Gluten-Free Cookie Bars

On Monday, my gluten-free pantry of packaged snacks was like Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard…bare.   I have a six foot tall, 13 year old celiac with a hollow leg and when he walks in the house at 5pm with a wild-eyed, half-starved look in his eye, after skipping breakfast, eating lunch at 11am, following full school day and a two hour basketball try out, he will NOT be nominating me mother-of-the-year with cupboards lacking any gluten-free options.

Thankfully, I was pulling my creation from the oven…my gluten-free pan bars.  I had a box of King Arthur Flour cookie mix in the cupboard and I noticed that I had all of the “wet” ingredients handy.  I also have this laborious recipe for homemade, healthy oat and fruit bars that I really did not have the time to make.  What I did was prepare the cookie batter and use the essence of the oat and fruit bar recipe to come up with my own concoction.

I had leftover thinly sliced almonds and craisins from a Thanksgiving side dish.  I toasted the almonds on the stove top in my cast iron skillet and then dumped both ingredients into my cookie batter.  I had Trader Joe’s White Baking chips for making Peppermint Bark, so I tossed the vanilla chips into the cookie mix. I also had Glutenfreeda Apple Cinnamon instant oatmeal with flax so I dumped two packets of that into the mix as well. 

I used my heavy duty bamboo spoon to incorporate all of those ingredients and then baked them up as pan bars.  I had to guess at how long to bake it but all I know is that I pulled it out from the oven and barely got the pan onto the counter before hungry man was scooping out a massive corner wedge onto a plate.

Of course, you are supposed to let it sit and cool but he happily ate a pile of hot cookie crumble.

Everyone tried a properly cooled and cut cookie bars after dinner and by Tuesday afternoon the entire pan was eaten.   I did not follow either one of the recipes as they were written, but sometimes kitchen experiments turn out to be something worth repeating.

Kendall Egan