adventures in vegan baking

I’m going vegan. For real this time. I’ve spent the last week reading up on the horrors of the meat industry and I really just can’t stomach eating meat anymore. Fortunately for me, I’ve always been a little out of sorts with meat anyway. Dairy makes me sick and eggs, well with what chickens are getting fed these days I just want no part of it.

For Thanksgiving I tried my hand at some vegan pumpkin oatmeal raisin cookies, they were great, however, they tasted like health food. We’ve dubbed them oatmeal raisin granola balls and I think I’ll keep making them just because they are actually incredibly healthy. Today I’m making molasses cookies, the recipe is modified from one I found on one of my favorite vegan blogs Hell Yeah It’s Vegan! (original recipe: http://hellyeahitsvegan.com/?p=710).

Oatmeal Almond Molasses Cookies

Yield: about 2½ dozen 2″ cookies

2/3 c apple sauce
¼ c blackstrap molasses
2 tbsp ground flax seeds whisked into 3 tbsp warm water
1 c brown sugar
2 c whole wheat flour
½ tsp salt
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 c. sliced raw almonds
1 c. oats

Preheat oven to 350° (do this later, about ten minutes before taking the bowl out of the fridge). Whisk together apple sauce, molasses, flax seeds mixed with water, and brown sugar. In a separate bowl, sift together remaining ingredients. Honestly, I have a terrible baking tendency to not mix in different bowls, it’s improper, but I’m a cook, not a baker…I just like to bake when I’m bored. So I mixed this all in the same bowl then added the oats and almonds, also, I eyeballed the measurements….again, I’m a cook….

After mixing toss the bowl in the fridge for about an hour.

Shape your dough into roughly 1″ balls, if you would like you can also roll them in sugar (I’m forsaking white sugar at the moment, and hopefully all processed sugars soon…). I also flattened them (well, the second batch, anyway), I think they didn’t spread terribly well because I used apple sauce rather than oil (I’m going for health here!). No need to grease the cookie sheet, I prefer to use parchment paper though, just because it results in a rather simplistic clean up.

Now bake these little guys for about 10 minutes-ish and yay! Cookies! Wait to take them off the sheet for a couple minutes, if only to save your mouth from being burnt. (: