Lemon Cookies with Pomegranate Icing

So mom and I watched a documentary on product placement called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a couple nights ago.  One of the corporate sponsors was Pom Wonderful, which put a million dollars into the movie.  Lo and behold, advertising works: the next day there was a bottle of the stuff in the fridge.  That settled it, I was baking something pomegranate-y.

Unfortunately, the only successful sugar cookies I’ve made in my life came premade in a refrigerated tube.  Thus, I’m borrowing Vegetarian Times’ vegan sugar cookie recipe, because I’ve never used nor even heard of a bad recipe from Veg Times.  There are a couple things I learned, in the process of making these.  First, always always get organic/whipped Earth Balance.  It’s just so much easier to get out of the tub, and you probably won’t fling any on your shirt (I only had about a half cup, so the other half cup came from a tub of original.  It wasn’t fun).

But actually, get the organic.

Second, don’t label bulk flour with twist ties.  I used no fewer than two, and no more than four, different types of flour in this recipe.  The likely suspects are Organic Whole Wheat Pastry, Organic Whole Wheat, and All-Purpose Unbleached (White Wheat is the likely candidate for number four, but I’m not sure that happened).  This is because a. the twist ties were falling apart and illegible, and b. we were low on flour.

Ingredients:

Cookies:
2 ¾ cups misc flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 ½ tsp. egg replacer (I used a heaping tsp of soy flour, since I don’t have any Ener-G)
1 ½ cups plus 1 Tbs. sugar
1 cup Earth Balance, softened
2 tsp. lemon extract (you could sub lemon zest)
Juice of half a lemon
Non-dairy milk (optional)

Icing:
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
4 Tbs. Pomegranate Juice
1 tsp arrowroot powder (or other starch)
¼ tsp. vanilla extract

Cookies:
1. Preheat oven to 325°F. Coat baking sheets with cooking spray, or line with parchment paper. Combine flour and baking powder in small bowl. Whisk egg replacer with 2 Tbs. water. Set aside.

2. Cream sugar and margarine in bowl with until fluffy. Beat in lemon. Add egg replacer/soy flour, and beat until smooth. Add flour mixture, and beat until soft dough forms.  I had to add a couple tsp milk to get the dough balls soft, though if you use white flour you may not have that problem.

3. Divide dough into 2 balls. Roll one ball to 1/4-inch thickness on lightly floured work surface. Cut into desired shapes, and transfer to prepared baking sheets. Repeat with remaining dough ball and scraps.

4. Bake cookies 15 to 17 minutes, or until light brown around edges. Cool 10 minutes on baking sheets, then transfer to wire rack to cool completely.

Icing:
1. Beat sugar, starch, pomegranate juice, and vanilla extract in bowl until smooth.

2. Apply icing to cooled cookies

3. If you do 2 without making a huge mess, call me (or comment on this post, I guess?) and let me know how.

Add an additional tsp. soymilk if frosting is too thick. Spread cooled cookies with icing, and top with sprinkles. Repeat with remaining cookies. Let icing harden before serving or storing.

We ate all but these last two before remembering to take pictures, and that’s why there are no more pictures.

 

I couldn’t find the mixer, so I hand-beat the fat.

 

Instead of having a citrus juicer I use squeeze the lemon with a fork in the middle and that gets most of the juice out.

C is for The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap!

I’m late.

I’m always late with things like this.

To be fair though, this lateness could not have been prevented.  It is not because I’m so messy I could build an excellent fort out of all the crap on my desk, or my general forgetfulness, or…no wait that’s exactly what’s going on here.

To tell this story completely we need to rewind a month:

It’s mid-November, and I’m checking in with some of the food blogs I follow when I see this picture:

It had the word cookie in it.  Clearly this could only be good.

I nudge Ashok (who was conveniently sitting next to me at the time) and take a look at the site.

The game was simple:

1. Donate money to charity
2. Bake 3 Dozen cookies
3. Send these cookies to three fellow food bloggers
4. Receive 1 Dozen cookies from three different food bloggers
5. Profit

Ashok was as keen on this idea as I was, so we signed up, received the people who we would be sending cookies to, and learned cookies needed to be postmarked and in the mail by December 5^th.

