Go Ahead Honey It's Gluten Free! - Pistachio cookies

Naomi from Straight into Bed Cakefree and Dried is hosting a food blogging event that is all about baking gluten-free. This month's theme is Teatime Treats. I happened to have a gluten-free cookie in stock for a while now so this event was the perfect moment to post about it. And if I didn't have any in stock I would have made something :)



I love to play around with ingredients to fit a recipe into a certain diet. I had a little experience with that a few years ago when our friend Y visited us when we were living in Tel Aviv. Y was sensitive to quite a lot of products you'd normally use in baking. Things like sugar, wheat, oat, yeast, almonds, cashew nuts, peanuts, poppy seeds, dairy from cows (with the exception of butter), chocolate. So you can imagine that it was quite challenging to come up with stuff that fitted her diet AND tasted good! It was rather difficult finding recipes that met all the requirements. There are recipes without sugar but they usually contain wheat. And recipes without wheat usually contain sugar. After some failures I succeeded in making enough treats for her to eat for the duration of her stay. We ended up with very tasty maple goat cheese cake with maple pecan nut crust (also gluten-free), pistachio-maple syrup cookies (also gluten-free), maple syrup cakes, dried fruit muffins, walnut honey cookies (also gluten-free) and honey pecan cookies.

The cookies you see in the picture are made without flour and contain just pistachio nuts, eggs, sugar and some lemon zest. It was supposed to be more or less the same as the Weesper moppen I made a while back but turned out a bit different. I used the recipe from Jonah Freud's book 'Koekje'. This recipe uses more egg and sugar than the other one. Making them more crunchy than chewy when compared to Weesper moppen.
I tried to follow the instuctions in the recipe but the dough was much softer and was therefor harder to make into a log. Also it spread out, something that Weesper moppen aren't supposed to do (much). Even though they turned out different than they were supposed to, they were really delicious. Next time I'd definitely try the other cookies again because I like the look of the other cookies more than these ones.

Pistache moppen (Pistachio cookies) (from Koekje by Jonah Freud)

makes about 40

250 g (8 ¾ oz) pistachios
300 (10 ½ oz) granulated sugar
2 eggs
grated peel of ½ lemon
granulated sugar

Process all the pistachios and sugar in a food processor. Make sure not to over-process but the nuts should be finely ground. Add the eggs and process briefly to mix. Make a log of 4 cm diameter and wrap it in plastic wrap. Allow the dough to rest overnight in the fridge.
Preheat the oven to 200°C (390°F). Sprinkle a layer of granulated sugar on your working surface and roll the dough into 2 logs of 3.5 cm (1 ¼ in) in diameter. Cut the logs in 1 cm (0.4 in) slices.
Bake the cookies on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment for 10 minutes until they are lightly coloured and still soft on the inside.