Chewy Chocolate Raspberry Cookies & Strawberry Cookies

The darker cookies in these photos are the Chewy Chocolate Raspberry Cookies from Veganomicon, and the lighter cookies are basically the same recipe but with strawberry jam instead of raspberry and with the cocoa left out.

The chocolate cookies are wonderfully rich and chewy, with a bit of a crunch to them around the edges. The almond essence in the recipe gives them a bit of a bakewell-ish flavour, which inspired me to make non-chocolate versions with strawberry jam. If only I’d had some cherry jam as well! (And some lime, some pineapple, maybe some apricot… Let’s face it, I would’ve been baking jam cookies all day!)

I couldn’t resist making a few of the strawberry ones into thumbprint cookies with a little blob of jam on top. They needed an extra 5 mins or so in the oven and took absolutely ages to cool down enough to move from the baking tray to the cooling rack, but they were definitely worth the extra effort – in fact I think they tasted even better than the plain strawberry cookies.

Gingerbread Daleks!

Back when I was vegetarian, I bought one of these Dalek Cookie kits to simultaneously indulge my love of robots and my appetite for cookies. Thankfully I remembered to keep the dalek-shaped cookie cutter, and these lovely vegan gingerbread daleks are the result!

For the gingerbread itself, I used this recipe from Parsley Soup, which tasted great. And to finish them off, I used some little dots of white icing to be the daleks’ spheres. Lovely!

Now I’m on a mission to find some reasonably priced vegan chocolate chips to use instead of icing next time…

Mint Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Ingredients
75g flour
130g sugar
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
20g cocoa
100g mint chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Plamil)
50ml rapeseed/canola oil*
1 small banana, mashed
1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Makes about 20 cookies

Method

• Preheat the oven to 350°/Gas Mark 4.
• Mix the flour, sugar, bicarb, cocoa and chocolate chunks together in a bowl.
• In another bowl or a jug, mix the oil, vanilla and mashed banana together.
• Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff gradually.
• Shape the dough into little blobs or discs and put on a greased baking tray (they spread out quite a bit, so give them plenty of room).
• Bake for about 10-15mins depending on how big/thick your cookies are.
• Leave to cool on the baking tray for about 5mins, until they’re firm enough to pick up, then transfer to a cooling rack.

These were pretty nice, but the mint chocolate didn’t work as well with the chocolate cookie taste as I thought it would, so they were a little disappointing (especially compared to yesterday’s Sparkled Ginger Cookies). Nevertheless I’m planning on trying a similar recipe with orange-flavoured chocolate, or possibly Green & Black’s Maya Gold, next time I get the urge to make chocolate cookies.
 
 
 
* I actually used 125ml of oil, but something must have gone wrong with my conversions from the VegKC.com guidelines, since the dough ended up far too oily – so I’d advise starting off with a small amount like 50ml and just adding more gradually until you’ve got the right consistency.

Sparkled Ginger Cookies

These lovely cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance are so insanely sweet that you might need to run off afterwards to brush your teeth! Perfect for those days when only the richest, most syrupy confections will do. Not only do these taste great, they look pretty too – the sugar sparkles on the top of these cookies definitely appeal to my inner child.

I really like the fact that the basic ingredients for these are the kind you’ll probably have in your cupboards anyway once you’ve started baking (e.g. flour, sugar, oil, baking soda, soya milk – luckily for me I had golden syrup to substitute for the molasses in the recipe, and also had ground ginger in stock).

Next time I’m going to try using black treacle instead of golden syrup, and muscovado sugar instead of golden caster sugar, to see if I can get a slightly darker taste to it. Oh, and I’ll probably throw in some chopped glacé ginger, but then I add that to just about everything ginger-flavoured!