Hey Look!

More cookies!

Vanilla and chocolate thumbprints from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur.

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Tis the Season

For cookies!

This week, I attended a cookie swap and reading for the Zinester's Guide to New York City (which everybody with any kind of interest in NYC should pick up), featuring pieces (and a whole vegan section) by Melissa Bastian. Sadly, she and I were the only people to bring vegan cookies (and someone brought - and wrote a song about - bacon brittle), but that didn't keep us from eating a whole hell of a lot of them.

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Cookie Time!

If you've read any part of this blog ever, you know I'm really awful at making food look good. I can't do pretty plating or decorating or anything like that. I'm lucky if I can make food appetizing enough to eat. So I don't really bother trying to model my food after cookbook photos. And I certainly would never dream of trying to copy a cover photo. Until now.

Hypnosis Cookies from The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur

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The Home Stretch

We're in it. There are just two days left to VeganMoFo, so I'm going rogue! Yes, there will be no theme this week! I'm just going to post...stuff!

Today's stuff: pumpkin gingerbread cookies I made for Halloween:

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Sea Shepherd Sunday Sale Success

So Sunday saw Sea Shepherd New York's vegan bake sale in Montclair, NJ, where we raised nearly $2,700 for Sea Shepherd. We were hosted by the lovely Go Lightly Eco-Store, and received generous (and delicious!) donations from The Cinnamon Snail, Rutherford Pancake House and RAWbundant in addition to all our lovely homemade baked goods. I contributed some roasted garlic biscuits (my own recipe) and sea life themed gingerbread cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. The biscuits didn't look like much of anything, but here are some process shots of the cookies:

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Bake Sale Week Wrap Up

Last week was the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale, and the New York area stepped up to the challenge magnificently.

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'Tis the Season to Be Baking

Fa la la...etc.

I did so much baking last week that I forgot to take pictures of most of it. Whoops.

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A Very Dandy Halloween (Part II)

As previously mentioned, I can recognize the hand of fate when it places delicious goodness in my path. But when Dandies, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar and Halloween all coincide, that's not just fate. That's celestial voices* calling out "Oi! We need some sweets up in here! What are you waiting for?" Never dreaming of ignoring a divine request, I broke out my cookie sheets and made with the baking.

 

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A Very Dandy Halloween (Part I)

I wasn't raised celebrating Halloween, so I never really worried about it much, but even I can recognize the guiding hand of fate when it brings Dandies to my local supermarket just days before the holiday. We spent Halloween night at home, warm, cozy and out of the rain, indulging in all sorts of sugary sweet treats.

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Closing MoFo

If you just pay attention to the name, you might thing VeganMoFo is all about the food. And, to an extent, it is. But really, when over 500 people get together (whether it's online or in real life) with a common goal, I think it's even more about community. So what better way is there to wrap up VeganMoFo than with a potluck?

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Ode to a Chocolate Chip Cookie

The last batch of cookies I made for the people who contributed to our bake sale was the chocolate chip cookies from Isa and Terry's upcoming Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I've made and posted about them too many times to count, so I won't get all redundant about how easy, fast and delicious they are, or about how everyone who's ever tried them has loved these crunchy cookies (once I solved the crumbling issue - make them a wee bit smaller).

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Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles

How do I love these cookies? Let me count the ways.

OK, I'm not going to actually count the ways, because if you've been following VeganMoFo at all, you already know how awesome they are. I think at least half the participants have posted about them already. I'm a little late to the posting party, but not to the eating party - I've already made them quite a few times.

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Sweets Week

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Sweets Week here at SSD HQ. This week’s VeganMoFo posts will feature cupcakes, cookies and maybe some other things to widen your smile and your waistline.

As you can see, Sunday was a very busy day:

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I Knew I Forgot Something

Welcome to today's VeganMoFo trip down Memory Lane. Back in 2008, I offered to bake for everyone who sponsored me in that year's AIDS Walk. It ended up taking me ages to make something for everyone and even longer to remember to blog about it. Even longer = until today = over a year. Oops. Sorry, Internet! Better late than never, here's a small sample of what I made to thank the people who contributed.

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Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale Wrap Up

We held our second Brooklyn bake sale on Sunday and a wonderful time was had by all. We ate, drank, made merry, sang, danced and raised over $1000 for Farm Sanctuary and Sea Shepherd (and we're not done yet, so if you'd like to contribute, keep reading).

Oh yeah. There were also some cakes and things.



Photo by Ronit Tal

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Vegan Bake Sale Day 1

We held our first bake sale on Sunday and things went surprisingly smoothly. We started a bit late, the weather sucked, chocolatey things got a bit melty due to the humidity and we had a small coffee accident, but other than that, smooth as silken tofu.



