The story so far: Mike is keeping a running diary of his holiday cookie efforts. Right now, he’s on a mission to create a vegan, gluten-free holiday cookie receipt that emulates his traditional receipt. (Wonder why we call recipes “receipts”? Here’s your answer.) Today in the cookie diaries: Vegan Batch #1.
First, Mike had to find an established receipt and use that as his starting point. After a search of the Internets, he found this receipt at Florida Coastal Cooking and Wellness. The plan was to bake this first batch using the ingredients from this receipt and the procedure from Mike’s traditional receipt–which is much different from a traditional sugar cookie receipt.
It’s important when cooking with vegan and gluten-free ingredients to use equipment which is dedicated to those types of ingredients, to avoid cross-contamination. Mike used a #24 ice-cream scoop to form the cookies, which yielded only 9 cookies from the dough.
The cookies were done after 12 minutes, but they didn’t look very brown on top. They tasted “very pleasantly sweet”, according to Mike’s notes. The texture was somewhat light, which was encouraging, since the last thing we want to do is create a dense cookie. However, the texture was also dry and grainy (for reasons Mike didn’t discover until Vegan Batch #2–but that’s a story for tomorrow). The cookie didn’t hold up well to the “milk dunk test”; it fell apart very quickly.
Kathy, who is an important part of this process as Chief Taster, said the cookies had “great sweetness”, but needed salt and moisture.
So this first effort could be called a minor success. Lesson learned: Add salt and moisture. To that end, the next batch would have additional salt and moisture–as well as another important ingredient. But that, as they say, is a story for another day. Like tomorrow.
newdeal kitchen 