Rosemary-Chocolate Chip Cookies

I had only made it through the first few chapters of Isa Does It: Amazingly Easy, Wildly Delicious Vegan Recipes for Every Day of the Week, soups and salads, and had flipped to the back for some reason - only to discover there were dessert recipes too! Now Isa has co-authored cookbooks on vegan cupcakes, pies and cookies so it's not really a surprise. I was excited to try the first one listed - Rosemary-Chocolate Chip Cookies (p. 272). I had never made vegan cookies before, because usually margarine doesn't hold up to butter in cookie recipes. But my local grocery store just happened to have currently trendy coconut oil on sale and this is what she uses. Also - rosemary? What?

Seems there are two kinds of coconut oil. There's virgin, which is what I have - it smells quite strongly of coconut and is very soft and shiny. There's also refined, which I hear has less of a coconut smell. Oh well, I like coconut so it's all good. In a large bowl, using a fork, mix 1/2 cup coconut oil (room temp) with 2 Tbsp fresh rosemary, chopped finely. Rosemary in sweet cookies? Yes. Add in 1/3 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup white sugar and mix for 1 minute. Add 1/4 cup milk (soy, almond, cow, whatever you have... I had cow) and 2 Tbsp ground flax seed (commonly used as an egg replacer in vegan baking) and mix again for about 30 seconds.

Mix in 2 tsp vanilla. Add in 1/4 or 1/2 tsp salt (my husband preferred it saltier, I preferred a little less), 1/2 tsp baking soda, and 2/3 cup flour. Mix well with the fork, then add another 2/3 cup flour. Mix and when it's almost combined, throw in 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips. And yes, without raw eggs you can definitely sneak a spoonful or two. Spoon onto trays covered with parchment paper and bake @350 for about 11 minutes. It made about 18 cookies for me.

Let them cool on trays and try not to stuff them all in your face at once. These were lovely - the coconut oil did a fine job of making a soft, chewy cookie. With a faint taste of coconut, lots of sweetness and some citrusy pine flavour from the rosemary, these were quite unique and quite the crowd pleasers. Fabulous warm but still good the next day. I've already made them twice and will definitely make them again soon.

Coconut Laddu

Welcome to post #60! I do apologize for being away for so long - I had a travel opportunity I couldn't pass up, and spent six weeks in England and Scotland, doing nothing harder cooking-wise than putting a curry in the microwave and ordering fish and chips at various pubs. As you can probably guess, I was excited to get back to my fully-stocked kitchen! To get started, an attempt at an Indian dessert! I bought that rose water ages ago... of course being a middle-class white girl I got this Coconut Laddu recipe from Canadian Living magazine. Guess I should expand my horizons! But this was the easiest recipe, with so few ingredients, and it turned out great - if you like coconut.

Pour one can of sweetened condensed milk (sugary goodness) into a pan and heat to thicken for about 10 minutes. Couldn't tell you if it actually thickened, but the heat does make it easier to stir into the other ingredients, so it's an important step. Just keep it on low, it does burn quickly. Meanwhile in a large bowl, mix 2 cups unsweetened coconut, 1/3 c chopped dried apricots, 1 Tbsp rose water (I bought this kind at a nearby Indian grocery store, the perks of living in Toronto - I paid less than $2 and they are selling it on amazon for $8.95... silly) and 1/2 tsp ground cardamom.

Pour in heated milk and stir, then let it sit for a few minutes so it can cool down. Next, you get to play with your food - using your hands, form 1 Tbsp-sized balls, then roll them in more coconut and place each one in a candy paper cup. I did buy these at Bulk Barn, and they weren't cheap, but oh well, worth it for this recipe. Then you can eat them, or keep them in the fridge for up to a day.

These were a big hit! I made them for a beach picnic and while they did get a bit sandy, they were delicious - sticky and sweet. I loved the apricot so don't leave it out. No idea how authentic they are but I'll definitely make them again. Maybe throw in some pistachios next time...

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Here it is, guys: the gold standard of cookies. Seriously. They are thick and chewy and sweet and amazing. I'm not a big cookie maker but I am so glad I found Michael Smith's (ie Chef at Home's) Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe because it's unbelievably good and totally fool-proof. Unfortunately I've not made many things from my (*ahem* signed) copy of The Best of Chef at Home but this page is definitely a little greasy. That and the pancake page.

I made them this time for Easter to have with the lime-coconut bars I've already written about. Instead of my usual milk-chocolate chips, I used cut-up mini eggs to be festive. Mmm chocolate and crunchy candy shell! First sift the dry ingredients: 1.5 cups of flour, 1 tsp baking powder and a pinch of salt.




In a large bowl, cream 1/2 cup butter with 1 cup brown sugar. I always do it by hand and it's not too difficult. Add 1 egg, 1 Tbsp corn syrup (I use honey), 1 tsp vanilla (I follow his own advice and double it). Stir in the flour mixture in three parts and then stir in 1 cup chocolate chips/M & M's/anything you want.

Roll the dough into balls and bake exactly as it says, @375 for 12 minutes for big, chewy, sugary cookies. It pretty consistently makes exactly 18 of them too. He's a genius!

