Mid Step: Vegan Anniversary!

Today marks the one year anniversary of me becoming vegan! I am very excited. I thought this would be a great opportunity to introduce people to the idea of vegan cookies. I don’t know enough yet about vegan baking to attempt my own recipe, but I thought I might get some useful experience using someone else’s recipes. I found a great web site with all kinds of vegan recipes. It’s called VegWeb and the url is www.vegweb.com. I tried the recipe called “Happy Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies.” They were really tasty in my opinion. One classmate actually said they were the best cookies she had ever tasted…I wish I had been the one to come up with that recipe!

I did think that they were a little bit too oily, though. Through my reading, I have discovered that using more oil is one way to hold the cookies together without eggs. I have also heard that apple sauce can do the same job, so maybe when I make recipes I can focus more on apple sauce or use a mixture of vegetable oil and apple sauce. It turns out there are a lot of different replacements for eggs. I’ve come across flax seed, a commercial product called EnerG, vegetable oil, apple sauce, tofu and water. However, they can’t all be used for the same purpose. For example, flax seeds can’t be used in “wet” desserts like apple pies because the texture would be grainy. Instead silken tofu could be used because no binding is necessary. On the other hand, silken tofu wouldn’t work as well in cookies because it adds too much moisture. Instead, flax seeds could be used to help hold the cookies together.

Step Two: Am I Just Reinventing the Wheel?

I have also been looking into existing vegan recipes. They are much more prevalent than I realized. There must be hundreds of cookbooks including some that are specifically for baking. I keep running into two books: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitzand Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I’m really excited that so many books exist, but it does make me question the usefulness of my original product idea. I was planning to come up with some vegan recipes of my own concoction.

I haven’t entirely given up on the idea, but for my own personal use, I think I would be just as likely to use a cookbook like one of these as to attempt to make one of my old cookbook recipes vegan. Like I said before, why reinvent an existing process? I guess I’ll focus on recipes that I know I really liked before becoming vegan. I know I would really love a piece of sour cream pound cake, for example. Since starting the project the idea of that pound cake has been floating around in my head. Yum!

Step One: Research

I have been researching the history of baking in general as well as vegan baking specifically for my class research paper. I will refrain from boring you with too many details, but there were a few points that I found really interesting. For example, the first baked good, baring no resemblance to what we now think of as baked, can be traced back 20,000 years ago! The “bread” as it’s considered was a mixture of ground grasses, wheat, and water left to “bake” on a flat rock in the sun. I would like to point out that such bread would be vegan ;) Seriously, though, who decided that was the first known example of baking? I would imagine some ground up grasses and water could have been accidentally left out in the rain, then baked in the sun without anyone consciously trying to make something edible.
I’m certainly glad that I was born in the twentieth century. It is believed that ideas like cooking and baking foods were discovered independently in different civilizations. Now, I can just check out a book at the library or search the web for all kinds of information, no need to reinvent a known process.