Skip to footer

Gluten-free: 18 fabulous flour-less desserts

Whether your household is entirely gluten-free, you're expecting gluten-free guests, or you're experimenting with a new diet, this list will satisfy dessert cravings of all sorts. 

Three-ingredient almond cookies

The Asian Grandmother's Cookbook
Sprinkle these gluten-free cookies with sugar or top with an almond sliver.

By Patricia Tanumihardja, The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook 
Makes 3 dozen cookies

This is a basic, basic gluten-free cookie recipe made with almond meal. If you want to get fancy add vanilla, baking soda (1/4 teaspoon) to give it more rise, and some almond extract (1/4 teaspoon) for a more almond flavor. Oh, and crown each cookie with an almond sliver to pretty them up some more! Almond meal is basically ground blanched almonds. It’s a pricy package – $8.99 per pound but it’s very useful in gluten-free baking. Even if you’re not gluten-free, try replacing some of the wheat flour with almond meal in a favorite cake or muffin recipe.

1/4 cup salted butter, softened

1/4 cup honey

2-1/2 cups almond meal

Turbinado sugar for sprinkling (OK, a fourth ingredient, but it’s only for decoration!)

1. In a medium bowl, mix the butter and honey until well blended. Add the almond meal and mix until a soft dough forms. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 30 minutes or so until the dough firms up a little.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.

3. Take dough out of the fridge and roll into 1-inch balls with damp hands. Place them on the parchment and flatten with the back of a wet spoon. Sprinkle turbinado sugar with or without abandon!

4. Bake for 8-9 minutes or until the edges turn golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool for about 10 minutes before removing to a cooling rack. The cookies will be soft so handle with care. If you refrigerate the baked cookies, they’ll be firmer and in my opinion, taste even better! Enjoy immediately or store in an airtight container.

8 of 18
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.