Before I talk about the past, a quick reminder about the future:

Our next bake sale is going to be even bigger and better*, and it's this Sunday, June 28, starting around 11 AM**.

Open Source Gallery
Park Slope, Brooklyn
251 17th Street, right off of 5th Avenue, one block east of the Prospect Avenue M/R station and convenient from the B63 bus

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Oh Hi

Wow, I'm really crap at this blog thing, huh?

Hmmm....what's happened since my last post of any substance? Let's see.



(please excuse the crappy photo. It's taken with my BlackBerry and apparently TwitPic* doesn't let you embed photos without shrinking them. This picture really isn't worth reuploading to Flickr, but we'll make do since it's all I have from the past few months and this post needs something. You can click through to see it in it's larger, overbroiled, glory.)

Vegan Brunch testing ended. Pre-order your copy today! (thus concludes the shameless plug portion of this post)

I successfully completed about a week doing Eat to Live really hardcore. During that week, I made loads of non-photogenic soup, which was not worth posting about.

I spent two months doing my own modification of Eat to Live, which basically meant making more ugly (though tasty) food and not eating any Luna Bars. Success!

I gave up fried foods for the period of time known as Lent (also chewy candy, but that's not relevant to what you see here).

I baked a lot of chocolate chip cookies. They didn't come out anywhere near as pretty as Isa's.

Testing began for Terry Hope Romero's Vegan Latina. WOOHA!

So far, I've made Tropical Pumpkin Soup, which uses Calabaza pumpkin instead of the kind you usually use on Thanksgiving. It's really good and creamy and kind of thymey. Yum.

Locro, or Creamy Potato Soup with Avocado, might be my new boyfriend. My whole family loved this. It's so thick and rich and creamy. The avocado adds a nice touch to your usual potato soup and it's garnished with lime juice and raw red onion which give it a nice kick.

Pastel de Choclo, or Sweet Basil & Corn Pot Pie, is kind of like shepherd's pie gone south o' the border. The filling is made up of vegetables, raisins, tempeh and yuca and the topping is a sort of batter made of corn instead of the usual potato. So. Good. The picture above doesn't really do it justice because I broiled the hell out of the top (I've said it before and I'll say it 74289 times more: I like my shit burnt).

In addition to getting to make all sorts of tasty awesomeness, working on this book is allowing me to try out a bunch of new flavors. In one week, I've already added two new spices to my list (annatto, which I used to flavor an oil that was to be used in the potato soup and many other things, and epazote, sort of like Latiny oregano). So much fun!

I think that's all I've got. Now that I'm testing again and Passover is coming, hopefully you'll see a bit more from me in the coming months.

So how've you been?



*Yes, I'm on Twitter, but I don't bother to link it here because I'm not one of those interesting food-related Twitterers who posts all sorts of useful links and stuff, it's mostly just my friends and I bullshitting.

C is for Cookie

And that's good enough for me!

Back in January, Wheeler's Black Label announced an upcoming ice cream party in Brooklyn and put out a call for volunteer bakers. I was overcome with the delusion I could bake and volunteered to make cookies. Approximately five minutes later, I remembered I'd never made cookies before and panicked.

Then I realized I had a month to learn, got myself under control, and decided to make my problem everyone's problem. I searched all my cookbooks and the Internet for likely cookie recipes, then sent the seven I thought would be best to everyone I know, asking which two they would most like to eat with ice cream. I baked the top two, then made everyone in New York taste them and vote for the one they liked best. Over and over and over.

The winner? 5-Spice Almond Cookies from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan.



For the curious, the options were:

VeganYumYum's Pumpkin Whoopie Pies (no filling, I thought they'd make good ice cream sandwiches instead)
VeganYumYum's Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
VeganYumYum's Avocado Lime Tea Cookies
Have Cake Will Travel's Gingersnaps
Papa Tofu's Chocolate Whoopie Pies (no filling, I thought they'd make good ice cream sandwiches instead)
Papa Tofu's Chocolate Roll Out Cookies
Eat, Drink & Be Vegan's 5-Spice Almond Cookies

The gingersnaps and 5-spice almond cookies received the most votes (by a landslide) and I hit the kitchen.

For my first try, I followed both recipes exactly as written.

The gingersnaps tasted great, held together well, were super cute, but didn't "snap". They were very soft and almost grainy inside. If left in the oven longer, they probably would have been great, but, like I said, I wasn't improvising at all. I learned from my attempts at gingerbread men that cookies may harden after coming out of the oven, so I didn't want to over bake them and end up with gingerrocks. They were gingery, but not too gingery. A common comment was "I don't usually like ginger cookies, but these are nice". I wonder if the turbinado sugar sprinkled on top helped cut the spice.

The 5-spice almond cookies tasted great, but fell right apart. By the time I brought them to my friends, I had a 5-spice almond blob. A really nice, spicy (but not too spicy) blob of goodness, but a blob nonetheless.

