Fireworks, Fanfare and oh yeah....Dessert Pizza!

First an apology. I meant to have this blogged about earlier but as life would have it things came up and next thing I know it's Monday night a week later. But...I do have a special this week as I will be making two entries. Jen and I made the most amazing Sweet and Sour Tofu, the original recipe was for chicken but we don't really eat meat that much. The Sweet and Sour Tofu recipe will be a little later this week.

So onto the goodness! We showed up at our friends 4th of July party with the two things that we had planned to bring. The first was the Silver Queen corn that we roasted fresh at the party. It was so amazing, and was literally picked just hours before we bought it! I love small local farmers with their produce stands! The second item was the one that I really was unsure about. Ok so I found a traditional shortbread cookie recipe and adapted it to make it gluten-free. It really was quite easy as the only ingredients in the cookie recipe were butter, sugar, and flour. Pretty simple or so I imagined. The hard part was not mixing the up the cookie. That only took about 5 minutes. The hard part was making the ginormous short bread cookie that took up the whole cookie sheet. The butter was a little too soft when I mixed it and it seems like it took forever to get chilled. I was a little worried about the consistency of the dough. It was extremely sticky really hard to roll out. Chilling it for an hour seemed to make it a lot easier to pat out but I still had to flour my hands with generous amounts of flour. Rolling it just didn't work. It kept sticking to the rolling pin. I learned quite a bit about making a giant gluten-free cookie this time. It baked up perfectly, although because of its size it did take a bit longer than the original recipe. I have modified the recipe to reflect this time difference. So the baked product was really soft and flaky like a really good pie crust. It was lightly sweet and had a great crumbly, yet moist texture! The first trial run seems to be a winner in my book. 
It is really important that you use the freshest, best quality butter that you can afford for this recipe as it is the star ingredient in the cookie. I use Cabot Natural Creamery butter. It was sweet and smooth, and had a light tang to it. It was a great choice for the cookie! I made a fresh whipped cream with pure key lime oil, coconut extract, and Banana Cream Jello pudding mix. I then topped the cookie with fresh local peaches, local blueberries, fresh strawberries, and a light topping of coconut.

Truth be told this recipe was awesome! I was a little worried about the texture of the cookie and absolutely didn't tell anyone that it was gluten-free. What? It would have spoiled my fun and besides people have this stigma about "special" foods. People loved it so much that we had just enough for a small snack later that night. It was perfect and I hope that you will enjoy it's simplicity and fresh bold flavor! Have fun and let me know how you like it!

Till we meet again. :0)

Recipe on the recipes page.