Vegan Cookies - March 12, 2009

Lila was in charge of finding the cookie recipe that we would try, and thus we had our Thursday cooking meeting (one week late due to personal conflicts) at Lila's house. She found 3 recipes online, I printed copies, and brought those and my cooling racks over to her place. The idea of using the leftover frosting from the cupcakes went out the window as we figured the lifespan of the frosting had expired. I did bring the leftover vegan semi-sweet chocolate chips from when we made brownies.

We spread out the 3 recipes on the table, considered the ingredients we had compared to the ingredients in the different versions, and picked which recipe we'd try first. While we pulled out the right ingredients from the multitude of things Lila had spread out, we decided that the next time we tried cookies, she would get the recipe her mother uses.

Alison put together the dry ingredients while Lila mixed together the wet, and I stood away from the crowded counter space calling out to them what to add next to each respective bowl.

At first glance we picked the most difficult recipe - there wasn't even white space on the single sheet / single spaced page for me to jot my notes (though the back of the sheet sufficed for this). The truth was this was the quickest recipe we've done yet.

Alison created a well in the dry ingredients, but not big enough, we quickly saw, for the wet ingredients that Lila had mixed. Nothing to sweat over, though, as the next step was to mix it all up. We blended the dough by spoon, then separated it into approximately half, once we had a good mix. Half the batter got the left-over vegan semi-sweet chocolate chip cookies - that dough made a dozen on one cookie sheet; the other half got craisins (dried cranberries) and almond slivers. That made a batch of 11, fulfilling the recipe's promise of "Almost 2 dozen cookies."

Because of the ingredients we added, and because of the individual touch (making each cookie by hand), we came up with a batch of cookies that were of inconsistent size. We decided that in the future we'd pre-make the dough, roll it into a standard size, and freeze it (for just a couple of hours, to let it set) so we could then slice cookies from the roll and have consistent cookies (the guess was for about 1 cm thick).

Following the recipe we put both pans in to bake, then half-way through the baking process we switched which pan was on the top, which was on the bottom, and rotated them 180 degrees. We ended up leaving the cranberry almond cookies in for a bit longer, and the chocolate chip cookies were in for an additional 2 minutes.





This recipe didn't call for egg or egg replacer (as the other recipes did), but seemed to just substitute oil in (we followed the recipe exactly). In the future we may try replacing some of the oil with applesauce, reducing the oil, or just finding another recipe. The first taste of these was oily. The cookies were good, otherwise, though in the future, if we keep Cranberry Almond on the menu, we'll try adding almond or lemon extract. (We'll try both, but not at the same time).

We took the cookies to gaming, and once again we discovered that the day after our baking, the treat tastes better. These particular cookies were soft to the point of crumbly, and though the day after was tastier, it was still a bit too oily for our preferences. I think something other than straight oil would help with both problems. We will definitely look into other cookie recipes, and keep in mind the trick of working from rolled dough to have more consistent size cookies, all the easier to sell, and to adjust the baking time.

[Recipe found at VegWeb.com, Happy Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies]