Baking challenge #1 - Walnut-honey cookies

In a few weeks two friends will be staying with us for a week. Obviously I will be doing some baking for them. The only problem is that one of my friends has quite a few products that she is sensitive to and therefore doesn’t eat. Examples are: wheat, oat, yeast, almonds, cashew nuts, peanuts, pine nuts, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, dairy from cows (with the exception of butter) and chocolate....oh and she prefers not to eat sugar...I think you’ll agree that it’s quite a challenge to bake yummy stuff with such restrictions!

Before she comes I want to do some test-baking so I can present something tasty when she is here. The first experiment went ok. My inspiration was an almond cookie recipe I have made many times before. I choose this recipe because it doesn’t contain wheat. It does however contain sugar, cream and almonds. In place of the sugar I put honey, the cream I skipped and substituted walnuts for the almonds. Obviously the honey made the batter more liquid so I skipped the Amaretto as well.

The taste was pretty good, not very sweet and slightly bitter because of the walnut skins. Next time I’ll use pecans to prevent the bitterness, I’m not a big fan of bitter.



Makes about 15

100 g (3 ½ oz) walnuts, ground
20 g (¾ oz) corn flour
60 g (2 oz) honey
1 egg
25 g (1 oz) butter, molten
15 mini paper cups (2 ½ cm (1 inch) bottom)

Preheat the oven to 175ºC (350ºF). Mix the walnuts and the corn flour. Mix the honey, egg and butter. Mix everything together. Put the mini paper cups on a baking sheet and fill them using a spoon.
Bake for about 15-20 minutes.

1 cookie – 80 kcal
100 g – 470 kcal

carbohydrate 29 g – protein 8 g – fat 37 g (saturated fat 7 g) – fibre 3 g