It was easy to veganize the recipe just by using margarine for “butter” and Ener-G Egg Replacer for the egg.  The cookie dough was super easy to make but the assembly of the cookie was a little more trying.  If you are feeling froggy and want to try to make them I have a few suggestions.

1. Don’t forget to chill your dough!
2. Work in small batches or a really cold kitchen (walk-in freezer?)
3. If you have a marble counter or cutting board, use it!  If it is a board you might want to chill it with the dough – this will help keep the dough chilled longer and therefore easier to work with.
4. When it says “lightly floured surface” feel free to be liberal, and make sure to flour the rolling pin too!
5. If you are expecting the cookies to bleed on their own, don’t.  Mine didn’t bleed at all – could have been the high quality, chunky jam I used though.

You may want to wait to preheat your oven until you have them made just to help keep the temperature in your kitchen down, but I am not sure how much that will help.  Enjoy baking!  (I’ll post pictures when we get them uploaded!)

~C

I love cookies.  I love them so much that we had cookies instead of cake at our wedding.  This past Friday I was suddenly taken with a craving for No-Bake Cookies, one of my favorite cookies from my childhood.  I remember making them with my mom and then following her as she dropped them to pick up all the little “bits” left on the wax paper.  Fortunately, this recipe is SUPER easy to veganize and doesn’t change the cookie at all.  Make them – I promise you will love them too!  Just make sure that you heed the timing advice – boil it too long and they will be chocolate-peanut-buttery chalk.  I think next time I won’t veganize them so that I can eat them all and don’t have to share with Sat.

~C

Last night I was able to draw some energy from my reserves in order to make some cookies. Pink Haired Cyn suggested I put my white choco chips to use in some white chip macadamia cookies and I thought that was an exceedingly good idea, so I went for it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a good straight-up vegan recipe that met the bill so I went with a recipe for White Chocolate/Coconut/Macadamia cookies on Recipezaar. The only non-vegan items were butter (I subbed in margarine) and egg (I used flaxseed/water) so I figured it should be pretty straight-forward. The recipe called for a whole (12 oz) bag of white choco chips but I only had about 2/3 of a 10.5oz bag so I had to half the recipe. I must say that as I was making these cookies I was very skeptical that they would turn out at all. Luckily, my skepticism was vanquished after I tasted these yummy morsels. I put a couple pictures up on my Flickr page but I’ve included one here for those of you who don’t like clicking links (seriously, who are you!??!). I was a bit disappointed by the look (they were a bit on the pale side) but the taste was right so, who’s to complain?

Of course, it wouldn’t be a baking experience with Sat unless I somehow managed to botch the instructions. Luckily, my error was limited to substituting granulated sugar for the intended brown sugar. Oh, and I guess the fact that I initially forgot to chop of the macadamias could be construed as another mishap, but I was able to fish them out before I mixed them in. The moral of the story? I still can’t follow a recipe!

Before I wrap up this post, I’ll leave with a few random bits of news.

• My trip to the car dealership today was a complete joke. When I got there, the guy asked me to turn the car on (I was all ready to hand over the keys), he jumped in the passenger seat, noticed the “Passenger Airbag Off” light wasn’t on and said, “Your car is fine.” After some initial disbelief (this was a full-sized guy and it was supposed to only be a problem with petite individuals) he convinced me that everything was working properly, just not the light. For Colleen’s sake, I hope he’s right.
• Rubi and Roxy have been up to it again. This weekend and into Monday they were in a “lets pee everywhere except the litterbox” frenzy. Colleen was convinced that it was just a behavior thing so she managed to get a second litterbox from a friend at work. The problem: on Monday I noticed that some of the pee had blood in it. Not good. I couldn’t tell who really had the problem so we were on the lookout for anymore bad behavior but, surprisingly, there has been none. I just hope all is well with our kittehs.

Well, that’s about it for this little blog entry. Stay tuned for more wonderful news from BaconAndTofu Land.

- Sat

P.S.
If you haven’t done so already, check out my FriendFeed: it’s pretty stinky sweet (and make sure you sign up too!)

I guess it all started after the spring quarter ended and we were off to Ohio for my brother’s wedding. I won’t go into the trip in this post (I promise I’ll catch everyone up on it later) but lets just say that it wasn’t the best vacation I’ve ever had. It wasn’t a disaster or anything but it was just way more stressful than a “vacation” should be.

Fast forward a bit to after we had gotten back from our trip. I had nearly 2 weeks of free time to do whatever I pleased. Getting caught up on bike repairs? I could do it! Cooking a lot of really yummy vegan food? It was on the todo list. Then a funny thing happened: I didn’t do anything. I mean, I did stuff but I don’t think it was productive either in terms of work or in terms of pleasure. It was just mind-numbing filler. Then I started to get angry. There wasn’t any one moment when I thought to myself “I am so pissed off about not getting anything accomplished.” No, it was a more insidious anger that emerges slowly in the little gestures you make. Of course, I couldn’t really finger the source of my anger and after a while it turned to a sort of sadness. I knew that I needed to get something done yet all I could focus on was the stuff that I had failed to do and I was paralyzed by inaction.

Luckily I have a wonderful wife and she was there to support me through this rough time. With her encouragement I was able to spot the true nature of my discontent and last night I was able to break out of my funk. I started by making a double batch of my favorite chocolate cookies (I would like to reiterate how much I love Dreana Burton for her kickass recipe!). Colleen spotted some vegan white chocolate chips at a local market (score!) so I decided to switch the cookie recipe up a bit to incorporate them. I added some cocoa powder to the mix and used the white chips instead of the regular and the result was pure bliss. The white chocolate chips are far better than the ones I got through the Internet and they are available locally so I was doubly pleased. I saved some of the cookie dough so I could make cookie dough ice cream soon.

Today was the first day of Summer Session I. I am TA’ing for 2 courses this session, neither of which have I taught before: discrete math (cse20) and operating systems (cse120). It’s going to be a lot of work but I needed to do it since there are essentially no TA opportunities for Summer Session II. It’s cool that I get to expand my teaching skills to new courses but I’m also a bit nervous about it.

Colleen and I are really going to make a concerted effort to regularly update our blog so that we can build up what we recently saw referred to as “social capital.” Colleen became a BzzAgent recently so we might start doing some product reviews here to give us something to talk about. I’m setting an unofficial target of 5 blog posts per week. I can’t promise they will be amazing but hopefully we’ll learn to be better bloggers one of these days.

- Sat