I had these cookies for the first time at a friend’s house on our monthly book club meet, and they were a big hit. She used buckwheat as a substitute to ap flour, as one of the friends is allergic to gluten. Also, sugar was replaced with maple syrup to accommodate the dietary needs of another friend.

After gorging on about half a dozen cookies (pls don’t judge me, they were too addictive) I asked for the recipe which she happily shared. Now an enthusiast SCD chef (pun intended) started looking for ways to modify the recipe to suit the SCD guidelines.

So, as the name suggests, the process started with looking out for sugar free jam.Few trips to the supermarket but no such luck, all the bottles contained a long list of preservatives if not sugar, which certainly couldn’t be used (no preservatives/processed food allowed in SCD).

Now the situation left me in a dilemma of either drop the idea of baking these cookies or do everything from the scratch. And of course, I picked the latter. After all it’s the challenges what make things more interesting and satisfying in case you get to overcome them. 

So, it started with making a batch of sugar free & all kinds of preservative free apricot jam, the recipe of which is followed in my next blogpost.

A mindful shuffle of few ingredients, some trial & error, I finally managed to bake a batch of SCD Jam drop cookies. A bite into these flaky at the side, soft in the center cookies and memories of my one among the many baking disaster came rushing back like a tidal wave.  I was somewhere in my teens and after watching few culinary episodes on holiday and driven by my passion for baking, I decided to bake some cookies.

Made a list of some fancy ingredients and asked Dad to get all those, which was next to impossible in our small-town grocery store. The recipe called for baking powder but since it was not available, the shopkeeper insisted to take ‘meetha soda’ saying they both work the same.

With a pleasant feeling of excitement and an expectation of some enjoyable treat, I finally I started baking with whatever available ingredients. But the adventure soon turned into a nightmare. The cookies turned out to be hard-rock cookies, which even a person with the strongest teeth wouldn’t be able to break it I couldn’t understand was it due to the baking powder replacement or baking time, but somehow we managed to finish those hard chewy cookies.

A small-town girl who’s still trying to figure out the difference between baking powder & baking soda…. how far has she come in this journey?

I kept ruminating!!