Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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.

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