Smile! Gluten-free Busken cookies available

The logo on most Busken Bakery products includes a small sprig of wheat. But you won’t find it in their newest line of baked goods: Busken is now offering a line of treats free of wheat and gluten, including a gluten-free happy-face cookie.

Brian Busken said they’ve been thinking about how to offer gluten-free baked goods for some time now.

“It’s a trend that seems to be here to stay,” he said. “Customers ask all the time if we can do gluten-free.”

But they could not convert any part of their production facilities to avoid flour thoroughly, so they needed a partner.

By chance, they found their partner just a few blocks away from their main production bakery in Hyde Park. Moondance Sweets has been making gluten-free cheesecake for over a decade, and has added cookies, coffeecakes and brownies, sold nationally. They are now baking a private-label product line for Busken that includes some of their most popular items. It includes two kinds of brownies, a cinnamon coffee cake and Mexican wedding cake cookies.

But the big goal was to create a new happy-face cookie. “If anyone from Cincinnati who, like me, used to eat gluten and then had to stop, a Busken cookie would be one of the things they’d most miss,” said Shelley Ritchie, the owner of Moondance. “For a true Cincinnatian, this is a big deal.”

So she spent some time with the formula, baking the cookie with the flour mix of various kinds of starches and rice flour, that she has developed for her other products. The almond flavor and the sweet icing of the original had to be matched convincingly, too. “I think we really got it,” she said.

The cookies and other baked goods are now being baked in Moondance’s completely gluten-free facility, and delivered prepackaged to all Busken locations. A billboard campaign to promote them starts on Tuesday.

Busken had once before tried a variation on the smiley cookie: their skinny cookie, made with a fat substitute. That product was taken off the market about six months ago.

But how are the new cookies?

The new gluten-free happy-face cookies look the same as the standard version, with the bright-yellow icing and stamped-on smile. The flavor is also spot-on. You can immediately recognize the almond flavoring and the sweet icing, which also had to be re-formulated without gluten.

It’s the texture that’s harder to get right in gluten-free products. They’re often dry and crumbly, or very thin, and sometimes gritty. But these cookies have a texture and thickness close to the original. It might be a tad crumblier, and, if you’re really paying attention, a bit gritty. Several tasters thought they might be a little lighter, even perhaps a little less sweet than the with-gluten cookies.

A great alternative for the gluten-watcher.