I’ve burned through my gluten-free flour options in these last few months where I’ve been avoiding wheat. I made these gluten-free cookies with a mix of barley flour and chickpea flour, honey, sesame oil, dates and apricots. I made them in an attempt to satisfy my sweet tooth without:
a) refined sugar
b) white, whole wheat, corn-based flours
c) butter
All the Martha Stewart lovers out there are shaking their heads at me, thinking, “Boy this is going to be awful…” but no, “good thing”-lovers, you’re wrong. These were super. Barley has gluten in it, but for some reason I was okay with it (or thought I was…turns out I wasn’t), and chickea flour is hard to digest but is completely gluten-free. Butter is a tough one to replace, and is normally done with flavourless oil, but fortunately all I had was toasted sesame oil. I was worried it would be bitter, and it kind of was, but that worked really well with the honey. Kind of like Greek honey-sesame cookies. In fact I did the Greek Melamokorona method of honey soaking at the end (without using the big vat of honey…more like a drizzle. A delicious drizzle for sweetness.
And I went with the honey because I had no sugar and I had a lot of honey. Simple. Normally honey is going to make your cookies kind of cake-y, and it did, but beggars can’t be choosers.
What’s awful, though, is despite all my efforts, I STILL felt sick after eating these cookies. It turns out I’m highly sensitive to sulfites (dried fruit, even though I only used about 1/4 cup total of chopped dates and my apricots were sulfite-free). About 1% of the population has a severe reaction – for me that’s a ridiculous headache. Plus the fact that I shouldn’t have been eating the barley flour. Plus the fact that it turns out my body couldn’t metabolize ANY carbohydrates at the time. Seriously. ANY! As in everything from potatoes to fruit to honey!
Now I’m much better. I see Leah Loffe at the European Healthcare CEntre at Yonge and Sheppherd in Toronto. No crazy cleansing diets, she basically resets the body without the 6-week intense food elimination diets other holistic practitioners prescribe. It’s not a miracle cure, but I can eat gluten again, and she could diagnose me with what was actually wrong – the fact that I couldn’t digest ANY carbohydrates, not just individual foods. Same for omega-3’s and amino acids. That can make your life pretty miserable. Try eliminating all those for 6 weeks and see how far you get before you pass out from exhaustion and depression.
So my point is, these are great cookies for those who can handle barley flour (replace the barley flour with sorghum flour if you can’t), and the sesame don’t make you regret that you can’t have butter. And the honey is a real treat. Definitely don’t skip the chickpea flour, though, because the nuttiness is essential and adds to the sesame flavour. It’s a bit of a savoury treat where the honey sweetness sneaks up on you and you can chew and extrude all the sugar before swallowing. The tiny pieces of dried fruit help too, so I definitely recommend not skipping those, but find sulfite-free versions and only use a little. Chop them fine and a little goes a long way.
Honey, Sesame, Date and Apricot Cookies
1/3 cup toasted sesame oil
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp honey
1 egg
1 tbsp water
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup chickpea flour
1 1/2 cups cream of barley (or sorghum flour, or barley flour)
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt
1/4 cup dates and sulfite-free dried apricots, chopped very small
Beat the oil and honey on high. Add the egg, water and vanilla and beat.
In a large bowl combine the chickpea flour, cream of barley, baking soda, and salt. Add to the egg mixture (either beat on low or just stir), and then stir in the dates and dried apricots.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Use a large spoon to drop in appropriately-sized mounds on sesame oil-greased baking sheets. Don’t try to roll the cookies in your hands or they’ll get all over you. You can sort of shape them with the spoon into cookie-like shapes once they’re on the baking sheets. You can also choose to flatten them, but I like a slightly puffed cookie. This makes them cook less evenly, but also makes them softer on the inside while crispy on the outside.
Bake for 12- 15 minutes (one sheet at a time), or until the cookies are browned but cooked through on the inside. They won’t brown as much as a flour, sugar, and butter-based cookie, but you won’t mind.
Optional, but great last step: Remove cookies from baking sheet to rack of plates, and while still hot, melt the two remaining tbsp of honey and drizzle over cookies. Then move cookies around in honey that doesn’t get immediately absorbed to soak into the bottom of cookies. Add more or less honey to taste. Remember that the more you chew the cookies the better they’ll get as the sweetness of the dried fruit will come out.
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