Cowboy-ed Up Grain-free Cookies
Here and there I can take grains. Small doses spread out over days. Go to a party, pass on the rolls but accept the birthday cake. That’s it for the night though. Its a funny thing to share with folks that you have pretty big grain issues. They treat you weird, watch what you eat, decide if you are honest or what based on what you eat. Its not that I can’t eat grains ever but if/when I do it has to be seriously limited as I mentioned in the beginning. And I’ve been managing this for 13 years at this point in time. Getting your gut healthy has to be done with focus and determination and patience and consistency. Damage that has you in search of a list of medications to manage and control the pain isn’t fixed overnight. This far along though, I do get to eat treats again and we (the kids and I) adjust and manipulate recipes so they are ok for me, too. No food is worth being curled in a ball on the floor hours later. I promise.
So for cookies we replace regular wheat flour with a combination of almond, coconut and tapioca flours. These are the best ones for me with no digestive trauma following consumption. Plus they increase the fats in the food, add a sweetness which allows us to cut sugar down or out depending and really up the flavor of what we bake here in the Munson household.
Way back before I knew about my grain issue I loved to make Laura Bush’s Cowboy Cookie recipe but had stopped when I cut the fun out of my dietary life a while back. Thanks to the power of Pinterest, they popped up in the pins other folks were pinning and I made a run at them. With some changes and tweaks. This is what I came up with and its not bragging to say they are amazing because they are. Ho-lee-cow!
Cowboy-ed Up Grain-free Cookies
Ingredients
- 1-1/3 C almond flour
- 1-1/3 C coconut flour
- 1/3 C tapioca flour
- 1 Tbsp baking powder
- 1 Tbsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp salt
- 3 sticks of butter at room temperature
- 3/4 C white sugar
- 3/4 C packed light brown sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1 Tbsp vanilla
- 2 C semisweet chocolate chips
- 2 C old-fashioned rolled oats
- 2 C unsweetened flake coconut
- 2 C chopped pecans
- 1 C unsweetened dried cranberries
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°. Mix flours, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in bowl.
- In 8-quart (or larger) bowl, beat butter on medium speed until smooth and creamy. About 1 minute. Gradually beat in sugars and continue beating to combine, about 2 minutes. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating after each addition. Beat in vanilla. Stir in flour mixture until just combined. Add chocolate chips, oats, coconut, pecans and cranberries.
- For each cookie, drop a large spoonful onto an ungreased cookie sheet. These cookies are so packed with stuff and with the substitution of alternate flours you will have to do some minor shaping. I fit 12 cookies onto each cookie sheet. They will spread out some but not like a wheat flour cookie.
- I had to test the bake time because of the flour change, addition of cranberries and decrease in sugar from the original recipe. Where the original recipe called for a 17 minute bake time, I found that 11-12 minutes was perfect.
This recipe makes so much dough that I also made a cookie bar with it in a glass pan. I filled the pan to about 1/2 inch depth of packed dough and then cooked for approx. 15 minutes. They were also yum and less crumbly!
Enjoy!