Product Review: Pamela's Gluten Free Sugar Cookies

Today I have a product review for you.  Last time my husband and I went to our favorite grocery store, Sprouts, they were doing their Gluten Free Jubilee.  This is always super exciting, because it means the gluten free food I have to buy is on sale, so I can afford to buy a few extra treats (or just stock pile thinks like bread).  Baking mixes are one of the items we usually stock up on because we can keep them in the freezer and pull them out when we need them.  We got really excited to see that the Pamela's brand of gluten free products had come out with a lot of new mixes.  We bought a bunch of them, but today I am going to review the Pamela's Gluten Free Sugar Cookie Mix.

The plate matches my super cute heating pad! 

Sugar cookies have been one of the products that has been surprisingly hard to find gluten free.  Around the holidays I would kill for a tube of gluten free sugar cookies to slice and bake.  Alas, the only mixes I have ever found involved a lot of ingredients, steps, or both.  This mix only requires butter and 1 egg.  It also included instructions to make your own slice and bake cookies.  Also, I can not wait to make fruit pizza with it!

I let the butter soften on the counter.  I thought it was pretty soft, but in retrospect it could have been softer.  It didn't quite mix as well as it should have- so make sure your butter is really soft.  Or...set your bowl on a heating pad like I did and keep on beating.  After I had added all the ingredients I mixed...and mixed...and mixed waiting for the dough to come together like the package said.  Maybe my butter still wasn't soft enough, but my dough never came together.  However, having made pie crust last week, I hoped the wet sand looking dough I now had in the bowl might turn into dough if I rolled it out.  I reached in, grabbed a handful, and made a little ball.  Success!  The dough held together.

Because I am a little lazy, I decided to roll all the cookies into little balls and then press them out.  I didn't have any parchment or wax paper to roll out my cookies, and this just seemed a whole lot easier. I also ended up with 24 cookies instead of the 17 listed on the package.  I dipped some of the cookies in cinnamon/sugar, some were left plain, and the rest got sprinkled with Andes mints.

The package said to bake the cookies at 350 for 8-10 minutes.  At the 8 minute mark, my cookies were still really soft and mushy.  So they went for 2 minutes more...and the 2 minutes after that.  Big mistake.  The first batch came out pretty dry.  They never really browned around the edges, but upon inspection the bottoms were a nice golden brown.  The plain cookies taste a lot like shortbread instead of sugar cookies.  For the second batch, I cooked the cookies for exactly 8 minutes, and then took them out of the oven.  The were definitely still really soft, but after cooling for a few minutes they were perfect!.  However, my cookies were a lot thicker than if I had rolled them out so I suspect 8 minutes would be too long for thinner cookies.

So, would I buy this mix again?  Definitely.  Do they taste like real sugar cookies?  Yes- if you don't over cook them.  I hope they work out for you!