I started after breakfast with Heather's Chocolate Chip Cookies, which came together in a fairly typical chocolate chip cookie manner, with shortening, sugar, milk, eggs, etc. The recipe called for butter flavor Crisco, which I bought in stick format (first time ever) and a small bag of Nestle Milk Chocolate Chips. The recipe gives different baking times for chewy and crispy cookies, so I aimed for the chewy end of the spectrum because I personally prefer that. They were a little tricky to get off the pan, which lead to me burning the second pan I did in an attempt to bake them into a sturdier format. Also, I recommend flattening the dough balls ever so slightly - this helps them to flatten out a bit more evenly.
After I finished baking the slightly over 3 dozen cookies, I ran out to the store for ingredients for Crockpot Lasagna and an additional small bag of Nestle Milk Chocolate Chips in case I had to make another batch to even out the amounts obtained from each cookie recipe. After running back home and putting together the Crockpot Lasagna, I started in on Pragati's Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies.
This recipe was completely different than any other chocolate chip cookie recipe I've made, mostly because I've never made any vegan cookie before. I was pleasantly surprised that I could find all the required ingredients at my local Acme, although I was a bit nervous that the Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips the recipe suggested I use were labeled as "may contain small amounts of milk". This suggests the cross contamination possibilities at the Ghiradelli plant may be higher than we'd like to know about, or perhaps this is just a limit of quantitation issue in their cleaning procedures. Other ingredients included whole wheat flour, flax seed, applesauce, natural peanut butter, oats, and maple syrup. I felt very healthy while making these, despite the large quantity of batter I ate. I made a triple batch of these since the recipe only makes 2 dozen.
The batter was tricky to roll into balls for baking, but it went a little easier when the dough was refrigerated before rolling. Still, I could really only get one tray's worth rolled before the dough became too warm to work with again and I was forced to eat the dough that was sticking to my fingers (don't worry, I washed my hands after each of these instances, because I couldn't even lick my fingers clean, warm soap and water was required). The dough balls were rolled in granulated sugar and then baked. These cookies were very soft and pliable when removed from the oven, which Pragati warns you of in the recipe. This caused some of them became a bit misshapen when they were removed to cooling racks. I managed to burn two trays of these cookies by setting the oven 50 degrees hotter than prescribed, so I ended up with approximately equal numbers of cookies and decided not to make a second batch of Heather's Chocolate Chip Cookies. All burnt cookies were added to the rejects container and left at my house to ensure the validity of the vote (note that we are still going to eat them!).
The cookies were taken to QS Pharma today labeled as "A" and "B" and people were encouraged to eat one of each and vote for their favorite. There was a lot of interest in the cookies, and it seemed that everyone had their favorite (Cookie A, Cookie B, or Both). Cookie A was Pragati's Vegan Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies (left) and Cookie B was Heather's Chocolate Chip Cookies (right):
No comments:
Post a Comment