rants & recipes

Last weekend, I wanted to bake "something" ... you know that feeling when you are craving something sweet but don't really know what? Well, I finally decided on chocolate chip cookies. I pulled out my Joy of Vegan Baking cookbook and dusted it off. I've had it for ages and never made a single recipe out of it but, honestly, the real reason I bought it was the picture of chocolate chip cookies on the cover - they look SO good!

So, I was excited - I happened to have all the ingredients on hand (which is no small feat, a bag of vegan chocolate chips surviving around here long enough to be used in a recipe!) and I had the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever - I mean, the ingredients were even given in grams, just how I like them.

I was in for quite a disappointment however - the cookies ran like mad and were a big, oily, crumbly mess. I couldn't believe it. I followed the recipe pretty much to a T (ok, so I over-ran the teaspoon of vanilla just a little bit - that could not possibly account for the horrid outcome). Anyway *those* cookies got packed away, in copious amounts of napkins, like deep-fat-fried-cookies and were semi-edible, after the napkins wicked off some of the oil and the cookies cooled in the 'fridge.

Anyway, now it was a bit personal - not only had that cover photo done a thorough marketing job on me, I am totally convinced there's no way those photographed cookies were made from the recipe inside. Just not possible. The dough was too wet and too oily.

The only thing left to do was to try again. This time, not ignoring the little voice in my head going on about "the dough's too wet!". And calling in some reinforcement - from Alton Brown, no less.

The results, this time - so much better! Photo-worthy, certainly.  There's maybe room for a tweak or two but 100% improvement over last weekend's attempt!

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) Earth Balance, melted
• 2 tbsp unsweetened applesauce
• 150 grams white sugar
• 170 grams brown sugar
• 2 tbsp water
• 2 tbsp Better Than Milk Powder
• 4 1/2 tsp ener-g egg replacer powder
• 2 3/4 cup flour (I used about 1/2 each bread and all purpose - next time, I will use all bread flour, per Mr. Brown's recipe)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 to 2 cups vegan chocolate chips
• 1 cup chopped nuts (I used roasted cashews)

Instructions:

1. Combine all but flour, baking soda, chips and nuts in stand mixer and cream.
2. Allow mixture to cool a little (from melted 'butter').
3. Mix together flour and baking soda.
4. Combine flour and wet mix into a dough.
5. When nearly combined, fold in chips and nuts.
6. Cool dough in refrigerator before baking.
7. Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
8. I used a 1/4 cup measuring up to scoop out dough. I made 13 cookies from a single recipe.
9. Form dough into a ball, place on parchment-lined cookie sheet, silpat or non-stick pan and flatten slightly.
10. Bake in oven for 10-14 minutes.
11. Cool on sheets for a few minutes. Remove to racks to finish cooling.

(2nd photo by Evin)