I like to experiment with baking. I’m not afraid of substituting ingredients based on what’s available to me or to accommodate tastes. Part of the fun, if you ask me.

But I’ve never used gluten-free flour before.

Usually when I make gluten-free recipes, it’s either a recipe which is anyway, or it has so little flour it can be easily switched with ground almonds.

And then I wanted to make my go-to sugar cookies recipe gluten-free. That calls for 400g of flour, and 1 egg, so it’s not very easy to scale down. So, gluten-free flour it was.

Never having used it before, I had no expectations. But I really didn’t expect it to have a sort of Magic Sand consistency and feel. Very weird.

Annoyingly, it also made my cookies spread in the oven (I’m told xanthan gum might help with that), so all the cute hedgehogs and squirrels and snails and dinosaurs were no longer. And they’re a bit fragile, so they’ve all lost their heads and tails. Shame, all those calories leaking out.

I’m reliably informed by some testers, however, that they don’t taste too bad (now there’s damning with faint praise!). All I’ll say on that subject is that they’ve lasted far longer than the gluten-filled version do.

Anyway, I’ve tried another recipe, for chocolate truffle cookies, for which fancy shapes are not needed, and only 80g of flour required. It works better, although I don’t recall the gluten version being quite so runny a mixture. Perhaps for gluten-free some more flour is needed, to thicken it so that I can roll out walnut-sized balls of mixture.

But there was less of a slightly weird aftertaste or the Magic Sand feeling when mixing. Perhaps it was the cocoa powder covering it up.