C is for cookie... or, B is for biscuit...

While vegan cupcakes may be great and may just take over the world, my addition to the vegan revolution will be in cookie form. They're less work, which is good for lazies like me. They are easier to transport and wrap prettily for gifts. And (possibly most importantly), they post well so I can send them to family and friends around Australia. (This has kind of become my "thang", so much that two of Andy's brothers mentioned vegan cookies on the statements they wrote in support of my permanent residency application.)

Last week was my PhD supervisor's birthday and I collaborated with two of her other students on a gift. We thought about books, about jewelry, about trinkets, about good coffee... but everything was either too personal or too dear. So we decided that edible gifts always go down well. We combined our baking adventures on a pretty plate wrapped in cellophane and ensured good supervision for at least another year ;)

My contribution to the sweets plate was two flavours. First, snickerdoodles. I followed Gina's recipe, posted on Vegan Strong and adapted from VegWeb. Instead of healthy flours, I used plain old white flour. And I needed to add a bit of soy milk, about 1/4 cup, probably because of the 10% humidity we've suffered through recently. Still, these were as perfect as Gina promised, all soft and chewy and cinnamony-delicious.



The second batch was passion fruit-coconut. For this I followed a recipe from Wild Morsels, kind of. Instead of "pulp from two large passionfruits", I used a tin of passion fruit pulp. This seemed to make the dough much wetter than it should have been so I added an extra 1/2 c. of flour. I think I could have even gone more, but I didn't want to stuff around with upping sugar and baking powder as well, so I left the dough a bit moist. To compensate, I rolled each biscuit in coconut before baking. These were a tad cake-y for my liking, but subtle and dare I say, sophisticated.

My second foray of the week in cookie-ing was gluten-free. When I was invited to go sailing with my friend, I remembered her saying that she tries to avoid gluten. I stumbled upon Nora's post about Hannah's simple peanut butter cookies and knew I had to make them. These were a breeze to make, but they stuck to my pan a bit. I made only a quarter of the recipe and added dark chocolate chunks. These were yummy, a bit tricky to eat due to their crumbling but they were popular with everyone on the boat.

Finally, I revisited Gina's perfect biscuit, but switched up the flavours and the flour. Chickpea flour made these suckers gluten free, and I opted for chai-inspired spices and orange oil. They were a bit soft and probably should have baked a few more minutes, but they were tasty and chewy and with a bit of tweaking I think I'll have my go-to GF biscuit.