Cookies (savoury)

Even on vacation I'm a Daring Baker ;) good thing I checked yesterday evening when this month's deadline was...otherwise I would have been a day late posting this month's challenge. I wasn't bursting with creativity but I knew I wanted to use products from our garden. So rosemary and olive oil went into the dough and pomegranate onto the dip :)
The crackers were very easy to make, very crispy and tasted delicious. The amount of rosemary was a bit too little, more would have been better. The dip is nothing really special but it was required to make a dip to accompany the crackers so I made something. It consists of cottage cheese seasoned with Adriatic sea salt and black pepper, topped with pomegranate. I preferred the crackers without a dip though.

Check out how this month's host Natalie of Gluten A Go Go and Shel of Musings from the Fishbowl did. You'll also find the recipe for the crackers there.
For all the other Daring Bakers, check out this link.

Update - I'm ashamed to admit I didn't the details about the challenge well enough this month. The dip was supposed to be vegan! So instead of cottage cheese just read vegan cottage cheese ;) (if there is such a thing)

I made my first time ever savoury cookies for the finger food theme of this month's Go Ahead Honey, it's Gluten Free! hosted by Sheltie Girl of Gluten A Go Go. I had quite a lot of gluten-free flour left over from last month when I made chocolate octopus cookies so I wanted to use some of that. I paged through my baking books and found a savoury cookie recipe - wheat based - that I liked. I thought I'd just use gluten-free flour instead, worked last time. Unfortunately this time it didn't. Instead of holding their shape, the cookies spread out a lot. They tasted wonderful but they were too delicate. When you picked one up, it would crumble between your fingers. Probably a lot of you gluten-free bakers experienced this at some point during experimenting with recipes. The problem probably was that the recipe didn't contain any eggs to hold it together as there was no gluten to do that.
I couldn't fit all the cut cookies on my two baking sheets so I still had some left in the fridge to experiment with. There were no more eggs in my fridge but there was a left over egg white. I added it to the dough and rekneaded it. As I expected a bit too wet but after adding 30 g (1 oz) of gluten-free flour (to the 240 g (8 ½) of dough that was left over) it felt like a good dough again. I chilled it, cut it into slices and baked it for 20 minutes. This time they held their shape beautifully. They tasted a bit less cheese-y which was to be expected and were not really crunchy. I baked them for another 25 minutes at 100°C (210°F), they were sort of crunchy on the outside and sort of soft on the inside. The end result were a good cookie but I think it could be better after some more experimenting. Unfortunately I didn't have time to do that so if anybody does some more experimenting, let me know how it worked out. My next step would have been to use the basic recipe and just add an egg to it and if necessary a little flour.

The recipe below is my first adaptation of the original recipe that didn't work with gluten-free flour. I had 240 g (8 ½ oz) dough left over to which I added 1 egg white, this did work.

Gluten-free goat cheese and sesame seed cookies (adapted from The Ultimate Cookie Book by Catherine Atkinson)

(this recipe didn't work gluten-free, read above for explanation)

175 g (6 oz) gluten-free flour
150 g (5 oz / 10 tbs) butter, chilled and diced
150 g (5 oz) matured goat cheese, grated
½ ts coarsely ground black pepper
1-2 tbs cold water
50 g (2 oz) sesame seeds

Process the flour, butter, cheese and pepper in a food processor until it resembles fine crumbs. Add enough water to make a soft dough. Shape into a log. Spread out the sesame seeds over a sheet of baking paper. Roll the log in the seeds until it is covered with sesame seeds. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least 2 hours.
Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Cut the log into 5 mm (¼ in) slices and place them on a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool.