holiday cookies

Hi! Remember me? I haven't been posting much, but I've definately been cooking...seven kinds of cookiies, to be precise. I feel like Martha Stewart or something.

Molasses crinkles, cantuccini, x cookies (my favorite!!), cornmeal-cherry cookies, peanut butter cookies, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate blocks (dark chocolate, cashews, apricots, and cranberries), and chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons.

Whew! (I've linked the the recipes I adapted from)

I think the tins looked really pretty.

See? This stuff is xxx, people!

veganmofo: CHEWY Double-Chocolate Cookies

Every day for a the month of November I'm going to write a post a day about something related to food as part of the Vegan Month of Food project. Ok, I'm starting 3 days late, but do we really have to talk about that?

Anyway, for my first post I give you chewy double-chocolate cookies. These were really chewey, really chocolatey, and really, really good. I'm not going to tell you how many I ate tonight. Ok, four. And two at breakfast. But we don't have to talk about that either, do we?

The recipe is from Orangette. I made the obvious substitutions: margerine for butter and plain soy yogurt for the dairy yogurt. And I used 1/2 a cup of white sugar instead of 2/3rds, but otherwise I followed the recipe exactly.

an experiment

As I mentioned in a previous post, I needed to make a dessert today to bring to a lunch tomorrow. I decided to overcome my fear of tofu and make a chocolate pie (with tofu in it). It was well...hmm...an interesting experience. Tasty, but interesting. First, here are the photos (I haven't cut the pie yet, of course. Hopefully I'll be able to get a picture of a slice tomorrow).

I didn't use her recipe exactly, but the look and feel of the pie was definately inspired by Isa Chandra's Chocolate Smlove Pie. The recipe appealed to me because it looks great, and since the pie is baked, it looked like it would have a cheesecakey sort of texture. I basically followed her recipe for the pie filling, except I subbed flour for the arrowroot powder. I also used a little bit less chocolate, because I was using a really good 72% dark chocolate (from Trader Joes. Only $3.99 for 17oz, and it's vegan!) The filling was GOOD. Of course, the chocolate overpowered the tofu. I never would have guessed there was tofu in it. The filling was so good, and so thick, that I had serious doubts about baking it, but I decided to go ahead because I had already mixed up the crust. After about 15 minutes in the oven, the top of the pie was really dark and dried out, so I covered it and but let it continue baking, because the crust wasn't done yet. I took it out as soon as the crust looked done, which was after 30 min or so. The pie was never jiggly at all, it was really thick all along, so next time I would pre-bake the crust and not bake the filling. Also, I'd use even less chocolate.

I made a peanut butter carmel topping too, but I didn't have maple syrup or brown rice syrup, so made the carmel the old-fashioned way, by melting sugar in a pot. It was fun! The sugar was all melted and golden after about a minute, so I poured some soymilk in (instead of cream) and it got all foamy and bubbly, like it does with cream, but then the sugar sort of separated into a ball. I put it back on the heat, and fortuately it melted back into the sauce. This was a very yummy sauce.

And as you can see, I put coconut on the pie instead of nuts. The crumbs of the filling that I tasted were pretty good, so I hope the finished product is ok. I think it should be fine, but I'd definately change things a little bit next time.