6/13/07   I enjoyed my first experience with the “Peanut Butter Cookie Mix” produced by The Cravings Place and available at The Gluten Free Mall. My wife, my son (our cook for the evening), and his wife also loved the cookies. My pre-school age grandsons wolfed them down and certainly did not act like children eating traditional “diet food”.  Yes, you really can have good tasting gluten free cookies. Click on the picture at the top of the article if you interested in pricing or purchase information.

To get the technical details out of the way, we used reduced fat Skippy peanut butter and Earth Balance buttery spread, a dairy free margarine. Later, an experienced dairy free cook told me that we might have had better results if we had used the version of the margarine that comes in sticks rather than in a tub.

The mixture is labeled gluten free, wheat free, nut free, egg free, dairy free, and bean free. (It is not sugar free.) When I see a long list of ways in which a product is “free”, I sometimes wonder what has been left except a healthy price tag. But that was definitely not the case here. The taste and texture was excellent. We sampled them fresh from the oven, three hours later, and a day later. In each case, they tasted great and there was relatively little crumbling. There would have been even less crumbling if we had stored them in a firm container rather than in a zip-lock bag.

We refrigerated part of the dough and baked the remaining cookies five days later. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the cookies were definitely less crumbly and as good if-not-better tasting than the original batch. This was great news for me: as the only celiac in my household I have no real need for a batch of 40-50 all baked at the same time.

The next time I try this mix (and I certainly will try it again), we will use almond butter or something similar. Why purchase a nut free product and then flavor it with peanut butter? Why is this product pre-sweetened? According to the information on the package, the Cravings Place has avoided pre-sweetening in many of its mixes. They seem to have the skills needed to fill all our needs.

Disclosure: I am being compensated by the Gluten Free Mall for my product reviews but will never let any compensation get in the way of giving you the best possible Gluten Free and Celiac Information I can.