Nut free cookies?

[Wholemeal Crank]

I volunteer at a camp several times a year that is militantly nut-free. I like to bring several kind of baked treats to the longer sessions especially, and have run through most of my standards by now--gingersnaps and gingerbread cookies, vanilla spritz, poppy and other variations on shortbread, oatmeal cookies with lots of other stuff, and lots of variations with sesame, and quite a few things made with cacao nibs. I am easily bored with bland cookies that just vary the proportions of butter, sugar, and flour, and I adore nuts.

So I'm thinking about breaking down and using sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds for interest, but I have never used these in sweet cooking before.

The infinite cookie generator in my head is on strike, because of a deep resentment against the whole idea.

I'm having trouble coming up with ideas for how to best compliment their flavors with spices and/or dried fruits or other flavorings (sunseed better with clove? cinnamon? mace? anise? massive vanilla? raisins? apricots? as butter vs whole vs ground?), and having never baked with them before, I don't have a good sense of how well they hold up to baking--do they get rubbery like peanuts? And I've so often been disappointed by rancidity in both of these in the past--what's the best way to avoid that? Will a slight off taste shine through even if toasted and then baked and wreck the cookies?

[GlorifiedRice]

There are several Nut substitutes out there, Google Wheat Nuts or Bowlbys Bits

They are so good, The Pecan Bowlbys are yummy

[JeanneCake]

I am looking at my copy of Maida Heatter's first cookie book; there is a recipe called Sunflower Coconut Cookies that calls for flour, soda/powder,, butter, light brown sugar, tbl of orange juice, honey, an egg, citrus rind (lemon and orange), oatmeal, shredded coconut,raisins and sunflower seeds (the raw ones, she specifically says to avoid toasted and/or salted seeds). They're a drop cookie. Let me know if this sounds like what you're interested in and I can PM the recipe to you if you like.

[Wholemeal Crank]

Coconut is also right out.

No tree nuts, or peanuts, and tree nuts includes such botanically distant relations as pine nuts AND coconuts. I blew it on coconuts a year ago and can't do that again.

I've done a lot with poppy and sesame seeds, but want specifically to try sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds, just don't know how to use them. I'm trying to avoid straight up nut substitutes, like the bowlbys & wheat nuts, when I've a good alternative like sunseeds etc.

But it looks like she's basically doing an oatmeal cookie with cocount with a straight up sub of sunflower for walnut or almonds, and using the seeds raw, and with citrus. I don't think I need to see the recipe--just the idea of citrus plus sunseed in oatmeal cookie is a good start. Thanks!

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Pumpkin seeds have a more robust flavour; I've had great luck with them combined with either nutmeg or cardamon in sugar cookie recipes (depending on how big the seeds are, you might want to chop 'em coarsely.) With chocolate chunks and cloves they're also very yum.

[Wholemeal Crank]

RAw or toasted?

[JeanneCake]

I would toast them lightly before using them in a cookie; agree about chopping coarsely, makes me think if you look for a pumpkin drop cookie recipe and use toasted seeds in place of nuts. Or a brown sugar bar (like a blondie) and use dried fruits with either type of seed. What about a hermit-type bar cookie with figs or apricots (think Apricot Newton instead of Fig Newton!)?

[Wholemeal Crank]

Ahh....I haven't ever done apricot newtons for this group, but I've done them a lot in the past. And with the new meat grinder to really smooth out the dried fruit filling, that's a terrific idea. Maybe some ground pumpkin seeds to add a little interest to the cookie part would do it.

[Panaderia Canadiense]

RAw or toasted?

In applications as standalones with spices, toasted. Paired with chocolate chunks, raw.

Also, have you ever made granola cookies? Basically the same recipe as oatmeals, but use toasted granola with sunflower seeds, raisins, and pumpkin seeds in place of the oats. (You may have to make the granola to ensure it's nut and coconut free, but that's not hard by any stretch of the imagination).

I'd also think that dried cranberry-sunflower seed newtons (ground together for the paste) would be excellent cookies.

[Wholemeal Crank]

RAw or toasted?

In applications as standalones with spices, toasted. Paired with chocolate chunks, raw.

Exactly the sort of insight I'm looking for. And cranberry-sunseed sounds like a very interesting combination, with the blandness of the seeds to temper the tartness of the cranberries.

[HungryC]

Consider the nut limitation a challenge rather than an obstacle....think about the cookie's texture. Tuiles, madelines, biscotti, meringues: you can vary flavors & textures with different styles of cookies, rather than focusing on a drop-style cookie dough embellished with chunky things. When I need cookie inspiration, I usually turn to Alice Medrich's Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy. She organizes the book according to texture, and each recipe is loaded with variations.

Avoid bland cookies by flavoring the sugar with herbs (mint, rosemary, lavender) or citrus zest (whether crushing together by hand or by food processor).