The general consensus was that I should go with the gingersnaps because they could actually be picked up and eaten, but if I could get the texture of the 5-spice right, go with those.

All the gingersnaps:



Gingersnaps, up close and personal:



5-spice almond cookies, try the first:



Macroooo!:



Back to the kitchen. The 5-spice almond recipe says to make tablespoon-sized cookies and bake for eleven minutes. I made mine half-tablespoon sized and baked them for closer to fifteen minutes. Brought a metric assload of both cookies to a Super Bowl party where I played with Legos instead of watching the game and polled the constituents. The verdict: 5-spice almond. Even some of the people who had originally gone with the gingersnaps changed their minds.

Take two:



I was convinced. Having attended Wheeler's previous event, I knew to expect loads of people, so I locked myself in the kitchen the night before and baked my butt off:



They went over very well and are now my go-to cookie. A friend of mine recently got a job out of state and I mailed him a batch of these to make him feel more at home (what's homier than home cooking?). As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to bake for everyone who joins or sponsors me in this year's AIDS Walk. These are probably what you all will be getting (unless you have an allergy or something). Lucky for me, doubling the recipe makes just a few too many cookies to fit in the tin I think I'll be using to ship, so I get to indulge a bit too (and walk it off!).

Thanks to everyone who participated in the cookie selection process! Without you, I would probably still be huddled in the corner of my kitchen, rocking back and forth and muttering "Cookies...ice cream...cookies...ice cream".

Happy Purim!

I'm still not being a good little Blogger-Bee and I'm nowhere near caught up with all I've made lately, but I've decided to Skip to the End (and go back later) because this is time-sensitive.

Purim is tomorrow. If you don't know what that is, and don't feel like clicking the link, it's one of the many Jewish "Hooray! We Weren't Genocided!" holidays. It's customary to eat a metric assload of junk food on Purim, including (but not limited to) hamentashen. Hamentashen are a BFD for me. I look forward to them all year. When I realized they all have egg in them, I wondered if I might actually be tempted to cheat on veganism.

Then I remembered I know how to bake. Behold!



I stole my mother's recipe, looked up egg replacement suggestions in Papa Tofu and got to work. This was my first time veganizing something without asking for help from The PPK and they came out really good, if I may say so myself. Too good. I ate SIX yesterday. Thank goodness I have many friends, coworkers and family members willing to take the rest off my hands. I don't know why, but they taste sort of buttery and the buttery + the preserves = good times.

On to the recipe!

Hamentashen

Makes about 33 3" cookies

Note: This is how my mother wrote up the recipe (except for the eggs). The flour measurement is kind of wrong. By a lot. Unfortunately, I didn't measure how much extra flour I added. You'll know you have enough flour when your dough is firm, dry and easy to pass from hand to hand without sticking. And it shouldn't leave any moisture on your rolling pin. Sorry about that.

Also, be generous with your filling. Don't go crazy with it, but I think it's better to have too much than too little. If you're having trouble closing your hamentashen, just scrape some off. That beats having bald spots. If you use jam/preserves, use the thickest, fruitiest one you can find (I used raspberry and apricot Hero preserves, available at Whole Foods). It will boil during baking and if it's too thin, you'll end up with glaze on the bottom of your cookie instead of filling (underfilling can also lead to a glazey cookie).

Ingredients
3/4 cup canola oil
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup soy yogurt
1 1/2 tsp Ener-G egg replacer dissolved in 2 tbsp warm water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp orange juice
2 1/2+ cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
Fillings of your choice

Preheat oven to 375 F. Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper.

In mixing bowl, blend sugar, yogurt, Enger-G, vanilla and OJ well with fork. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix until it gets doughy, then knead it until all flour is blended and dough is desired consistency (see note above). Split dough into two halves. Roll out one half of the dough until it's a bit more than 1/8" thick. It should be thick enough to be able to support the filling, but thin enough to fold easily. Using a glass or cookie cutter, cut the dough into approximately 3" rounds (I used a plastic mug and the diameter was probably closer to 3.25").



Place a spoonful of filling in the center of each round.



Fold the dough up around the filling and pinch the edges together into a triangle.



Repeat with second half of dough. Place hamentashen on parchment-lined cookie sheet. They don't expand much, so it's OK if they're close (though if some of your hamentashen are overfull, they may ooze over onto their neighbors). Bake for about 25 minutes or until browned to your liking.

The variations for these things are practically endless. Other popular fillings are prune, poppy seed and chocolate. If you want to get creative, dip one corner in some melted chocolate. Make it fancy by dipping the chocolaty end in colored sprinkles, chopped nuts or shredded coconut.

That's it. Try it, you'll like it. Have another, you're too thin!*



*That'd be my Jewish grandmother impression.