My boss gave me a Christmas present this year. Well, the entire QA team got them.

Since I’ve been having fun with Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar I thought this was the right time to try out the Blackstrap Ginger cookies. I had everything I needed… except, as it would turn out, canola oil. We had corn oil, though. It was either that or the “bold and robust” olive oil, which is very olive-y. How bad could corn oil be, really? Corn goes into baked things all the time!

You can guess the outcome, can’t you.

Yeah, keep reading anyhow.

I mixed the wet stuff.

It looked awful and smelled weird. That’s because of the blackstrap molasses, though, and not the corn oil.

Next… the dry ingredients. Including the most powerful ginger I have ever smelled. Please note that ginger, nutmeg, clove, and allspice are all things I absolutely love to smell. This part of the cooking was the best part. Anyhow, it turns out I actually own a sifter!

So, sifted and folded, and the dough looked like something pretty wonderful.

Gorgeous, isn’t it? And since this is vegan, there’s nothing wrong with eating the dough. Except that’s rude. I made the cookies first and then scraped the dough from the bowl and ate that. It was amazing. REALLY intense ginger. Like mouth-burningly intense. I was looking forward to them.

Start the sad music now, folks.

The dough that was so amazing and intense turned into attractive cookies.

Attractive cookies that taste more like corn muffins than ginger.

I think I’ll do these again in the very near future. I want to know what they really taste like.

Sadly, my boss’ birthday is tomorrow and I was going to take some of these in for her, as a thank you for the spices. It’ll have to wait, though. These are fine for home, but not for public consumption. I kind of wish I had time to make another batch of the Tahini Lime ones to take to work instead.

Summary:
Ease: Very
Time: 20 minutes.
Taste: Three (out of 5) stars. (See substitutions)
Substitutions: Corn oil for canola oil
Result of substitution: Bad idea. The cookies taste more like corn than anything.

This recipe is also from Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar. To be honest, I wasn’t sure about these. Tahini always seems like sort of a non-flavor to me. Kitti was interested, though, and I really started baking things so there would be cookies and things for him, so I got the ingredients I’d need to make these.

If you’ll recall, the last batch of cookies were too wet. This was because I used vegan margarine instead of shortening. This time I actually bought Earth Balance Natural Shortening and I think it made a difference.
Again, this started with zesting citrus — a lime, this time.

Then there was the usual “blending the sugar and shortening” step.

It doesn’t look as good as it did when it was margarine, but that’s probably because the margarine was wetter.

Add the coconut milk, tahini, zest, and vanilla….

At this point Kitti announced he’d eat it as-is. I didn’t let him. The dry ingredients had to go in.

The dough is then rolled into little balls, smushed, sprinkled with sesame seeds (the recipe called for black ones. I bought regular ones because I couldn’t find black sesame seeds. I did later, but since I already had the regular kind and I wasn’t sure if these were going to even work out, I didn’t want two kinds of sesame seeds cluttering up the shelf) and then baked.

They still didn’t come out very brown, despite the fact that I now have an oven thermometer (Thanks, Mim!) and the oven was the right temperature. I think maybe my baking sheet is too thick. It’s probably time to dig through the cabinets and see if I have thinner ones (that used to be my Nana’s). If I don’t, I might have to buy some, because the cookies come out looking unbaked.

They taste good, though. Better than I expected. They’re not exactly a sweet cookie — it’s more like a peanut butter cookie, only more sesame and less peanut-y. I don’t taste the lime at all.

Summary:
Ease: Very
Time: 45 minutes (including zesting the lime and cleaning up as I baked)
Taste: Better than expected. Four (out of 5) stars.
Substitutions: white sesame seeds for black.
Result of substitution: None noted. Maybe just aesthetics.

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.