Gluten Free Triple Ginger Cookies

I’m allergic to scallops.

Just scallops though. No other shellfish, thank goodness, as I inhale lobster rolls like my next breath is hidden in the center of them. I don’t understand how one is allergic to just scallops, but I am. Multiple instances of scallop consumption as a child always led to several bed-ridden days of me clutching a large popcorn bowl for the most unappetizing role of its poor plastic life.

Scallops make me very sick. I seem to remember one point where I was so sick, the utterance of the phrase “hot dog” caused an almost instantaneous and very violent physical reaction in me. And I love hot dogs.

But scallops are very avoidable. A recognizable shape and often obvious star of a plate, I don’t generally have unexpected run-ins with my evil mollusk nemesis. I have never even heard of a scallop in a dessert.

I can’t imagine having celiac disease.

Flour is a building block of baking. Sure, there’s flourless chocolate cakes and whatnot, but there’s a reason those cakes are defined by their lack of flour. The idea of replacing it with another similar, yet wheat free, substance both fascinates and frightens me.

I am not well versed in gluten free baking. How do you know what flour you use? There’s so many. Sorghum, potato, rice, sweet rice, brown rice, almond, millet, tapioca… Then there’s the xanthan gum. It sounds more like something an evil mastermind chews than a baking ingredient.

I once made a gluten free, dairy free, egg free, soy free chocolate cake for a very allergy-unfortunate friend. It actually tasted like chocolate cake at the edges. It was an odd pudding-esque substance in the middle.

Scratch the “not well versed in gluten free baking.”

I have no idea what I’m doing.

All I can do is find a recipe that sounds good and follow it religiously and hope it tastes like a dessert when I’m done.

I could just avoid gluten free recipes. I don’t even own half the ingredients they ask for most of the time and that’s with eight types of flour in my cupboards. I clearly mess things up more often with gluten free, as I have no inclinations if the ratios in a gluten recipe make any sense.

But it takes a lot of people in the world a lot more effort to avoid gluten than it takes me to “man-up” and make a gluten free recipe every now and again.

If you’re apprehensive about GF baking, I highly recommend you make this recipe because I would totally make this recipe again, regardless of gluten concerns. Its texture is sandy but tender, with the raw sugar making a wonderful, sweet shell around a playful punch of ginger.

Then, like me, you’ll have an adorable little package of xanthan gum next to your eight bags of assorted flours, and a (slightly) less neglected subset of friends.