Gluten Free Nut Butter and Jam Sandwich Cookies

Rarely do I feel the urge to bake, and much to my annoyance, when the mood strikes it is usually late at night, or in the middle of a blizzard, or when I am just downright too lazy to go back into town to the store. What this means is that I often find myself ill-equipped for following a recipe as it's written. I'll have baking powder but no baking soda, brown sugar but no powdered sugar. A 1/4 bag of chocolate chips will be wallowing in the cupboard along with 2 tablespoons of oatmeal and more shredded coconut than I can ever remember buying but I won't have enough of any one thing to make even a half batch of a single recipe. So I improvise. Often the substitutions and tweaks end up being delicious but there have been some real train wrecks too. I remember one particularly abysmal carrot cake cooked in a tiny cottage at the end of a dead end road during a snow storm in Maine with my best friend after too many bottles of wine. I confess, we ate half of it anyway. Maine in winter can call for desperate measures.

On an unusually peaceful Sunday afternoon last week I suddenly wanted nothing more than to make cookies. I knew I had the basics for something as simple as a sugar cookie, and then I remembered all the half eaten jars of jam in the fridge. With no toaster in the house and bread only making a rare appearance in the kitchen, we suddenly have a glut of jam and no vehicle. I started searching the web for simple, gluten free, thumb print cookies. Instead, I stumbled upon a recipe for peanut butter and jam sandwich cookies. Of course! What goes better with jam than good, old PB?

True to form I had barely a quarter of the peanut butter I needed and it was of the chunky variety, not the called-for smooth type. But when has something as silly as having the necessary ingredients stopped me from trying a new recipe? I mixed the chunky stuff with smooth almond butter and followed the rest of the recipe to the letter (though I did add twice as much salt as suggested and cut out a little of the sugar).

These were by far, the easiest, fastest, yummiest peanut butter cookies I have ever made and they are definitely going to be a staple now. I slathered a few with raspberry jam, a few with Lingonberry jam, and the last with fig preserves. The cookie is light and airy and not to sweet and it actually gets softer a day later making it even more like the best PB&J sandwich--chewy, and with the perfect ratio of PB to J. You can easily swap the peanut butter for another kind of nut butter, though if you use cashew or walnut butter I would add even more salt to the recipe. This would also be a great cookie for making ice cream sandwiches. Just saying.

Nut Butter & Jam Sandwich Cookies

adapted from Haut Appetit

makes about 10 sandwiches

1 cup natural peanut or other nut butter (smooth or chunky or mix of the two)

1 large egg

1/2 cup sugar

1 T almond or other dairy free milk

1 T brown rice or other gluten free flour

1 t baking soda

1 t salt (or more if using a sweeter nut butter)

favorite jam or jams

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper

In a large mixing bowl beat the egg and sugar together until creamy and frothy. Stir in the almond milk. Add the nut butter and stir with a wooden spoon until well combined.

Mix in the flour, baking soda and salt until well combined. Taste a little bit and adjust salt as needed.

Using a tablespoon, scoop the batter onto the cookie sheets. Dampen a fork in water and use the back of it to flatten each ball of dough, leaving a criss-cross mark on each one.

Bake 15 minutes or a little longer. You want the edges to be just slightly golden.

Let the cookies cool slightly. Spread a generous layer of your favorite jam onto the flat side of one cookie and place the flat side of another cookie on top of it, pressing gently to seal the sandwich. Repeat until you run out of cookies.

These cookies will keep really well in an airtight container for several days, if you can keep your hands off them.

Coconut Rose Pudding

For the past three days I have been craving something that I have never made and never even tasted. Coconut pudding. Where the notion for such a thing came from I have no idea. But here I am, craving something sweet and cold, refreshing but creamy, the kind of dessert that takes two bites to get off the spoon. Comfort food.

With the ever growing popularity of coconut water it has become pretty easy to get access to the stuff. As with most trends, once it catches on there are people who become purists, which, as far as I can tell, in the case of coconut water, means getting it raw, or better yet, straight out of a green coconut. In this case, the purists are right. Many of the boxed and canned coconut waters taste too sweet, too processed, like the flavor of coconut instead of the thing itself. If you live somewhere with a good Asian market or close to a Whole Foods, you can easily get your hands on a young Thai coconut. It's worth the dicey work with a cleaver just to get at that fresh, almost effervescent, incomparable water.

Once you've refreshed yourself with the water you're left with silky coconut meat which bears little resemblance to the chalky flesh you find in the drier, brown-husked variety. This is slippery and almost gelatinous to the touch but dense when you sink your teeth in and delicate in taste.

Traditional pudding involves cream and milk and actual cooking. Maybe it's the hot weather, maybe it's the past weeks of a sprint-paced life, maybe it's as simple as missing someone I love who now is gone. Whatever the reason, I really needed this pudding to be simple, no-frills, easy to make and comforting to eat. I recently read that the Sanskrit word for coconut palm means "tree that gives all that is necessary for living." Eating this, barefoot in my dusty backyard, a thin slice of moon rising in the twilight, and not a sound but the crickets and my spoon against the bowl, I just might have to agree.

Coconut Rose Pudding

serves 4

2 young Thai green coconuts

1/2 cup coconut water reserved from the coconuts

1 t raw honey or other sweetener

2 t rose water

Lie one of the coconuts on its side. Carefully and with confidence, use a cleaver or other very sharp butcher knife to cut off the top of the shell. Do your best not to lose too much of the coconut water inside. 

Once you've cracked the nut, pour the water into a cup or jar and repeat with the second coconut. Drink some of the water. It's delicious.

Wielding the cleaver again, split the coconut in half from top to bottom so you may more easily access the meat. Using a spoon, scoop the meat from the shell and place it in a high speed blender. 

Add the honey, rose water, and about 1/2 a cup of the reserved coconut water and blend until smooth. Chill in the fridge for at least a couple hours so the pudding thickens.*

Top with a sprinkle of cinnamon, cocoa powder, some chopped pistachios or just enjoy as is. 

*I put one small bowl in the freezer just for fun and ended up with a sorbet-like consistency which was very nice.

Note: This can be made vegan by replacing the honey with stevia or coconut nectar. Stevia will also make this a cleanse-friendly sweet.