Even though you don’t necessarily taste it, flour is the foundation of most desserts we love. Cookies, pies, cakes and brownies are all loaded with the wheat-y, glutinous powder.
Whether you have celiac disease, a gluten intolerance or are just cutting gluten out of your diet, the baked goods you eat on a gluten-free diet will likely need a major overhaul. And because the definition of gluten is so incredibly specific, it’s not always easy to know what you can and can’t eat.
The Celiac Foundation defines gluten this way:
Gluten is a general name for the proteins found in wheat (wheatberries, durum, emmer, semolina, spelt, farina, farro graham, kamut khorasan wheat and einkorn), rye, barley and triticale ― a cross between wheat and rye. Gluten helps foods maintain their shape, acting as a glue that holds food together. Gluten can be found in many types of foods, even ones that would not be expected.
You can see why people might find it daunting to navigate a gluten-free diet.
But thanks to years of recipe development, it’s all getting easier. Coconut flour, oat flour, rice flour, almond flour and others can be used as substitutes, not to mention gluten-free flour blends like Cup4Cup, which is a 1:1 substitution for all-purpose flour that works in almost any recipe.
Below are tried-and-true recipes from bloggers who’ve mastered making gluten-free desserts. We were extra picky in our selection, because we want to spare you the disappointment of biting into a gluten-free brownie that tastes like it’s made of paper towels. We’ve done it, and we love you too much for that.