In my youth (god damn, has it really been over 20 years?), I used to enjoy my grandmother’s homemade Polish kolaczki cookies. We are partially Polish, and so this recipe was sort of brought down through the generations (not that you have to be Polish to enjoy these). However, since I was diagnosed with celiac disease almost a decade ago, as well as lactose intolerance, I had to get a tad bit creative if I wanted to make this recipe so that I could actually eat these cookies without ending up in the hospital.

For those of you who do not know, celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder where the individual cannot consume gluten (usually from wheat), or else they have an immense, severe reaction. Actually, I should revise that: a lot of celiacs have strong, negative reactions when consuming gluten, but there is such a thing as asymptomatic celiac disease. Personally, I would rather have my symptomatic version. My body told me to stop consuming gluten via nausea, cramping, and catastrophic and agonizing pain, etc., instead of waiting until I was fifty to receive a surprise diagnosis that, with all the internal damage, I acquired stage 4 colon or intestinal cancer. The asymptomatic version can be a sneaky snake in the grass and, well, deadly[ier].

I also was given the absolute pleasure of being gifted lactose intolerance, a symptom that a certain percentage of celiacs gain in their disease-laden journey. So, with an intolerance to both dairy and gluten, I decided to substitute the usual wheat flour and cow’s milk cream cheese in this recipe for my own tidbits. Here is the full list of specs:

Dough:

• 1.5 cup gluten free flour (King Arthur, Measure for Measure)
• 4 oz dairy free cream cheese (Kite Hill, made with almond milk, plain)
• 3/4 cup dairy free butter (Country Crock, mine was made with olive oil)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Filling:

• 1 teaspoon gluten/dairy free pie filling, jam, or preserves per cookie (I used Bonne Maman preserves – peach, apricot, blueberry, and cherry)

Optional:

• Powdered sugar for sprinkling

Making the recipe was actually quite simple. In a bowl, beat the cream cheese and butter together until smooth. Then, slowly add the flour and salt, a little at a time, until fully mixed with the cream cheese/butter. When finished, roll the dough into a ball, wrap with parchment paper, and let chill in the refrigerator overnight (at least 1 hour). I had it chillin’ for about 16 hours by the time I got around to taking it out for prepping and baking.

Now, even though this is gluten-free flour and dairy-free cream cheese/butter, you still need to powder your rolling pin and cutting board with gluten-free flour as well — like you would should this have been a regular wheat and cow’s milk-based recipe. I learned that the hard way, as you can see from the photo, above, that lacks flour. Ha ha ha, fucking hell did things become a mess.

Next, you want to roll the dough to be about 1/4 of an inch thick. Keep adding flour to your rolling pin, because reasons. Then, cut the dough into about 2 inch squares for each “cookie”.

Then take your 1 teaspoon of filling/jam/preserves and dab it into the center of each square. As you can see, here, I became overzealous and put way too much on each. Whoops. Oh well. Once the overabundance of preserves seeped and burned onto the cookie trays during baking, it made for a good workout when it came time to scrub it all off. …

I guess at this point I just realized that I forgot to mention that, during this time, you should be preheating your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. And this is precisely why I do not write food blogs — I just screwed up your chef-like flow.

Anyway, back to the cookies that are laying all open and exposed to the world — fold two [opposite] corners and pinch together over the filling. Like, really pinch — otherwise, the cookie will unravel during baking, and then you just have some weird, pale cracker with really hot jam boiling on top of it.

Carefully place the pinched cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 12-14 minutes. I baked for 14 because, well, gluten-free flour takes a little longer to firm and sort-of-but-not-really brown. They all turned out pretty pale in the end (as was expected due to this recipe using gluten-free flour), but 14 minutes made me feel better than 12. Anyway, you do you.

Let the cookies sit on the baking sheet for 10 minutes after removing the trays from the oven. This gives the cookies and filling time to firm up even more and cool, and promotes less of a chance that they will fall apart upon lifting from the trays.

Then, if you have any (which I didn’t, but not having this did not compromise the taste in any regard), sprinkle a puff of powdered sugar over the cookies.

Proceed to stuff as many as you can into your hungry, rumbling stomach, and enjoy the taste of gluten-free, dairy-free Polish Kolaczkis! I don’t think this was half-bad for my first try! By the way, this recipe yielded 32 cookies.

Or you can just skip the gluten-free, dairy-free ingredients and modify this recipe to fit your own dietary cravings and needs. I, on the other hand, had no other choice but to do this gluten and dairy-free.

And, now, my readers, I will leave you with one last piece of food for thought: It is utterly unsatisfying that there isn’t a newer film of The Time Machine that closer aligns to H.G. Wells’s novel. I was so bummed by this realization last night that I had difficulty falling asleep.

That is all. Enjoy your weekend. Mine will undeniably be spent in a food coma.

-A.M.