I can do cinnamon rolls and croissants gluten and dairy free but I struggle with cookies? Yep, I have a friend who can't make a boxed brownie mix to save her life but can do lovely sugar cookies from scratch, so it isn't just me with this odd tendency. Rather it is the nature of the beast, or rather beasts. In most gluten free baking you want wet, wet dough or actually batter and use a container to give the product shape and structure, which obviously doesn't work for cookies. I've tried dozens of recipes using shortening and vegetable butter but they still want to dissolve into a gloppy pool of goo and run everywhere, even when you freeze them, mound the batter high, and all the hundred other things the internet recommends to make edible cookies that are both chewy and gooey. I did have good luck with monster cookies (lots of peanut butter and 100% oatmeal) and those cookies you make with just peanut butter, sugar, and an egg, so obviously peanut butter makes a nice cookie base but what about when you want a non-peanut butter cookie or can't have nuts?
I fiddled with the fat forever but it didn't seem to help, then I started adding enough flour to make the dough fairly stiff, still sticky compared to wheat cookies, but way too thick to result in a moist cookie, at least if you think along the lines of traditional gluten free baking theory, all that extra flour is going to suck up all the moisture and leave them dry and crumbly, they won't run all over but it will be about like eating a dog biscuit. Happily I was wrong about that, at least as long as you don't overtake them, which means you need to pull them from the oven when they are barely set around the edges and still goopy in the middle, letting them cool on the pan. They tend to be thin and a little crispy, but certainly better than before but I still wasn't very happy with my flour/starch mixture. Then I started tampering with 100% oat flour, it worked in my monster cookies, why not try it in other recipes, except grind it up to make it less like a monster cookie? And it works! I've done double chocolate chip, chocolate chip, and even converted a wheat molasses cookie recipe and they all turned out, the oats give them structure, flavor, moisture, chew, and crispiness and you don't even have to use xanthin gum, at least assuming you are using real eggs and sugar. Then I did the unthinkable and thought to use vegetable oil instead of crisco or vegan butter (both of which are getting ridiculously expensive and are basically just that, save in a semi-solid form).
My former fiddling with fats showed that they didn't make a significant contribution to structure in a gf cookie except in the case of peanut butter, so why not? I found an oil based wheat flour chocolate chip cookie recipe and ended up adding twice the recommended amount of oat flour to get the right consistency, but they turned out as good as my other gf cookie recipes I've tried and I had also doubled the amount of flour to fat/sugar and made them whole grain besides (obviously healthy cookies now, right?). You can't cream the butter and sugar for obvious reasons but as you don't have gluten to hold in and maintain that gloriously fluffy structure I'm not sure you'll miss it. Don't substitute cup for cup oil for butter/shortening, rather do 2/3-3/4 cup vegetable oil for each cup of solid fat, as the solid fats contain some percentage of water (20-40%). Then add your oat flour until the batter is stiff but still a little sticky (use a danish dough whisk or your big mean mixer!). Flatten a little before baking and watch carefully, pull from the oven when they just begin to crisp around the edges and firm in the middle, let cool on the sheet and remove to a wire rack. This little trick can be used for many recipes, obviously you may need to tinker with your specific recipe and if you can't have oats it may be hard to find a good substitute, as oats really have a nice neutral flavor, a great texture, and are naturally moist and chewy. Quinoa and buckwheat have strong flavor, coconut flour is really absorbent, maybe almond flour or possibly brown rice? You also don't want to substitute the eggs or sugar as they add their own flavor, structure, and texture. Have fun!
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