My lovely wife asked me to try my hand at some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies, so she bought the Betty Crocker mix and also found a recipe in a gluten-free baking book. Suffice to say that the Betty Crocker recipe was pretty bad. It uses only rice flour, which made the cookies gritty, not to mention the fact that they had zero body, plus the taste was ho-hum. Mixing them up was like trying to make a sand castle without enough water. About half of the batch went into the trash.
The second recipe was from the CIA's Gluten-Free Baking by Richard Coppedge, Jr. It used flour mixture #4 that combines white rice flour, tapioca flour, and soy flour. The recipe was pretty close to the one I use with all-purpose wheat flour, except it called for twice the eggs, some water, and used only butter whereas I use half butter, half Crisco. I mixed it up in the cuisinart (possibly a big mistake). After blending in the dry ingredients, it was obvious that it was wayyyy too wet, but I blundered on. The first batch of cookies ran together, plus they stuck to the non-stick pan, and they cooked way faster than indicated in the recipe. I cooked the rest of the mixture in a brownie pan.
Results? Well, they tasted better than the Betty Crocker cookies, but they just didn't have the body of a chocolate chip cookie. Perhaps mixing them in the cuisinart added air that when combined with the water did something adverse to the mix. Who knows? So what now? I'm going to try it again w/o the water, mix them up by hand in a bowl, and cook them at a lower temp. I usually cook them at 325 F.
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