Time passes….

Suddenly it’s the week of December 5^th, I’m in the very middle of a very stressful Finals period and now cookies must be baked.

Can I have a show of hands as to who saw this coming?  Everyone but me?  Thought so.

Ashok’ managed to have his own adventures with cookie baking.  Delicious, slightly troubling adventures.

The following is my recipe for Vanilla Cardamom cookies:

Wait. Not this bit. This is not a recipe. It’s a picture of me measuring flour.

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks butter
• 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 egg
• Guts of 1 vanilla bean
• Cardamom (how much is up to you.  If you like cardamom, use it!  If you don’t, use less.  I will not police your usage of this spice)

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees
2. Place 1 stick of butter in a frying pan and keep over medium heat until it turns dark brown and gives off a nutty smell.  This will involve standing over the pan and keeping the butter in motion for much of the 3-5 minutes it takes to achieve this.  Otherwise you’ll end up with burnt butter…gross
3. Put other stick of butter and brown sugar in a bowl.  If the bowl is plastic, I also recommend a fork.  Why?  Because then you’ll add the browned butter (the stuff in the frying pan) to this bowl.  If you use a plastic bowl here it has a chance of melting, but a metal fork will soak up a lot of that heat. SCIENCE!  WOO!
4. Give the mix a minute or two to cool before combining it with the egg beaters of your choice.
5. Add in flour, egg, salt, baking soda, vanilla guts, and combine.  You should be left with something that looks suspiciously like cookie dough.  Do not be afraid.  In fact, you have created cookie dough.
6. Add as much ground cardamom as your heart desires and ensure that it is stirred in
7. Bake for about 10 minutes (depending on your oven) and enjoy.

I baked up three batches of these, packaged them (a harder process than you might expect when your local post office agent gives you sass) and got them in by the deadline to three fantastic blogs.  Still, this is the first minute I’ve had to make a post, as well as to say thank you to the three bloggers who took time out of their lives to bake me cookies, so my recipe hasn’t been posted with all the other amazing participants.

Since I have access to a camera again, I took it upon myself to take artsy pictures of these cookies as well.

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

I’d love to share pictures of more than two of these coconut salted caramel thumb prints, but they have all been eaten!

And finally the cookies that kept me company every night at 4:00am. Lemon Ginger Molasses Cookies.

This is really a great event, and does some pretty cool things in the world.  If you have your own cooking blog, I’d strongly suggest joining in next year.  Just make sure you either get around to building your desk-crap-fort or actually getting organized before you do.

That’s all for now!

~Molly

Oatmeal, Chocolate Chip, Pumpkin Pie cookies and other cautionary tales

Simply after reading the title of this post, I imagine most people are going to have a few questions.  So, before the recipe, some FAQs (and a picture):

This is like two dozen cookies. In a picture below, there are the dozen that I took to Thanksgiving dinner. I ate the difference.

Q: Is it even safe to combine that much delicious all into a single cookie?
A: I had a near burning-myself experience, as I was taking the 19th batch I made out of the oven (seriously, I baked no fewer than 12 batches of these cookies intending to send each off for the food blogger cookie swap.  The first 9 dozen all got eaten by me/family/friends, the final three barely survived into the boxes I mailed them in).

Q: What is the cautionary tale?
A: So I was like “la la la I’m a food blogger I do what I want” and I decided to recreationally make up a recipe from scratch.  And that original recipe involved not having flour, not so much because I was as hubris as to think that my food blogger ness would make chemistry irrelevant, but because I just kind of forgot and I didn’t have a recipe to remind me because I was making the recipe up.  The cautionary tale: put flour in your cookies.

Q: Who likes these cookies?
A: These cookies were like the first time that I had made up food and then been asked for the recipe.  So, uh, everyone I know likes these cookies.

Q: How do you make cookies without butter? (but actually, this was a question I got at my family Thanksgiving dinner when I said I had brought vegan cookies.)
A: There are a bunch of different fats you can use.  In this case, I used earth balance because I had it on hand and it’s solid at decently high temperatures, which adds substance to the batter.  You could also use crisco (though, uh, gross) or coconut oil.  Alternatively, you could use something like canola oil (which I do for most of my cookies, but not these…).

