This gluten free peanut butter cookie recipe, was originally not going to be cookies at all, nor was it going to have peanut butter even in it, but when I get the mixer going, sometimes strange things occur, like blueberry muffins becoming sidetracked into peanut butter cookies. It was always meant to be gluten free at least…lol.
It all started with me playing around with this Wondermill Electric Grain Mill, I’d been sent as part of their Grain Mill Wagon Challenge. I had a lot of rice on hand, so I of course milled some. I also had a bag of millet in my pantry. I’ve been cooking a great deal of whole grains recently, and for the most part really enjoy them in my savory dishes. The exception has been millet… not my cup of tea. I decided to mill all of it into flour, and simply store it in the freezer, so it wouldn’t spoil. The Wondermill made short work of the grains, and I was ready to start baking.
I used both millet and rice flour as my batter starters, and added sugar and the basic batter ingredients. I checked for sweetness level at this point, and was sorely disappointed. The batter was bitter. Yuck. The millet flour had a bitter taste to it, and it was rather noticeable. I worked some magic and metamorphosed the concoction into peanut butter cookie mix. The bitterness was beaten down with sweetener, oats & peanut butter.
I popped a batch of the impromptu cookies into the oven, and Googled “millet flour bitterness”. I soon saw someone say millet got bitter when it spoiled. I did not think this was the case here, so I browsed further. I then found out that just like quinoa, millet has a bitter sap attached to it in it’s natural state. Washing during processing removes much of it, but a little remains. The good news though, most of it will go away through cooking. It did, the peanut butter cookies were yummy.
- 1 cup millet flour (or other gluten free flour)
- ½ cup rice flour (or other gluten free flour)
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- ½ tsp. cinnamon
- 1 tsp. Kosher salt
- 1 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1 cup light brown sugar (firmly packed)
- ¼ cup honey
- 2 eggs
- ½ cup buttermilk
- ⅔ cup natural peanut butter
- 2 cups oats
- ½ cup sunflower seeds (substitute roasted peanuts if you prefer)
- ¼ cup slivered almonds (substitute roasted peanuts if you prefer)
- 2 tbs chia seeds (substitute poppy or sesame seeds if you prefer)
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Mix together flour, baking powder, cinnamon & salt.
- Add vanilla, brown sugar, honey, eggs, buttermilk and peanut butter. Mix well.
- Add oats, seeds and nuts. Stir until evenly distributed.
- Drop spoonfuls of the batter approximately 2 tbs. in size, onto a baking sheet.
- Bake for approx. 12-13 minutes until cookies are set.
