Adventures in Vegan Cookies

I've been experimenting with vegan cookies. I didn't feel like trying to keep track of which of my Christmas cookies were safe for my vegan friends. The first batch, peanut butter chocolate chip, came out beautifully. Peanut butter's texture lends itself beautifully to vegan cookies. Today I tried whole wheat snickerdoodles. Well. This was more of a learning experience.

First of all it seems that I haven't done enough baking lately, my whole wheat flour is just a bit stale. Not horrible, but not great either. I'm told that whole wheat flour keeps best in the freezer. Trouble is that when you bake, all ingredients should be at room temperature. So you have to plan ahead a little more and get the flour you need out of the freezer ahead of time. My little freezer is full so until I get a big freezer, I'll just have to bake more to use the flour up! :) Then I have to find testers since I don't have room to freeze the cookies....

First major hurdle: the shortening. All of the margarine and shortening in my house today has whey or "natural butter flavor" which I assume means it came from a cow. I used light olive oil for the peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, but I'm nearly out due to a kitchen anomoly which has swallowed two bottles of the stuff with no trace. So, I tried canola oil.

I use a powdered egg replacer from Bob's Red Mill. It's made with soy flour and wheat gluten. One tablespoon egg replacer powder and three tablespoons water replaces one egg. Since canola oil is more liquid than vegetable shortening, I decided not to add water with the egg replacer. By the time I got all the flour mixed in, the dough wouldn't hold together at all. In the end I think the amount called for in the recipe would have worked pretty well despite using oil instead of shortening. The recipe called for rolling the dough in one inch balls and then rolling the balls in cinnamon sugar. I only added enough water to get the dough to stick together in a ball, although it was still quite crumbly.

The recipe makes about 3 dozen cookies. I did 1 dozen per sheet. The first sheet I formed the balls and left them alone, baked them for 8 1/2 minutes. They didn't spread nearly as much as I expected, and they shattered/crumbled very easily.

For the second sheet, I flattened the cookies with a drinking glass. This was NOT a good choice, as when they cool they are still very brittle and the unflattened ones seem to hold together better. I baked these for 9 minutes, still not quite enough. These cookies might work to make a vegan cookie pie crust, but they are just too crumbly and brittle to be good for eating out of hand.

Once they cool the unflattened snickerdoodles are still very crumbly but they don't fall apart quite as easily. They are pretty good although the salt the recipe called for was too much, next time I will add half as much. I added more water to the last batch. I thought it was too much as the dough seemed a little too soft, but it definately held together much better. These spread more, and I didn't hear the timer so they are a little darker than I'd like.

These cookies are surprisingly filling and very satisfying. Since I know better than to think I can skip eating cookies when I bake them, I baked them for brunch. I ate 4, and a few small bites of the dough. I can't eat another one, even though I want to test the last batch. I'm surprised and pleased.

I made them a little bigger than an inch because it was easier to keep the dough in a ball that way, and I'd have guessed each cookie had about 100 calories. I did some rough math and got closer to 120 calories: 53 calories from the canola oil, 31 from whole wheat flour, 32 from sugar, 4 from the egg replacer. With the additional water so the balls could be made smaller, they probably would be closer to 100. Certainly not the healthiest food, but better than what I could buy. The recipe says it only makes 24 cookies, but I got 34. I like using canola oil, it's close to olive oil in the "good fats". I probably could have used half the sugar in these snickerdoodles, and the sugar on the outside would still make them taste very sweet.

Finally ate one of the last batch. It was crispy but didn't shatter, the texture was delightful. I usually prefer my snickerdoodles a little soft, but that would probably be achieved with a shorter bake time, and I think they'd be even better. So the main thing I learned from this try is that the texture of your cookies will be similar to the texture of your dough. Seems like that should have been fairly obvious, but I hadn't really thought about it like that before.

The recipe I used is on the back of the Bob's Red Mill egg replacer. Here is the snickerdoodle recipe and there is a link in the recipe so you can get the egg replacer if you can't find it in your local store. They also have a "store finder" if you don't want to pay for shipping, but it doesn't give you the option to search by product and not all stores that carry Bob's products carry the egg replacer. I live pretty near the factory store so I often shop there, but I usually end up spending a little more than I'd intended while I'm there. Having the things I really need delivered cuts down on those impulse buys.