Buckwheat Butter Cookies and Barbados Biscuits

I baked a pair of recipes from Claire Ptak’s The Violet Bakery Cookbook for the USDS holiday party. This year’s desserts were supplied by attendees in the form of a cookie war, and I wanted to make sure there was at least two gluten-free entries. I made a double batch of buckwheat butter cookies (a slice-and-bake shortbread with chopped nuts and candied citrus peel) and a single batch of barbados biscuits (fudgy almond macarons with a pecan topping) because the former used one egg yolk in each batch and the latter used two egg whites.

The color of buckwheat cookies is decidedly darker than the photograph in Ptak’s book, as the only buckwheat flour I could find was whole grain. The most common reaction to the buckwheat cookies was some variation of, “I have no idea what I’m eating but I like it,” and everyone was surprised to hear that both cookies were gluten free. Guess it helps to have recipes built around specific grain or nut flours instead of trying to remove gluten from recipes built around wheat!