Gluten Free Vanilla Custard Bars

I know what you are thinking.  Ugh! Gluten Free equals gritty texture right? Or it goes in the opposite and is very cakey with a gritty after bite.  Basically if you don’t have to put yourself in the world of gluten free, you don’t.

This isn’t my first foray into the gluten free world.  I made a cake for a friend many moons ago and last year I made my best friend sugar cookies for her birthday.  Both turned out pretty good, at least that’s what I was told but I still wasn’t happy.  This past weekend Rowan has a play date with two friends, sisters who were gluten free.  So I decided to have the girls decorate cookies, it’s kind of my standard play date activity for the first time visit (you know hop them up on sugar and send them home LOL).

I’ve also wanted to try the new Cup4Cup Gluten Free flour. As the name indicates, you just substitute this flour for whatever amount flour in any recipe.  Now save your pennies, it ain’t cheap.  It’s $19.95 for 3lbs and can only be found at Williams Sonoma, hence the price.  You can also buy in wholesale in 25lb bags but until you are sure you want to make a lot of gluten free cookies or desserts, I’d go with the small bag first.

The girls loved the cookies and made some pretty awesome cookies! 

But now what to do with the rest.  I know make a cookie bar!

I was cleaning out the pantry and found my Birds Custard Powder and I knew right there what I was going to make.

As a Canadian a common holiday treat is the traditional Nanaimo Bar, so I basically took that idea but used the GF cookie dough as the base et voila!  OH SO GOOD!

Recipe:

• Cookie Dough – use my basic sugar cookie recipe and replace the flour with Cup4Cup flour or use my GF sugar cookie recipe:
• Custard – blend together 1/2 cup softened butter, 2 cups confectioners sugar, 2 tbsp Birds Custard powder (yes it’s GF), 1/4 cup milk
• Chocolate – 1 1/2 cup chopped chocolate and 1/4 cream.  Boil cream and melt chocolate to make ganache.  1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 400F
2. Bake off cookie dough in 8” square pan lined with parchment for 9mins.  Let cool.
3. Layer custard on top of cookie dough crust.  Chill for 30 mins.
4. Make ganache and cover chilled custard.  Sprinkle with mini chocolate chips.  Chill for an hour.
5. Cut and serve
6. Enjoy!

Now you can totally make this with regular flour.  You could totally just eat the custard with a spoon, OH SO GOOD.  And mini chocolate chips always make treats fun!

Thanks for looking!