That's way too much tweaking--the different wet and dry ingredients absorb and bake differently. It sounds like it could be a good recipe, but I don't think it'll come out the way I think it's supposed to come out if you do all that. It would be easier to invent your own recipe from the empty bowl up. Your best bet for success the first time is to find a recipe that matches the ingredients you want to use.

From a web search:

Old German Honey Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup shortening
• 1 cup honey
• 2 eggs

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

Directions

1. In a saucepan over low heat, melt together sugar, shortening and honey. Let cool.
2. Mix together eggs, vanilla, baking soda and ginger. Gradually add to cooled honey mixture.
3. Slowly add 4 cups of
   flour to mixture. Stir until well blended. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto
   cookie sheets about 2 inches apart. Bake at 350 degrees F (180 degrees
   C) until golden (about 12-15 minutes).

There is no milk in that recipe.
The recipe looks fine to me, as is....but not if you substitute wheat flour for any of the oat flour.
There are many recip[es on line for honey cookies...I recommend one of those for Rosh Hashana.
Frankly I don't think you are an experienced enough cook to make substitutions in a recipe for baked goods. Until you really REALLY know what you are doing, I suggest you make all baked goods as written.

I have a lot of experience doing the opposite by converting baked goods recipes to be gluten-free or wheat-free, and I agree that your suggested changes are extreme. The taste and texture would be very different by substituting that much wheat flour for oat flour. The recipe sounds to me like it would taste good as written. Not sure if there was supposed to be almond milk listed in the recipe... Fwiw, I searched for non-gf versions of a honey cookie and didn't see any recipe that got good ratings!

No, I'm not experienced making substitutions, if I was, I would have no need to post a question here for advice. Frankly, I can't imagine the recipe tasting good as is, would be too cakey for my taste I think, but again, what do I know, which is why I am posting the question. And yes, I have lots of other recipes for honey cookies. The reason this one interests me is the use of rice flour.

I left the almond milk out of the recipe when I typed it. Thanks for pointing that out Party Music! Here it is corrected.

1/3 cup coconut oil
1 cup honey
2 eggs
1 cup unsweetened almond milk
3 1/2 cups oat flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg

So the point is a rice flour cookie, rather than a honey cookie? If so, I'd look for that kind of recipe. Rice flour is almost sugar. It's the oat flour (and eggs) that makes this cookie.

With those ingredients, they are obviously supposed to be a "healthy" cookie. IME, you always lose taste and texture when you go for healthy. :p

Maybe check the gf recipes on the King Arther Flour site for ways to use your brown rice flour. Or you could use it by substituting a bit for the flour in muffins or cakes when you make them...

Actually when I thought about it, I DO have some experience with cookie baking! Like lot of folks, I'm always trying to find "healthy" recipes but like you say PM, I'm not willing to go too far down that path because inevitably, the results just aren't that good. It is a cookie after all! Most "healthy" cookies try to cut the fat, sub out some kind of unsaturated fats for butter and margarine or crisco, and use whole grains. Farther down that path is the lack of eggs and gluten free. At that point, IMHO, you might as well eat a bowl of whole grain cereal! To me, the recipe above combines just too many healthy elements to turn out good. My experience with using non-hydrogenated fats in cookies is they turn out cakey. To me, particularly with the addition of almond milk and the use of coconut oil, I imagine these turning out quite cakey. But I am not a baking expert, just someone who has experimented quite a bit with cookies. I don't ever recall adding milk to cookies, although one of my favorite cookies are those Italian ones that use ricotta cheese! They're cakey, but in a good way, like little angel pillows. I rarely make those because they have no whole grains in them at all, they would be just for very special occasions.

I have a recipe for whole grain muffins using rice flour. Right now, I'm looking to use up butter because we ended up with three pounds of the stuff and I rarely use it, and when I do it is mostly for baking, particularly cookies. I have had good success subbing in some whole grain flours for SOME of the flour in my tried and true cookie recipes. Back in the day it was soy flour, but nowdays it is likely to be oatmeal. I think brown rice flour would be OK too, since it is used in shortbread. I could make shortbread but I don't have the energy for that right now. I've been sick for a month and am so behind in so many areas of my life!

