Wherein Baking is Attempted

If you don’t already know, Kitti (the partner-in-crime) is vegan. It used to mean that he wasn’t allowed to have any fun or eat any kind of junk food, but that’s boring. So I bought Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar and made “Citrus Glitters”.

I substituted coconut milk for almond milk because I really don’t like the taste of almond at all. I didn’t know how much the taste would come through after all the ingredients were in, but I didn’t want to risk it.

I started with zesting a lemon and an orange.

Then I did the “blend the shortening and sugar until fluffy” thing. Once that was fluffy, the vanilla and coconut milk went in.

Added the flour, corn meal, corn starch, baking powder and salt….

And then it was time to make the dough into little balls, dip them in sugar, and bake them! Except this is where they went a little weird. I don’t know if the coconut milk was “wetter” than almond milk would have been, if the shortening got too soft, or things got mixed too much, but the dough was way too sticky. It stuck to my fingers, it stuck to the sugar dish, it stuck to my fingers again when I tried to get them on the cookie sheet… basically, they were a mess. Even adding extra flour didn’t seem to help. So I just went on with it…

And I baked them.

There was still dough left because my oven isn’t really big enough for more than one cookie sheet at a time, so the rest of the dough sat there for about 12 minutes while the cookies baked. Apparently the dough needed to “rest” a little, because NOW it was much better. It wasn’t sticky and it did what it was supposed to.

Twelve minutes later.. much more attractive cookies. Not as brown as I thought they’d get… and puffier than expected. I’m not sure what I did “wrong”, but they taste perfectly good. The corn meal gives them an interesting taste and texture that keeps them from being really boring.

I’m absolutely going to make these again. I’ll try to remember to let the dough rest before I start making the actual cookies, and I’ll see if I can figure out why they rose so much — maybe the flour? Something about the way I mixed the dough? Seriously, I make coffee cake that comes out huge, and pancakes that inflate, so I might be doing something that just fluffs up baked goods.

Anyhow, for a first attempt, I think I did pretty good.

Summary:
Ease: Very
Time: About an hour
Taste: Better than expected. Four (out of 5) stars.
Substitutions: Margarine in place of shortening.
Result of substitution: More cakelike, puffier. Wetter dough. Trying to get the dough to stiffen up added to the time.

Tags: baking, cookies, vegan, vegan baking, vegan cookies

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2011 at 16:50 and is filed under Baking, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.