better peanut butter blossoms

Do you really enjoy cracking your tooth on a big hard waxy chunk of pseudo-chocolate full of nasty cow secretions made by a certain obnoxious company that has been recycling its christmas commercial since 1990 in the middle of your cookie? No, you don't. A nice blob of rich chocolatey ganache is so much better!



The only special thing you need to do is find something to make a thumbprint in the cookie with. You cannot literally use your thumb because you do it when the cookie is hot so you will burn your thumb off. What you want is something cylindrical, about 1/2" in diameter, and fairly flat. I used the handle of a particular potato masher. It seems that certain bottle caps (tamari especially) look about right too. Wrap it in foil so that it does not get dough in its crevices. If this sounds like a pain then just think of what a pain it is to take all the wrappers off those little wax blobs.

Vegan Peanut Butter Blossoms

makes ~ 72

1 cup Earth Balance

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla

2 egg replacers (3 tsp Ener-G whisked with 1/4C hot water)

3 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1-2 T soymilk

extra sugar for rolling

 ganache:
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (Ghiradelli)
1/4 cup soymilk

Preheat oven to 375.

Soften EB and mix with peanut butter. Add sugars gradually until creamy and well-blended. Beat in egg replacer and vanilla. Stir in flour, baking soda, and salt. Add little splashes of soymilk until you have a cohesive but soft-ish dough. If it is too stiff then it will crack a lot when you make the ganache holes.

Form 1 inch balls and roll in sugar. Bake 13 minutes. Immediately after removing from oven, firmly yet gently press something into the surface of each cookie to make an indentation. Remove to rack and cool.

Make ganache by melting chocolate chips and soymilk in the microwave. It takes about 1-1:30 minutes. Stir until smooth and glossy then use a teaspoon to put a little dollop into each cookie hole. If you are a real over-achiever you could probably pipe it in with a pastry bag.

VOILA!