I made these cookies for the first time a couple of months ago as a thank you gift to my supervisor. She’s on a wheat-free diet so I had to adapt to that. Gluten plays an important role in baking – it is a binding agent that helps give a nice chewy texture. Without gluten in cookies, the dough tends to get very hard and dry. The cookie would be very different (likely to be harder in texture) if I were to substitute the flour in my usual cookie dough recipe with gluten-free flour. So I decided to adapt my melting moment cookies recipe to make these gluten free cinnamon cookies. Making these gluten-free cookies were quite challenging. Simply because the dough was dry and crumbly which makes it difficult to roll out. When baking, the cookies remained pale in colour so to determine if they are done, just use your fingers and press down the middle. If the cookie is hard that means it is over-baked; it should be slightly soft in the middle. …

I love festive baking – it gives me a reason to bake even more and doesn’t make me feel bad for procrastibaking. Two more days to Anzac day and I’m keeping up with the tradition of making Anzac biscuits. The traditional Anzac biscuits are oats with desiccated coconuts. But I like my biscuits to be fancy so I’ve added cinnamon, dried cranberries and white chocolate. One good thing about Anzac biscuits is that it is super easy to make and you don’t need to rest the dough overnight. So all it takes is one big bowl to mix all the ingredients in and then rolling it out into little cookies. Nutrition per biscuit (one batch makes 50) Ingredients 180g rolled oats 150g plain flour 80g caster sugar 60g desiccated coconut 100g honey 100g unsalted butter 1 tsp bicarbonate soda 2 tbsp hot water 30g dried cranberries 30g white chocolate Directions Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Place the oats, flour, sugar and coconut in a bowl and mix to combine Place the honey and butter …

One of my favourite Chinese New Year snacks. I have no idea why they are called love letters because the direct translation from Mandarin should be egg rolls. Maybe people in the past used to roll up love letters in these biscuits. Anyhow, to make these biscuits, you will either need the old school charcoal machine or the electric press (which looks like a sandwich press but specially made for love letters). I found making love letters extremely therapeutic. Simply because it is repetitive and you can watch television while making it. However, it is extremely time consuming because it takes at least 1 min to make 2 love letters and you can’t rush it unless you have more than one machine. I got the recipe from my uncle and in the past, they used to use their hands to roll the biscuits and it is a painful process because the biscuit is really hot. To save his blistering hands, he fashioned a stick with a slit in the middle to roll up the love …

Chinese new year is not complete with pineapple tarts. This was my first time making pineapple tarts because it’s impossible to find them in Australia. Pineapple tarts are one of the most expensive new year goodies after making them on my own, I finally understood why. Making these tarts is seriously a lot of work and my back was aching after that. To make pineapple tarts, first you need to prepare the jam. Cooking the jam takes two hours and requires a lot of patience. After that you need to make the cookie dough. I made the jam and cookie dough at the same time and then placed it in the fridge to rest overnight. The next day, I spent about 1.5hr rolling the cookie dough out. You will probably spend about 4hr in total preparing the jam, cookie dough and making the tarts. To me, the perfect pineapple tart is one with a crumbly, melting texture to it and the jam must not be too sweet. So the trick to a crumbly, melty texture …