All of the ingredients. Also some coconut milk because I was thirsty.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup earth balance
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup pumpkin
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup chocolate chips
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp each: cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg
1 cup quickoats
1/2 cup flour

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400
2. Cream the brown sugar and the earth balance
3. Mix in the all the other ingredients, in the order they’re on the ingredients list in.
4. Drop ~3/2 inch globs of batter onto greased baking sheets.  You don’t have to worry too much about them spreading out.
5. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until they start to brown.
6. Let ’em cool and enjoy!

An action shot (oh my god fancy!) of the oatmeal being added to the batter.

Delicious, delicious batter that I ate waaay to much of.

The cookies that managed to survive me being around them long enough to make it to my family Thanksgiving.

What is this Math Doing in my Food? A Post About Thinking

The other day, I thought to myself: why don’t I try baking something sweet with nutritional yeast?  So I started looking for recipes that I thought could use a bit more umami cheesy flavor in them, and thinking about sweet baked goods which would do well with cheese added.

Then I realized, this is exactly the thought process that I use to figure out how to solve difficult Foundations of Math (the first math class here that requires proving things) problems.  And this is exactly how I work out complicated algorithms to solve CompSci homework problems, too.  I ended up deciding to make jam bars with nutritional yeast, feeling perhaps a little too cocky after reading a recipe for cheddar cheese jam bars (basically it was a pie-esque crust, with jam smeared on top, then baked).

My Thoughts from GHC, Otherwise Known as Code Like a Bad Ass

Hello!

I know it’s been quite a few months without any activity here, I’m back at school so fitting in time for cooking and strong opinions is harder.  Even this post is a month old.  I wrote it in early October and was unsure of whether or not to post it for fear of making people angry.  Now, I think I can trust anyone who reads this to accept this as my opinion and disagree as they see fit.

This past week I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Baltimore and had an amazing time.  I met other Computer Science majors from all over the country.  I learned about how to start developing for open source platforms (which will be an entry in itself one day). I got more free stuff than my room can handle.   What’s more, I gave my resume to representatives from some amazing companies that I would love to work for one day as I don’t think they have many plans to become an evil empire (Oh hey potential employers.  What?  No.   I completely forgot I had a link to this blog in my resume).  Hire me! *ahem* Where was I?  Oh yes.  GHC.

Blackberry, Peanut Butter, and Banana Breakfast Cake!

Wild blackberries: if you live in Western Washington you need to stop reading this, go outside, and pick some because they are everywhere and they are deliciously ripe. So ripe that there’s no sour/bitter left in them – I didn’t even know blackberries did that! I promised my mom that I would be making her breakfast sometime before I went back to college, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do that without waking up at 5am. This cake is that: it’s a reasonably healthy (via just having a little sugar, using whole wheat flour, and having a lot more fruit than your average cake), super delicious breakfast. And despite what my mom will tell you, it was totally worth having the oven on when it was 75 Fahrenheit outside.

This batter is thicker, richer, and more delicious than any of the nonvegan things I can remember cooking up before I was vegan – the combination of the peanut butter and coconut milk, I think, is a winner. The final taste comes out just faintly peanut butter-y, and it really works well with the blackberries (I had been sort of nervous, when I was making up the recipe. Molly told me she had enjoyed something that combined blueberries and peanut butter, a while back, and I decided to give this a shot).  I’d eat it in the morning, with coffee; after lunch, with (non dairy) milk; or after dinner with tea. It’s good.

FAQs about this picture: why is the coconut milk in a glass mug? Where is the lemon juice that’s called for in the recipe?