I think I'm going to go with a more traditional honey cookie recipe and just sub in a little bit of whole grain flours.

L, I am going to be the odd one out and say I think replacing up to half of the oat flour with wheat flour would still be OK. Milk is milk, so the difference between the almond milk and the dairy milk isn't an issue for me. The only issue I have is with the coconut oil, I don't really like the stuff and don't use it, so it's outside my realm of experience, and fats do act differently from each other in baked goods.

I tend to be very "experimental" anyway, so wouldn't hesitate to make changes. They're cookies, and if they are too dry or too hard or whatever, I just dunk them into my coffee or cover them with frosting!

Annie

What seems a little off to me is I have never seen a cookie recipe that called for milk . . . of any kind. I would expect them to be kind of cakey, as most cookies made with alternative fats are, in my experience.

hmmm... right off the top of my head, I can think of two of my cookie recipes that use milk. Both recipes are at least 50 years old -- maybe even from WWII time-frame when certain food items were rationed?

BTW: If you've ever watched the old 'Christmas in Connecticut' movie, I always wondered what Uncle Felix was talking about when he read his planned menu and kept saying "no points". A friend recently researched and found it meant that the ingredients wouldn't cost you any rationing points! I love that movie. :)

This is OT, but my curiosity is piqued. What are the cookies made with milk?

One is the cherry blinks I made for Xmas. I also remember milk in an old Betty Crocker cocoa drop cookie. Pretty sure I'd find more that use milk if I took the time to dig through all my recipes.

I make a lemon shortbread that has a small amount of milk in it, and my Chocolate Crinkles recipe recommends a small amount of milk if the dough is too stiff.

Cool! Not wanting to bother PM further, I looked up Cherry Blink cookies. YUM! I think I need to make these soon! They call for one and 2/3 TBLSP milk. Yes, I can see a couple TBLSP, but the cookie recipe I posted calls for 1 CUP! I think I'm going to make the cherry blinks and maybe some cocoa drops instead. I have excess cocoa too. As for my rice flour . . . I dunno. I'll have to take a look at some of the options in the rice flour thread. I'd love to make lemon shortbread but SO does not like anything lemon. I love lemon!

One cup of any liquid is unusual for a cookie recipe! My CBs use 3 tbs milk.

Milk is often added to cookie recipes...just a little like 2 teaspoons. someone once told me it was to help melt the sugar into the butter.
The texture of the batter of the cookeis as originally posted would be very like a cake batter....seems to me you would pour puddles on the cookie sheet....Cakey indeed!

I can see cakey if these had wheat flour, but not sure you would get that with just oat and rice. With so much almond milk as well as honey and oil (and wouldn't it make a difference whether you were using a coconut oil that was solid at room temp or one that was liquid?), I would expect this to be a very thin batter. I am reminded of fortune cookies where you pour out little pancake-like circle of batter. The recipe could be cut in half if you feel like playing -- smaller if you divide your egg. It is bound to be unusual, that's for sure.

I'd expect it to be a gloppy sticky texture, and I'd expect the cookies to be dense... Similar to baked globs of oatmeal cereal. Not sure what the c oil and all that honey does for the texture but it probably gives it a nice gloss and light crispness outside. Now somebody needs to make them and give a report with pictures. :)

Too right. Maybe Ricky will volunteer?

Linda is probably right, but I was thinking the oat flour would soak up the milk and that the baked cookie would be more lacy than dense.

I'll make a half batch and report back!

Well, I attempted to make a half-batch and the batter was about the texture I expected when I was ready to scoop out cookies -- but then I suddenly realized I had forgotten to add the egg! Batter before egg. lol!

