Gluten Free Lactation Cookies

Lactation cookies, for those yet to encounter this phenomina, are essentially a selection of ingredients commonly held to promote lactation baked into a sweet, oaty, cookie form.  Typical active ingredients held to have a beneficial effect on lactation are flaxseed, brewer’s yeast and oats –  the sugar rush is also immensely beneficial at strange hours of the night.

You can find a wide variety of lactation cookie recipes online – the key challenge for this particular formulation was to keep the end product free from Gluten.  To celebrate the arrival of the littlest angel (also responsible for the extended hiatus of this blog), this is the recipe for gluten free lactation cookies that has kept mummy going through the difficult early months (years).

Ingredients

You will need:

• 3 heaped teaspoons flaxseed meal
• 4 tablespoons of water
• 120g butter
• 200g brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon vanilla essence
• 200g gluten-free self raising flour (we use Dove’s Farm)
• 1 teaspoon xanthan gum
• ¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2½ tablespoons of brewer’s yeast (gluten free – see notes below)
• ½ teaspoon salt (we use Himalayan rock salt)
• 200g gluten-free oats
• 130g packet of magic stars (or alternative chocolate treat)

Most of these ingredients are readily obtained from your nearest supermarket.  Finding gluten free brewers yeast is a challenge however.  If you are only gluten intolerant then you may be able to get away with packets of brewer’s yeast power obtained from the internet, however we have had a mixed experience with these.  Check your reaction to a small quantity before you commit.  Otherwise it is possible to obtain certified gluten free brewer’s yeast as a nutritional suppliment.  You may find this more easily in tablet rather than powdered form, however you can fairly readily turn the tablets back into a powder using a mortar and pestle if necessary.

Method

Before you start, preheat the oven to 180 degrees C

Step 1

Mix the flaxseed meal and water in a small bowl and allow to sit for a few minutes (essentially until you need them).  I’ve found using a metal spoon and giving a good stir works fairly well.

Step 2

Now place the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl and cream them together with a blender (a small handheld one does the job).  If the butter has come straight out of the fridge I find it helpful to give it a 1min zap in the microwave on the lowest setting to soften it first.

Step 3

Now add the egg, vanilla and the flaxseed meal porridge from earlier into the bowl and mix together thoroughly.  I’ve found a metal spoon works well for this.

Step 4

Now add in the flour, xanthan gum, cinnamon, salt and yeast and stir together well using your trusty spoon.  I’ve found I can get away without needing to sieve gluten free flour, but your milage may vary.  Stirring the thicker mixture can be a reasonably good workout.  However I’ve found that the thoroughness of mixing at this point makes a very noticable difference to the quality of the final cookies, so don’t give up until you have a good even texture with all dry ingredients you added well incorporated.  The mixture should still be quite wet at this point.

Step 5

Now you can add the final ingredients, the oats and the magic stars (or any other chocolatey treat for that matter).  At this point you will need to use your hands to kneed the mixture together; keep at it until you have a well incorporated and very sticky dough.

Step 6

Place the mixture onto a baking tray.  Use your trusty spoon to measure out dollops of dough onto the baking tray – I find I get 18 good sized cookies from this recipe.  You may find it helpful to wet the spoon between cookies to prevent too much of the mixture sticking to the spoon.

Once you have placed the dough, wet the back of the spoon and use this to shape the dough into rough cookie shapes.

And bake…

Now you can put them in the oven.  I find 12 minutes in a fan forced oven at 180 degrees works well.  When they come out they will have barely changed colour; don’t be tempted to leave them until they noticably brown or they will go rock hard as they set…

When the cookies first come out of the oven they will still be very soft and will fall apart if you try and move then straight away.  Give them 2-3 minutes to set slightly before carefully transferring them to a wire rack to cool.

Enjoy!

And there you go – lovely fresh gluten free lactation cookies to boost your lactation and/or sanity through the early months/years of children.  Note don’t feel any need to give up on the cookies just because you’ve stopped breastfeeding…