Lavender-Rosewater Cookies

Tonight, I undertook two excursions into previously-uncharted vegan-culinary territory: I made my own seitan (from the amazing VeganYumYum's recipe) and baked up a batch of lavender-rosewater sugar cookies. The seitan was great! It's slated to be the base of tomorrow night's dinner. The cookies were also a big hit, and I'll share that recipe here.

Vegan Lavender-Rosewater Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:

1/2 + 1/3 cup white sugar
1 /2 cup (1 stick) margarine
1/4 cup soft silken-style tofu
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 tsp. rosewater
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons dried culinary lavender
sugar for rolling cookies in (1/2 cup or so)

Directions:

Cream together sugar and margarine in large bowl. In a food processor, blend together tofu, rosewater and vanilla till smooth. Add to sugar-margarine mixture and mix well.

In a (well-cleaned!) coffee grinder, grind lavender into a powder. In a separate bowl, mix together ground lavender with other dry ingredients. Add dry ingredients to wet and mix well. Refrigerate dough for half an hour or so.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Remove the dough from the fridge and roll into walnut-sized balls. Roll the balls in the extra sugar till well-coated. Arrange on a cookie sheet, about 2 inches apart. Bake 15 minutes. Allow to cool slightly on cookie tray, then transfer to a wire rack. Enjoy!


Pictures are coming, I promise! My camera is in Chicago, but I'll get it back this weekend. In the meantime, I'll try to get some of my cookie-testers to comment about how good these lavender-rosewater ones taste and how pretty they look!

Vegan Portuguese Kale and Soyrizo Soup!

This veganized recipe from Epicurious may change your life, along with your friends' feelings about vegan cooking.


Ingredients:
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 cups finely chopped onions
3/4 cup sliced carrots
1/4 cup olive oil
2 large russet potatoes, peeled and cubed into 1-inch pieces
4 cups veggie stock (I use Better Than Boullion No-Chicken Stock)
1 package Soyrizo
8 cups chopped kale, packed
1 pound small Yukon Gold potatoes (or Red Bliss, in a pinch), chopped into 1-inch cubes


Directions:
In a large stockpot, cook the garlic, the onions, and the carrot in the oil over moderately low heat, stirring, until the vegetables are softened. Add the russet potatoes, the broth, and 4 cups water. Bring the liquid to a boil, and simmer the mixture, covered, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender. Puree the stockpot contents with an immersion blender (or transfer to a regular blender if you don't have an immersion blender).

While the potatoes are cooking, cook the soyrizo in a skillet over moderate heat until browned, stirring occasionally. Add browned soyrizo and cubed Yukon Gold potatoes to stockpot, cook till potatoes become slightly tender, about 10 minutes. Stir in chopped kale and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cook until kale has become wilted--then serve!

Vegan Carrot Cupcakes

I've always had a thing for carrot cake, so while everybody knows that even for non-vegans, cream cheese is pretty much disgusting in almost every other context, I missed me some cream cheese frosting when I went vegan. I know it's hard to believe, but nasty Tofutti, which usually manages to be even grosser than real cream cheese, makes an incredible cream cheese-ish frosting that my omnivorous friends said was the best they'd had.



These are from the immortal Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. This is from way back in the summer, but I wanted my first post to have pictures!!

Ingredients

2/3 cup all-purpose flour
2/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
2/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup soy yogurt (plain or vanilla)
1 teaspoon vanilla (I used vanilla paste)
1 cup finely grated carrots
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup raisins

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin tin with 12 cupcake liners.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, mix together sugar, vegetable oil, yogurt, and vanilla. Sift in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices), and mix until smooth. Fold in carrots, walnuts and raisins.
3. Spray the cupcake liners with non-stick baking spray. Fill the liners 2/3 full. Bake for 26-28 minutes, until a toothpick inserted through the center of one comes out clean.
4. Once fully cooled, top generously with cream cheese frosting.

Sorry I don't have the frosting recipe up... I'll post it as soon as I find it.

Here's the raisin exposure shot:


The texture was fantastic, really moist and full of great chewy stuff. If you're wondering about the "fancy" coiled frosting effect, that was achieved by a ziplock bag with the corner cut out. Just make sure the frosting is firm and properly chilled before you embark on a similar adventure.

Earl Grey Sugar Cookies!

This post represents the figurative ribbon-cutting for our new recipe blog. To get things rolling, I'm going to post my newest invention: vegan Earl Grey sugar cookies. These totally delicious but, alas, slightly weird-looking. Since they are, after all, Earl Grey cookies, maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised that they turned out so...well...gray. After some initial trepidation vis-a-vis their stone-like appearance, however, my roommate couldn't stop scarfing these up. We agreed that they look like rocks because they rock.

Vegan Earl Grey Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:
1/2 cup vegan margarine (I use Earth Balance or Willow Run)
1/2 cup + 1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup soft silken-style tofu
zest of one lemon
zest of one small, smooth-skinned orange (I used a Temple orange)
a splash of soy milk (vanilla or plain)
4 tablespoons loose-leaf Earl Grey tea
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/4 teaspoon salt

Extra sugar to roll the cookies in (1/2 cup or so)


Directions:
Put the lemon and orange zests in a food processor with a splash of soymilk. Process till the zest has been reduced to tiny bits. Add the tofu and vanilla extract and process till relatively smooth (you'll still see little pieces of zest).

In a large bowl, cream together room-temperature margarine and sugar. Add the tofu mixture and mix till incorporated.

Place 4 tablespoons of Earl Grey tea into a (well-cleaned!) coffee grinder and process till very finely ground. In a separate bowl, combine ground tea, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt. Mix well.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix well. Cover bowl and refrigerate for at least half an hour. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

Remove the cookie dough from the fridge and roll into balls, using about one teaspoon of dough per ball. Roll the balls in sugar till coated and press them lightly onto a cookie sheet, leaving about 2 inches between them. Bake for 12-15 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly on cookie sheet. Remove carefully from cookie sheet with a spatula and transfer to wire rack.

These cookies will keep cooking as they cool, so don't worry if you eat one right off the baking sheet and it seems a little undercooked in the center. Once cool, these will be delicious, floral, perfumey, and elegantly gray and rock-like. All in all, a very sophisticated, grown-up cookie.


If you try these, let me know what you think. To come: finished-product pictures, my recipes for lemon-thyme and orange-cardamom cookies, plus more baking experiments involving lavender, rosewater, matcha powder...and maybe some weird extracts from this rad site! I definitely want the bergamot, but the question remains: will I be seduced by the jasmine, rose and lavender? Tune in next time for the resolution of this cliffhanger...