Ingredients:

½ cup sugar
1 cup 2 tbsp whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

½ cup earth balance
3 tbsp unsweetened peanut butter
2 tsp vanilla
½ cup milk, or coconut milk
1 mashed banana
½ a lemon’s juice (or 1/8 cup bottled)
1 tbsp water

1 heaping cup blackberries

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375.
2. In a large mixing bowl, combine and mix thoroughly the dry ingredients
3. Add the wet ingredients (I highly recommend you mash the banana before you add it to the bowl), and mix thoroughly
4. Add the blackberries. Now, most recipes would say something like “gently fold the blackberries in” – if you can manage to fold your blackberries in without damaging them in any way, I will take off my hat to you. I tried “gently folding” and my blackberries sort of disintegrated into the individual, uh, bits. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
5. Grease an 8×8 baking dish and pour the batter in.
6. Bake for about an hour, or until a toothpick in the middle comes out clean (if you use a different size dish, make sure to adjust the cooking time!)

Careful to let it cool, after it comes out of the oven. I didn’t wait, and burnt my tongue a little bit (but that’s okay because it was yummy).

Chocolate Ginger Cake and the Poor Choices of a Jet Lagged Brain

This past week my family and I were in northern California.  We spent a few days each in San Francisco, Carmel, Monterey, Yosemite, and Palo Alto.  However rather than where we went, I think what we ate is what is going to stick in my memory.  Elk, bacon that tasted like ribs, Prohibition era whiskey and raspberry coffee cake (this last one is all one dish…because people who do not use the Oxford comma are dumb and also a butt) were all fantastic.

Still, there is a downside to travelling westward.  My body has no idea when I’m supposed to be asleep.  Because of that I woke up at 6:00 this morning…which makes absolutely no sense as that’s 3:00am back in California.  Believe me, I tried explaining this to my internal clock, but it gave a very convincing argument: “No”.

Instead I went for a run, did several important computer related things, cleaned my room, poked around the internet for a bit, aaand then had lunch… as it was noon.

Happy phone

I have a smartphone.  It’s a Samsung Galaxy S™ II, Epic™ 4G Touch, in the color Vortex Black (no but really, I think their naming schemes are almost too concise…).  I use it a lot for GPS navigation, which it’s actually pretty good at.  If I get everything set up before I’m driving (and therefore not using my phone because that’s dangerous) it’ll even tell me which way is fastest based on traffic.

I had this problem with Google Navigation (the GPS app), though: it sort of pissed me off.  Hearing it demand that I “turn left onto South 18th Street” was all good and well, until I was at, say, a complicated intersection where there were two or three different possible lefts I could make.  In that situation it felt as if my phone was as anxious (or more anxious) to get where I was going than I was, and making this stressful demand on me so it wouldn’t be late to meet my friend’s phones.

Egg Pasta? Last night’s dinner!

So I have a confession to make. I use Flipboard. I feel like this is something that I ought to be embarrassed about. Here’s the story: I downloaded the app when it first came out and was super cool and fancy and on Android and stuff. And as I was flipping through stuff, I found this article. Its been love with Flipboard ever since. I didn’t have green garlic on hand so I made this up instead.

Ingredients (serves two, though it could be easily doubled or more):

1/4 pound spaghetti

One massive stalk of green onion (see how big it was below), or stalks of mass-market grocery store green onions; chopped

Two eggs

2 + 1 tbsp Olive oil

Five cloves garlic, coarsely chopped (cloves into two or three chunks each)

And cue the peanut gallery: but wait, Ashok, aren’t you a vegan? You can’t eat eggs! Well, yes, that’s what you’d think. But like most things, my food ethics don’t fit on a t-shirt – I just call myself vegan because it’s the most accurate, simple descriptor. If and when available, I happily (joyously, even) consume locally grown, ethical animal products. Otherwise, I obstain from animal products.

Thai Food and Pictures!

It has been quite a while since my last post and a few important things have occurred.  First, I have a camera!  This is exciting as I was relying on Ashok’s and since he and I are now on opposite ends of the country I get to take artsy pictures of food again!  I love artsy pictures of food.

aw yeah!

Another piece of exciting news is that I officially can stand to eat Thai food again!  I spent most of May and part of June in Thailand and after three meals a day predominately consisting of rice products, I was very much not in the mood for Thai food.  But after two months avoiding the stuff, I picked up my Thai cookbook today (translated in a way that makes the English major in me smile) and made my family dinner (which spoils the third piece of news, I’m home again rather than at school).