Cold and bright sunny days are so good for baking. I love spending time in my little yellow and green kitchen whipping up some goodies.

I’ve been doing a little experimenting in this department. I’m not sure what is going on but I’ve been finding myself having some digestive disagreements (Don’t worry, this blog won’t turn into my daily log of ailments!) and I’m beginning to suspect that it’s something specifically that I’m eating. So I thought I would remove some foods from my diet (namely [wheat] gluten and dairy, the usual suspects) and see how things go.

But for someone who loves to bake this could be quite the problem. But I know there are lots of alternatives out there and I’m determined to have my gluten-free cake and eat it too.

I found some gluten-free chocolate chip cookie dough mix at Whole Foods (a house brand). It’s basically a box of the dry ingredients (stuff like rice flour and sugar) to which you had the wet ingredients. I did a little substituting here as I’ve had gluten-free cookies before and they are not always, err, good.

My boyfriend’s step-mom got this delicious vanilla extract from a recent trip Belize (I think…although it says product of Mexico). I doubled the amount which always seems like a good idea. I also used walnut oil instead of margarine since it’s not hydrogenated and is loaded with healthy omega-3s.

I added an extra egg too for protein and bindy-ness. (That’s a word, yea?)

The dough was quite gloppy and sticky but as you can see from the first pic, they look like regular cookies and tasted pretty good too as long as you ignore the slight sandy texture of the cookie part.

My next test would be some gluten-free cupcakes. I recently gathered up all of my liners into this cookie jar so I can see all of them and how pretty they are. They are also tempting me, so I’ll have to keep you posted on this next attempt; I know a lot of folks out there have similar issues with gluten and dairy.

Have a sweet Tuesday!