 1/4" thick.  Cut out using your favorite cookie cutters!  The scraps can be recombined with the dough and used again.
7. Bake for 12-13 minutes on a greased cookie sheet or until the edges are golden brown

Icing

• 2 Tbsp butter
• 2 cups icing sugar
• Milk or whipping cream
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Blend all ingredients together, add more milk or icing sugar as needed to achieve desired consistency.

Gluten Free Roll Kuchen

My Mennonite roots are coming out here.  Hot summer day + roll kuchen + watermelon = bliss.  Diagnose a few family members with celiac disease and the roll kuchen days were over.  Oh how we mourned that loss.  But for those of you following along, you know that I refuse to be told I can't have something.  If someone else has done it, then I'll find out and try it myself.

The final push to find a recipe (and try it) came when I spent a weekend in Steinbach for a family reunion and (unfortunately) ended up sitting beside the big bowl of roll kuchen (NOT gluten free).  Enough! I said.  I'm having roll kuchen when I get home.

Berry Cream Muffins

Double post today!  Muffins convert so nicely when the recipe includes added moisture in the form of sour cream, applesauce, zucchini, etc.  These ones are so great for breakfast.  Husband and I are headed off to the mountains today to have a little Christmas celebration just the two of us.  Our hotel includes a continental breakfast, but I just never know if that will include something I can eat.  So I'm baking muffins to bring along!

Christmas Cookies

Every year at Christmas, my Mom made my favorite cookies.  The soft white ones cut into fun shapes with icing and sprinkles on top.  They were one of the first to go after she became a celiac.  Something about being the only one eating gluten free took the motivation out of experimenting for her.  I think now that there are two of us (albeit in different homes), we are both a little more eager to make our favorites again.  This year has been a big one for experimenting and trying new recipes.