Some days I can counter major crankiness with a bit of hippie love: playing fetch with Mitra (check out this little Vimeo from yesterday), reminding myself of my “just enough” theory, going to a yoga class, hugging a tree (I warned you this is hippie love) or simply remembering that there is only one life we get and so we should just enjoy the silly crap of it all.

Other days I just need a cookie. Yesterday was such a day.

Now I’ve been a poo-pooher of gluten-free baking mixes because I do not believe that an all-purpose gluten-free baking flour exists. Take four of these so called “cup-for-cup” blends and make the same recipe with them and you’ll get four very different outcomes. But I’m often sent mixes for Easy Eats and in my ever-evolving study of them have grown an appreciation for what they offer: something sweet and warm from your oven, very quickly. This is obviously huge if you’re not inherently a baker or if you’re new to gluten-free baking. And for those of us who have our own go-to blends and bins of flours, starches and gums, they offer a quick fix. when you need a cookie!!

Still, that doesn’t mean I’m a fan of just any baking mixes. But the list of ones I admire is growing. And soon I’ll start reporting on them more regularly, hopefully one day culminating in my feature in Easy Eats on battling… well, you’ll have to wait for that.

One line that I truly love and respect is Pamela’s Products. I’d used Pamela’s flour in my Taste Test spread and then featured her in an interview on the Easy Eats blog. They then sent me a sampler of her new baking mixes before the holidays and I was honestly shocked when the biscuit mix turned out really great biscuits. I used some of her flour blend in a cake I made, and again was surprised that it was exactly as I’d expected it to be for that recipe, meaning indiscernible from wheat flour.

I’m in Connecticut today, working in my family office, which in itself is a buggery; I’m not a fan of numbers and taxes and credit statements and all, and so when a really frustrating phone call with a credit card company made me miss my yoga class, it sent me into a downward spiral. I’d had a rough night sleep. My knees and back were really cranky. I’m still catching up after a really hard couple of weeks (months) and some days keeping it together takes more energy than others. So when my calculator just stopped working I walked away. Just walked away.

Ok, just from my desk.

I needed that darned cookie.

Luckily I’ve been toting Pamela’s Oatmeal Cookie mix around so that when I’m here I have a quick solution for something sweet or when an unexpected visitor drops by. And after a quick trip to the market for butter (what house does not have real butter, I ask ya?!?!) and some dairy-free chocolate chunks (Enjoy Life is often on sale here, and that makes me happy) I had these babies in the oven in, like, ten minutes. Seriously.

I was, again, skeptical that they would work; the batter seemed a tad dry and it took a lot of beating to soften the butter up enough. I divided the batter into thirds and added chocolate chunks, then chocolate chunks and toasted walnuts, then cranberries and walnuts. 14 minutes in the oven and…

They’re delicious. I added tons of cranberries, chocolate chunks and walnuts that I toasted up fast. I wanted to see if they could hold up. And I purposely sprayed the sheets instead of using parchment, because I didn’t want to buy a whole roll of parchment for 12 cookies and the bag gave both options. They held up. Totally.

I highly recommend this cookie mix. I literally eye-balled ingredients and they were darned tasty.

Head to Pamela’s Products for this and her entire line of mixes. And to banter back with me on days such as this head over to Twitter, where I’m often venting / retracting / reventing.

Ooh, and these images are obviously not prettily altered and watermarked and all that… but just writing a blog post feels awesome today, too. So, thank you, bloggerreaders.