Rustic Swedish Cookies

More Scandinavian stuff. Well, this recipe came from a recent (fall? winter?) issue of Bon Appetit magazine, so it may be fake Scandinavian. I'm just in the mood these days to try more cookies, after neglecting them for so long. And I made them while I still had Ikea lingonberry jam in the house.
First you whisk 2 cups whole wheat flour (ooh, up my alley already), 1/2 cup sugar and 1 1/2 tsp baking powder in a large bowl. Then you rub in 10.5 Tbsp room temperature salted butter - but I used unsalted because that's all I usually buy for baking, so I added some salt in with the dry ingredients for balance. In small bowl, whisk 1 egg and 1 egg yolk, then stir into the flour until just combined. Easy.


The recipe says to measure the dough by 2 Tbsp and then roll into balls, but who's measuring? It made about 18 cookies. The fun part is, you get to make indentations in the cookies and fill them with 1/2 tsp jam - lingonberry in this case. You know, because it's Swedish. Bake @400 for 12-14 min.

They ended up a little like shortbread - a bit crumbly, so the jam was nice to have. Unfortunately I either didn't make my indentations deep enough or just used too much delicious, tart jam, because it oozed out of some of the cookies. They also weren't as good the next day, so I would suggest eating them right away. A hardship, I know.

Coconut Macaroons

Making these cookies was first of all a lesson in basic cookery. Check to make sure you have all of your ingredients! I set out to make something else with coconut, involving graham cracker crumbs, only to find out at the last minute that the box I thought I had was no longer in the cupboard - and hadn't been there for a year, probably. So what else do you make with lots of coconut? Macaroons!

I just followed a basic recipe from Canadian Living but with one difference - I toasted about half the coconut first, which I had never done before. Quite easy, just put the flakes in a dry pan on medium and watched it carefully so it wouldn't burn, as I'm sure it would do quite easily. Macaroons are pretty much the easiest thing to make - and I make a lot of easy recipes. Also, because there's no fat in them I don't feel guilty about stuffing my face with them.

In a bowl, whisk 3 egg whites (which are really gross, by the way... slimy), 1/2 cup sugar and 1 tsp almond extract. It gets nice and foamy. Then mix in 2 cups coconut (I buy medium unsweetened) and 1 Tbsp flour and let it sit for about 5 min for the liquid to absorb. They were still pretty liquidy, though. Form into balls and bake at a low temperature, only 300, for about 25 min. They will get delicious and browned on top - and, because of using toasted coconut in the recipe, brown on the inside too.

I'm not sure how Canadian Living got theirs to be perfectly spherical, since mine definitely flatten out a little in the bottom. But otherwise, they are a delicious snack - and one I convince myself is sorta healthy, right? Isn't coconut oil the big thing these days? Even my mom uses it!

Almond Chai Cookies

Sick of Christmas cookies yet? Clearly I'm not... I found a special baking issue of Canadian Living at the library last week and copied out this Almond Chai Cookie recipe - thought they would go well with tea or coffee. The in-laws were supposed to visit us last Saturday but it got postponed due to a vet visit instead - so darn, we had to eat all these ourselves!

The dough was easy enough to make. Beat sugar and butter together, then mix in the dry ingredients in three additions. Lots of good spices in the dry ingredients - cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and a bag of cardamom chai tea (I just happened to have a bag) - along with the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and ground almonds. I love using ground almonds in stuff - it made the cookies a little more crumbly and delicate but very yummy.

Each one was topped with a single blanched almond - nice presentation. Notice there were no eggs in this recipe - which means it was quite easy to snack on the dough while I was supposed to be rolling it into balls! I also seemed to have made them twice as big as the recipe called for - oops. This meant they took about 17 minutes to cook instead of 12, and they flattened out quite a bit.

Mmm these were a good choice. A little sweet, a little spicy, and a faint lemony flavour, not sure where that came from (the tea?). Also very soft and buttery - perfect for afternoon tea.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

For the record, I don't think I had ever eaten a whoopie pie (the dessert du jour, cupcakes are out!) let alone made one. But, 'tis the season for pumpkin things, and I wanted to make a Halloween treat for our Halloween-themed monthly pub trivia night at the Magpie. I had this recipe from Food Network magazine picked out, which involved a chocolate cookie and pumpkin icing, but the online reviews turned me off - good thing I checked! A quick Google search found a multitude of recipes, and I picked Rachael Ray's Pumpkin Whoopie Pies because they seemed to be what I wanted - a pumpkin-flavoured cookie with cream cheese icing.

I don't make cookies too often (they're hard to make healthy since the best ones are full of butter) but I figured since a large group would be eating these, I could go crazy. The batter was different from the choco-chip cookies I normally make - it's made with melted butter and brown sugar, which gave the cookies more of a cake texture.

Despite (or because of?) my use of a cookie scoop (a Xmas present from last year) the thick batter didn't really smooth out very easily, so the cookies were a little bumpy and not all were particularly round, but mostly the same size. Clearly this is a skill I need to work on. But they were a lovely dark orange colour.

Next up was making the cream cheese icing - seemed a pretty standard icing. Which means it was delicious, of course. Hmm.. think I still have some in the fridge... the recipe made twice as much icing as I used, and I thought I had used a generous amount in each 'pie'. Clearly I should have used more! Just didn't want them getting too messy in their Tupperware in the fridge.

Sandwiching them together was pretty fun, mostly because of the large amount of icing I ate in the process. The cookies were so thick that the pies were quite tall - lots of cookie goodness in each bite. My friends seemed to enjoy them - and we ended up in a solid 3rd place at trivia.