Use healthy quinoa to bake these dark chocolate quinoa sugar cookies – gluten free foods never tasted so delicious!
How to Make Quinoa Flour
I love the nutty, wholesome richness of quinoa flour and it’s easy to make your own. Follow the following steps to wash, sprout, dry, and grind quinoa flour.
Wash Off the Soap
Quinoa is really a seed and it has a saponin layer that covers it so you NEED to presoak it no matter how you’re using it.
It is also a great gluten free “grain” and can be cooked up to use in place of rice; it also makes a wonderful casserole filler and an additive to wholesome soups.
To prepare it for cooking, measure out how much you’ll need, put it in a non reactive bowl and cover it with filtered water. Let it sit for a few hours and then rinse it several times to get the soap off and cook it up.
Quinoa is Easy to Sprout for More Health Benefits
I like to sprout my quinoa, too, since its so easy. Instead of soaking it for a few hours, soak it overnight and then rinse the quinoa. You’ll know its sprouted when you see a little white tail.
To make flour, spread your soaked, sprouted and rinsed quinoa onto dehydrator trays or onto a cookie sheet, if you don’t have a dehydrator. Use these sheets to keep the tiny seeds from falling through the cracks on your dehydrator tray. I usually dry mine at a raw setting (around 115) but you can crank it to 135 and it will go faster.
It really doesn’t take too long because these buggers are so small. Check your favorite dehydrating manual for specific times and temps. If you’re using your oven, put it on the lowest setting possible and just keep checking it. The quinoa should only take an hour or two.
Finally Grind to Make Flour
After the quinoa is completely dry, put it in the blender and hit your highest setting. Do a cup at a time, pause to stir or shake down and then grind again to get it as fine as you can. Quinoa is light and dry and it should blend up pretty easily.
If you need to know more about making your own baking supplies, please visit this post.
Cookie Tidbits
This recipe is adapted from a fabulous quinoa cookbook called Quinoa: The Everyday Superfood. I own it and highly recommend it. Not all the recipes are gluten free, fyi, but all the ones I’ve tried have been very tasty. My kids eat them, so there you go.
If you need to freeze these cookies, you can do so for up to eight weeks, though they last that long. You can also store them well in the refrigerator for up to ten days.
If you need a good post on how to make the healthy, homemade chocolate hazelnut spread (read Nutella) mentioned in this recipe, please visit this link from Chocolate Covered Katie.
Recipe for Gluten Free Dark Chocolate Quinoa Sugar Cookies
For a sweet biscuit, leave off the powdered sugar; for a real cookie, lightly dust these babies in it.
For a simple and sweet biscuit, leave off the powdered sugar. For a real cookie, lightly dust these in powdered sugar. I usually wrap my cookie dough in a silicone baking sheet and then use the sheet for baking up the cookies.
Gluten Free Foods: Quinoa and Dark Chocolate Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
Instructions
In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt.
Mix dry and wet together until well blended. Form into a ball and refrigerate for an hour*.Notes
If you reduce the sugar to 3/4 cup, these make awesome sweet-ish crackers. You can still roll them in homemade powdered sugar (or slather them in homemade hazelnut spread) to sweeten them up, just like the full sugar variety. I love them plain!
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Gluten Free Foods for Baking
If you’re here just for the Quinoa and Dark Chocolate Sugar Cookies, skip to the end. However, if you need some information on gluten free foods for baking, read on.
So, lets talk about a few gluten free foods in the realm of baking. I have a short but seriously cool round up of information on gluten free baking foods here:
From Gluten Free Mommy – Gluten Free Grains 101: The Best Flour Blend. This is the ultimate post on what you need to know regarding gluten free foods when you’re baking – particularly flours.
There’s information here on how to store your GF flours, what goes into commercial brands, how you can make your own. She also included information on the necessary additives to make GF flour stick together – items like potato starch and xanthan gum.
Each gluten free flour has a flavor all its own, so experimentation is a must as you’re searching for just the right flavors in your gluten free foods.
Whole New Mom has some general gluten free baking tips in this article. This one is a great one for beginners as it explains how things work and what you can do to make them work.
oh, yum! And I just happen to have some quinoa in my pantry. Even though we don’t have to eat gluten free, I really like cooking with a variety of grains and seeds.
Also, I agree, the Bob’s Red Mill 1 to 1 gluten free flour is amazing.
I do, too, Angi and quinoa is one of my favorites. Amaranth is similar but quinoa has a richer flavor, I think. You can put it in food storage, too, and expect it to stay fresh about three years.
These look wonderful! I am going to have to try them.
Let me know how they turn out for you, Kimberly! They’re practically health food, right?