Once I added the egg, the batter was very much like a thick pancake batter. And here are the problems: a half-batch created 2 cups of batter which should make 18 cookies, so I made the first dozen with about a tbs of the batter. They 'sit up' until the heat hits them and then they spread very quickly to 3" diameter and are thin on the edges. This was probably my fault because I ground my own oat flour and didn't care whether it was perfectly smooth. The edges were starting to burn at around 8 mins so I took them out and made the remaining cookies just a bit smaller (2.5") -- 35 cookies total, and actual baking time then was closer to 6 min than 12! Not sure if I screwed up on a measurement somewhere, but this is what I ended up with... oh! I also sub'd 2% milk because I didn't have almond milk. I think I will make them again, but I will reduce the baking soda by half and either lower the temp or drastically shorten the baking time (as was req'd). It's a healthy cookie -- not too sweet -- and naturally GF. I like it and can tweak it for my preferences. :)

Does not look like the stock photo that accompanies my recipe! This is fascinating PM! I am so unfamiliar with GF baking, so I don't know the qualities of oat flour . . . but I do know that invariably, when I use honey in cooking I have problems with over-browning, particularly in a cookie! I love that you are more adventurous than me! Thank you for sharing!! I may make some version of a cookie this weekend, if I can just get my energy back. I am fighting a virus that just won't leave!

I readily admit I didn't grind the oats well! I did it the way I do for adding to breads... Leaving a bit of texture. Assume it's my failure. These remind me of a soft molasses cookie and they keep getting softer as they sit.

Btw, the recipe you've given didn't address combining the ingredients - or I missed it. Just stir? Beat? Chill dough or anything else I missed?

I could type it all out, but it was basically: preheat the oven. Combine the coconut oil through all the "wet" ingredients. Then for the dry, it says to sift them all together. Not sure if that would have made a difference. Then combine wet and dry, no special instructions. And then, drop by TEASPOONFULS on a greased baking sheet. It said bake 12 minutes (that seems long considering your results) or until golden brown underneath cookie. (Which seems kind of a hard thing to tell . . . ) Allow to cool before serving. The stock photo, which I suspect is not of these cookies, does look like some photos I have seen of molasses cookies. I have recipes for two type of molasses cookies, ones that look like yours, and ones that look crinkly like the ones in this stock photo. I think the ones that look crinkly is a case where you refrigerate the dough and then roll it into balls before baking. You might try that with this cookie. I might even go rogue and mix half honey with brown sugar . . . just based on my past experience with all honey cooking. I love the flavor of honey but the texture of honey baked goods are not always ideal. I had to give up honey cooking due to the high price of honey, but would like to get back to more local and natural eating.

PM's cookies look similar to what I was thinking.

The trick to baking this kind of cookie is to use a heavier sheet pan (rather than the thinnest aluminum--steel if you have it), pull them out when the edges start to get brown, and let them finish in the heat retained in the pan. Remove when cool.

BF got clever and sprinkled the cookies with sugar and put them in the toaster oven. :)

Here's a recipe for crispy cookies made with brown rice flour.

http://francostigan.com/the-recipe-for-the-thin-crispy-vegan-gluten-free-cookie/

You can sub honey for the maple syrup, so as not to forgo the joys of tweaking. Have your cookie and eat it too!

• 1⁄4 cup oats, toasted and cooled (Use certified gluten-free if desired)
• 1⁄4 cup whole almonds, toasted and cooled
• 1⁄4 cup brown rice flour
• 1⁄4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1⁄4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1⁄8 teaspoon nutmeg
• pinch salt
• 3 tablespoons mild tasting extra virgin olive oil or a neutral vegetable oil
• 1⁄4 cup maple syrup, Grade B or dark amber
• 1⁄4 cup brown rice syrup, warmed until pourable (see note)
• 11⁄2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1⁄2 teaspoon almond extract (omit if nut allergies are a consideration)

1. Position a rack in the middle of the oven and another rack above it, and preheat to 325 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. Grind the oats in a blender or food processor until fine. Add the almonds and process until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Pour into a medium bowl, and add the rice flour, cinnamon, baking powder, nutmeg, and salt. Stir to distribute the ingredients.
3. Whisk the oil, maple syrup, rice syrup, and vanilla and almond extracts in a small bowl until well blended. Pour into the dry mixture and stir. The batter will resemble soft, chunky peanut butter.
4. Using an ordinary teaspoon (not a measuring spoon) scoop up scant half teaspoons of batter and drop onto the prepared baking sheets, leaving 4 inches between cookies. These cookies spread a lot.
5. Bake for 11 to 12 minutes. Set the baking sheet on a rack and cool completely (this will take 6 to 7 minutes). The cookies will release easily from the paper when they are completely cool. Store the cookies in a tightly closed jar or tin for two days. These cookies freeze well.