Ideal Bite

Whip It Up: Sugar Cookies With Jam

Sugar Daddy

10.30.2009

Submitted by alara on Thu, 10/29/2009 - 11:00pm.

Food & Drink

The Bite:

Looking for a healthier sweet(ie) that's loaded...with flavor? Your allergy-prone kiddo'll be well off with this one: Make a batch of gluten- and dairy-free organic sugar cookies at home. Jean Duane, aka the Alternative Cook, shared this recipe with us for a jam-filled sandwich cookie without a speck of butter, wheat flour, or cow's milk. The taste? Rich.

The Benefits:

About 2 million Americans suffer from wheat allergies, while close to 50 million Americans can't tolerate lactose (milk sugar). These cookies are safe for kids with food allergies.
Organically farmed soil absorbs a wealth of CO2 - about a third more than regularly farmed soil - and organic farmers apply no pesticides to their crops.
Homemade baked goods don't milk as many resources by cutting out the production, synthetic preservatives, transport, and packaging waste of store-bought cookies.

Wanna Try:

Jammie Sammies
Makes 12 cookies

To make these sandwich cookies with a cutout design, you'll need two fluted-edge cookie cutters (circles or heart-shaped look great) in two sizes. Here, the recipe uses 4-inch- and 3-inch-diameter cutters.

Ingredients:
(local and organic whenever possible)

1 cup cane sugar, plus 2 Tb for sprinkling
1/2 cup walnut or sunflower oil
2 tsp vanilla
3 egg whites
1/3 cup vanilla rice, nut, or seed milk
1 1/4 cup whole grain sorghum flour (milletlike grain)
1 1/4 cup whole grain brown rice flour
1/2 cup sweet rice flour
1 tsp each cream of tartar, baking soda, and baking powder
2 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp salt
1 jar fruit preserves

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a stand mixer, combine sugar and wet ingredients (oil through milk). In a separate bowl, whisk together dry ingredients (flour through salt) and add to wet ingredients. Mix well. Refrigerate dough for 2 hours.

Oil hands and baking surface, and roll out dough about 1/2-inch thick. Start with the larger cookie cutter, and cut dough for the bottoms and tops. With the smaller cutter, cut out the center of the tops. Carefully remove the dough around the cutouts. Sprinkle remaining sugar on both the bottoms and tops. Bake 10-12 minutes. Cool.

Thickly smear the bottom cookie with fruit preserves and place the cutout cookie on top to make a sandwich.

Adapted from Bake Deliciously! Gluten and Dairy Free Cookbook by Jean Duane

Timeout

Alison isn't much of a baker, but this cookie dough was easy to handle and also worked well as a basic sugar-cookie base for one of her faves, snickerdoodles.

Bang For The Bite

If 10,000 Mama Biters make a dozen organic cookies instead of a regular batch, we'll keep the weight of 147 sugar daddies in pesticide-treated ingredients out of the house.

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