For September 23

This week, Mark Shogen Bloodgood is giving a personal practice talk at the Zen Center. Shogen is a vegan, and in his honor this week's recipes are both vegan:

Toasted Almond Cookies
Chocolate Chip Brownies

both from Peter Berley, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen

Peter Berley is a prominent cookbook author and chef whose first book, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, was almost entirely vegan. It is somewhat challenging to find vegan cookie recipes, but he has several in his book, and they sounded delicious, so I decided to do both recipes this week from the same source.

Now, I am not a vegan-phobe, but I now realize that I am a lacto-ovo-phile. Many of my recipes have been made without eggs or without butter, but I can't remember any previous ones that have had neither. So I entered into this project with some trepidation, but I really wanted to support Shogen, who is coming down from Arroyo Grande to give his talk. Vegan cooking was interesting. It was unbelievably expensive - I thought that my normal recipes were expensive, but these recipes hand's-down win my "most expensive recipe" award. Both of them rely on fairly expensive ingredients (or at least the ingredients that I bought were expensive). So the almond cookies called for quite a lot of coconut oil as the fat, and then use maple syrup as the sweetener. The brownies call for a generous amount of maple syrup, a lot of cocoa powder, sucanat (a natural, less-processed sugar), and other stuff. Anyway, taking out the eggs and the butter doesn't mean no fat, it means different fat, and often different other things to act as binding agents.

Of the two recipes, I think the brownies worked out better, at least as of now. The brownies are a pretty close approximation of "regular" brownies - lots of sweetener, cocoa powder, fat (canola oil), nuts, flour. Most brownies reply on a substantial volume of eggs, and these obviously have none of that, and they are a bit more crumbly as a result - they are not dry, but they are a bit crumbly. The flavors are good - they should be, given the amount of coca powder and chocolate chips - and the texture is also good. Overall, while I am not a big fan of these, I could easily see making them for vegan company.

The flavor of the toasted almond cookies is wonderful - lots of toasted almonds, a little orange zest, the maple flavor peeking through - but the consistency says "yep, that's a vegan cookie, all right." These are not delicate cookies - they are almost the opposite. Little boulders or something similar - not because they are hard to bite (although I think they probably would fall in the "al dente" category if they were a pasta) but because the dough does not melt into a traditional cookie in the baking process. This was a fairly stiff dough, and you form it into walnut sized balls and place them on the cookie sheet, squash them a little, then bake. With most cookies, they bake into beautiful rounds. These were unchanged. So not too beautiful to look at, texture is not my style, flavor is good. A vegan cookie. Oy.

Next week is my birthday, so it is "baker's choice." Hmmmm.....what will it be?