How to Make Buttery-Sweet Gluten-Free Corn Cookies

The other day, my husband and I disagreed over an important subject: the flavor of a particular type of cookie I had just baked.

"They taste like a cookie-version of buttery corn on the cob, or maybe a corn muffin in cookie form," I mused.

"I'm getting more of a Cap'n Crunch thing, but, like, with butter poured over the cereal, instead of milk," he countered.

这种分歧的来源吗?我的无谷蛋白已经rsion of Christina Tosi's corn cookies from herMilk Bar食谱。

For months, I'd wanted to make the cookies. I just couldn't find the freeze-dried corn kernels needed for what Tosi calls "freeze-dried corn powder." Not to be confused with cornmeal, corn flour, or cornstarch, her corn powder is made by grinding freeze-dried corn kernels in a food processor or blender. Honestly, before I saw this recipe, I didn't even know freeze-dried corn kernels were a thing.

To make the recipe gluten-free, I swapped the wheat flour for white rice flour, since I didn't want the flavor of the flour to compete with the corn flavor in the cookies. Then I bumped up the amount of corn flour (finely ground cornmeal) just a little. I left everything else alone. For this recipe, I didn't use xanthan gum. Since these are drop cookies, I figured that they didn't need the shape-strengthening properties that xanthan gum brings to a gluten-free recipe.

The other important "ingredient" in this recipe is a kitchen timer. The butter-sugar-egg mixture is creamed for a full seven minutes, during which time it turns white and airy. Creaming butter for this long is a common step in butter cakes—it helps the butter hold onto air and helps the cake rise. For cookies, you usually only cream the butter-sugar-egg for about 30 to 45 seconds: over-creaming butter in a cookie recipe causes cookies to spread.And spread these did—into wonderfully thin, crisp cookies!

For my first tray, I followed the recipe and used 1/3 cup of dough for each cookie. I knew that much dough would make really big cookies, but when first converting a recipe to be gluten-free, I like to follow the creator's directions to remove any extra variables, at least at first. The cookies were so big, though, that they baked together into an amoeba-shaped cookie-cake blob. So I reduced the size of the cookies from 1/3 cup of dough to 1 1/3 tablespoons. The baked cookies were about 3 1/2 inches across.

As for the flavor, I'll let you settle the debate my husband and I had. For now, let's just say they're somewhere between buttery corn on the cob and a buttery bowl of Cap'n Crunch—at least we both agree that the cookies are buttery! And, dare I say it, they're almosttoobuttery for me. So, if you don't love a really buttery cookie, you can reduce the amount this recipe calls for. When you cut the butter down, the cookies won't spread as much, but they'll still be unusually delicious.