[Wholemeal Crank]

Consider the nut limitation a challenge rather than an obstacle....think about the cookie's texture. Tuiles, madelines, biscotti, meringues: you can vary flavors & textures with different styles of cookies, rather than focusing on a drop-style cookie dough embellished with chunky things. When I need cookie inspiration, I usually turn to Alice Medrich's Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy. She organizes the book according to texture, and each recipe is loaded with variations.

Avoid bland cookies by flavoring the sugar with herbs (mint, rosemary, lavender) or citrus zest (whether crushing together by hand or by food processor).

I've been going to this camp for 4 years, and I have been thinking of it as a challenge rather than an obstacle.....but this time, the infinite cookie generator ran out of oomph, and that's why I decided to try a batch or two with these seeds, which I've been avoiding doing for the past 4 years. I've done variations on biscotti, shortbread, bar cookies, drop cookies, rolled cookies, spritz cookies, icebox cookies, but refuse tuiles (too lazy for those); adjust the flour's contribution to the texture by changing the grain mix milled for each batch (rice for crisp, oat for soft, hard wheat, soft wheat); but most of my favorite cookies have nuts in them, and I've made most of the ones that don't have nuts several times already, and don't want to duplicate what their own kitchen turns out (snickerdoodles, plain chocolate chip, simple oatmeal cookies, brownies).

Meringues....I recently played a bit with macaroons, and when I was in France 2 years ago bought some, but every time found them too sweet, even when the sugar was minimized and the proportion of nuts was very high. I'm pretty sure I've already done Anise Caps for them, but maybe another variation on those, where the eggs are beaten whole rather than as meringue, and the richness of the eggs cuts the sweetness of the resulting cookie to tolerable levels.

[JeanneCake]

Meringues....I recently played a bit with macaroons, and when I was in France 2 years ago bought some, but every time found them too sweet, even when the sugar was minimized and the proportion of nuts was very high. I'm pretty sure I've already done Anise Caps for them, but maybe another variation on those, where the eggs are beaten whole rather than as meringue, and the richness of the eggs cuts the sweetness of the resulting cookie to tolerable levels.

I like to use bitter chocolate in a meringue cookie (not macaron) - from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Christmas Cookie Book; she adds ground unsweetened chocolate to the meringue at the end; then pipes it into shapes. You can also flavor the meringue with chocolate and coffee and that helps temper the sweetness. I don't like things too sweet, but I like the meringues with choc/coffee.....

[Wholemeal Crank]

Aha...ground chocolate plus chipped chocolate....I am suddenly inspired to recreate forgotten kisses, yes!

[Panaderia Canadiense]

Oooh, if you've got the wherewithal to grind sunflower seeds into paste, then try your favourite chocolate sugar cookie dough formed around balls of sunseed paste with cinnamon, salt, and a bit of confectioner's sugar (to stiffen it up and sweeten it a bit). They come out like peanut-butter cup cookies, but so much better.

[Lindacakes]

Date bars. Date snowballs (Rice Krispies and molten dates, rolled in powdered sugar). Jam thumbprints. The fun graphic cookies you get by combining plain and chocolate dough (checkerboards).

[Wholemeal Crank]

Made several things over the weekend, now reporting back.

I used pumpkin seeds, toasted, to make some hermits as follows, more or less:

HERMITS

1/2 cup tart dried apricots

1 cup raisins

(zapped together in food processor with part of the flour to chop pretty finely but not turn into paste)

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup honey

1/4 cup molasses

juice & zest of 2 lemons

2 eggs

400g soft white wheat milled with

3 long peppers

1 teaspoon mace pieces, crushed lightly

6 pods cardamom

1 inch cinnamon stick

OR

3 1/4 cup unbleached or soft whole wheat pastry flour

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon ground mace

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup lightly toasted pumpkin seeds, unsalted

Spread in baking pans--3 @ 8x8--baked 350 about 20 minutes.

I think they needed a little less flour, but the pumpkin seeds were outstanding, and I'll make these again this way.

And using the suggestion above about using sunflower seeds raw when added to a blander drop-cookie dough, made

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with sunseeds

1 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

zest of 2 small lemons

150 grams hard wheat

30 grams sweet rice

milled with 3 inches chopped vanilla bean

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon soda

2 cups quick oats

3/4 cup sunflower seeds, raw

6 oz (180 grams or 1 cup) semisweet chocolate chips or chopped bittersweet chocolate

1/2 cup raisins, chopped

and baked per toll house drop cookies 375 about 15 minutes. I really didn't notice much difference vs my usual walnuts or almonds in this dense cookie.

And finally, made lemon-poppy seed shortbread cookies with browned butter, very nice, just a slight variation on this recipe from my web site (which has moved to my new domain debunix.net).

I will put the recipes above into better form and port them over to the new site, where they'll show up on the recipe index page here.

Edited July 7, 2012 by Wholemeal Crank (log)