Adventures in gluten free baking

So I recently tried to do some gluten free baking for my cousin Bryan and my aunt Heidi who have been diagnosed with Celiacs disease or whatever the fuck you call it. for the sake of conversations we will refer to them as Glutards. so I decided to bake these cookies with this bobs red mill gluten free AP flour. it smells a little funky and as I'm sifting it I noticed that it says,"for best results in baking add Xantham gum" in my head I'm just like what the fuck is Xantham gum, I do a quick bit of wiki research and figure out what it is, and then after a quick perusing in the pantry I find out that I have none. so Apparently it is used as a stabilizing agent in several products, especially those of the gluten free variety. I do some more research and figure out that you can substitute corn starch for it as a stabilizer, so that's what i did. I'm not entirely sure if that is a gluten free ingredient, but after much painstaking label reading i gave up and added it to the mixture i was sifting. I made these cookies based on the back of the heath bits bag and added semi sweet chocolate chips and some Reece's peanut butter chips. after sifting and creaming and beating and folding I had a pliable hopefully usable dough. I tasted the dough and thought,"well it tastes like its gluten free." it wasn't bad, just a little off tasting. so I baked off a sample cookie and after adding heat to the chemical equation I was left with a soft chewy cookie that actually tasted pretty good. I'm not sure if beating it a little more well help but with the exemption of gluten the cookie definitely doesn't hold together as well as I would have hoped, but hey it still tastes good and that's what counts right? so I'm going to bake the whole mess of these cookies and hopefully my relative Glutards will be satisfied. Stage mahizzal out.