I am, frustratingly, intolerant to gluten. Now much could be said on that subject but not now… Here instead is the first recipe that I want to share.
These are great if you like peanut butter, and great if you want a gluten free biscuit that doesn’t taste too brittle or too dry, and very easy to make if you want to do some (fairly) low maintenance home baking. I used a ready blended gluten free flour. In Leeds the brand stocked in (for example) Holland & Barrett, Co-operative, Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s is Doves Farm and that is what I use. I cannot vouch for another brand, but I doubt it would be much different. Only one way to find out though!
I have used normal oats. Oats in themselves are gluten free, but their lack of gluten free status stems from cross contamination from nearby wheat or barley fields. So for people with Coeliac disease then you must use certified gluten free oats, (although some people with Coeliac disease react to the proteins in oats as well). I find that ordinary oats in moderate quantity are ok for me and my IBS and I tend to buy them because they’re more readily available and much cheaper.
You will need:
- 175g / 6 oz plain, gluten free flour.
- 175g / 6 oz rolled oats
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 175 ml / 6 fl oz vegetable oil
- 225 g / 8 oz crunchy peanut butter
- 150g/ 5½ oz granulated sugar (well, technically 5.3 oz)
- 225g / 8 oz molasses sugar (or muscovado if you can’t find molasses sugar)
- 125ml / 4 fl oz milk (or soya milk if you want them to be vegan)
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
Mix together the flour, oats, baking powder, salt. In a separate bowl mix the oil, peanut butter, sugars, milk and vanilla extract. Make sure that you’ve got rid of all the little lumps of molasses sugar – it does tend to clump together.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ones and mix well. The dough will be fairly firm and moist (and rather tasty).
You can now put dollops of mixture onto a greased baking tray and put in the oven, pre heated to gas mark 4 / 180°C. You need the biscuits to be reasonably similar in size, or at least each batch needs to be. I just blob a dessert spoonful of mixture onto the greaseproof paper and that gives me biscuits of roughly 5 cm in diameter.
Bake for about 10 minutes if you want soft, chewy biscuits. They will still be fairly soft when you get them out of the oven, and they’ll carry on cooking for a bit.
It is at this point you need to be careful because the gluten free thing can cause problems. Leave them on the baking tray to cool for about 5 minutes and then carefully transfer them to a wire rack using (ideally) a thin metal spatula or fish slice. I find that they can still fall apart or fall in between the gaps in the wire rack.
If you want harder, more brittle biscuits then cook the biscuits for 15 minutes. The longer cooking time means these will be easier to manage once out of the oven, but still take care when transferring them.
