this is the best idea I have ever had.

A couple weeks ago I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies and then I froze most of them instead of baking them. Now I have constant access to warm melty cookies. Of course, it is potentially not brilliant to heat up the whole oven to bake two cookies and potentially not brilliant to eat two cookies every night at 11pm. But still.

I slightly modified the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. I think this cures them of the creepy translucency they come down with on day two. Of course if you do it my way they will not survive more than ten minutes out of the oven anyway. I will post the recipe since the VWaV version is already on the internets in five frillion places. I made them partly whole wheat and you can kind of tell, but I like that because it makes me feel better about eating them every day late at night.

1 cup Earth Balance buttery sticks, at room temperature
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp molasses
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp ground flax seeds whisked with 3 Tbsp water
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (check ingredients for vegan-worthy chips)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Cream together the margarine and sugar until fluffy.
Add the molasses, vanilla, and flax glop. Add the flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix well. Fold in the chocolate chips and walnuts. The dough will make you concerned with its unnatural stiffness. Form the dough into cookie-like discs. They will not be spreading out much at all so flatten them a little. Place onto ungreased cookie sheet. Put cookie sheet in freezer until solid then dump into ziploc bag for storage. Put straight from freezer to oven to bake (remove from ziploc). If you bake them in a hot oven (400ish) the outside browns while the inside is still gushy. GENIUS!

jennifer belly need pancake

ginger cookies

I don't know what it is about me and Vegan with a Vengeance, but it seems like my doughs are always way too sticky. It is odd because I measure my flour wrong anyway, by dipping the cup into the bag, instead of by sprinkling it into the cup grain by grain with a teaspoon or however you are supposed to do it, and that's supposed to give you too much flour. Well ANYWAY. I added an extra half cup or so of flour. I like these Sparkled Ginger Cookies a lot, they are not too sweet despite being covered in sugar. But I'm taking them to my lab holiday party and I don't know how they will go over there. They're great with a cup of tea but maybe they won't be good with a big cup of pop. Ick. I don't know how people can drink pop. It's not really like me to fret over the unrefined tastes of my cookie audience. It must be the benevolent spirit of the winter holidays.

I switched to saying "soda" a long time ago but I'm using "pop" here for the authentic Buffalo flavor.

isa pizza. reduced sodium.

Yesterday I made Isa Pizza from VWaV but I forgot to take a picture of it until this morning. The other thing I forgot was to add salt to the dough. Which, in case you were wondering, is not a good idea... so that was sad.

chocolate peanut butter highs and lows

So, I had my first unsalvageable vegan cooking failure.

The peanut butter pie from VWaV... why lord is there so much agar? Maybe it's because I had flakes instead of powder. But it calls for 3 tablespoons, and I used two, because I know from my previous weird fascination with agar jellies that that is a crazy amount of agar. Anyways, after I boiled it I still knew that was going to be way too much but then it was so fun or something to pour it into the blender that I dumped it all in.. and then it set into this horrible gelatinous brick that has the same texture as a cold, wet pencil eraser except a little more chalky. Also contributing to the disgustingness is probably the fact that my grocery store only has firm silken-tofu-in-a-box in the "LITE" form. It makes no sense to me. But anyway. I threw the whole thing out, but it was not that sad, because the pre-made crust I used tasted kind of like cardboard dust mixed with the floor sweepings from the cocoa factory.

In better news...

These are chocolate peanut butter shells and they are great. If you use the weird "special dark" cocoa that I have, then the outside tastes like an Oreo. Someone saw me eating one at work and said that it looked "not home-made," which in knitting is a huge compliment so maybe that is a compliment in vegan baking also. (I overbaked half of these a little though so don't do that. Take them out as soon as they start to crack on top and they will be much better. Also put in more filling than you think is reasonable.)

I had to make a very difficult decision on Friday, so tell me what you would have done. It was especially hard because the decision involved coffee and therefore had to be made BEFORE having coffee.

The choices are:
Silk, the faux cream of choice, except that it has been in the refrigerator for a very, very long time and the sides are suspiciously bloated.
Weird, powdered soy "beverage" mix which is apparently made from ground-up tofu and I only bought in order to make the supernatural agave icing from VCTOtW.
Unopened rice milk, but then what am I going to do with the rest of that rice milk once it's open? Also rice milk = ick.

blueberry reign of terror

Our postdoc went blueberry picking last weekend and she didn't realize how sour they were until she got home with ten pounds of them. Now every day she brings more of them in and tries to make us eat them. I made some into the sunny blueberry corn muffins from vegan with a vengeance. They would be better except I only had coarse cornmeal. So now instead of everyone being forced to eat sour berries, they will be forced to eat gritty muffins. With sour berries inside. Happy Friday!