Last week, Caleb J Ross gave up a peek into the least distracting meal ever.
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This week, Courtney Elizabeth Mauk shares a cool vegan recipe:
Vegan Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chip Cookies
I love baking,
and teaching writing workshops out of my apartment means having a steady stream
of people to bake for. These cookies are based on a favorite recipe, the
“secret ingredient” a product of poor planning.
A little
background first:
All my baking
gets done with my prized possession, a purple KitchenAid mixer. It’s been a
long-standing tradition in my family to give KitchenAids as wedding presents; I
got mine when I graduated from my MFA program. I’m not sure if that means
they’d given up on me marrying (I didn’t meet my husband until three years
later), or if I “married” my writing. Either way, I got my mixer.
I’ve been vegan
for six years. I could go on and on about my reasons, but I’ll just say that
it’s an ethical and deeply personal choice and leave it at that. In my second
novel, Orion’s Daughters (Engine
Books, May 2014), the characters, members of a commune, are vegan. I do a lot
of twisting and exaggerating and perverting and a little bit of mocking of
their belief system, but being vegan is central to who I am.
Non-vegans often
express concern/fear/disbelief about vegan baked goods, but the truth is that
baking without animal products and making it taste good is really, really easy.
So even (especially) if you aren’t vegan, you should give these a try. Maybe a
whole new world of compassionate eating will open up to you…
Vegan Secret Ingredient Chocolate Chip
Cookies
(adapted from The
Joy of Vegan Baking
by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau)
4 ½ teaspoons
Ener-G Egg Replacer (A vegan baker’s best friend; available at Whole Foods and
other such places)
6 tablespoons
water
These combined are the equivalent of 3
eggs. You could probably use a “flax egg,” too (1 tablespoon of flaxmeal plus 3
tablespoons of water equals 1 egg), but I haven’t tried it.
1 cup vegan
butter (I use EarthBalance sticks)
¾ cup granulated
sugar
¾ cup firmly
packed brown sugar
4 plus teaspoons
vanilla
2 cups whole
wheat pastry flour
3 tablespoons
chickpea flour (the secret!)
1 teaspoon
baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
12 oz. package
of nondairy semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to
375 degrees. Whisk Ener-G Egg Replacer and water until thick and creamy and
egg-like. Set aside.
Cream the
butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla. Add egg replacer mixture
and thoroughly combine.
In a separate
bowl combine flours, baking soda, and salt. Add to wet mixture and blend. Stir
in chocolate chips.
DO NOT TASTE THE
DOUGH. I’m sorry, I know that’s the best part of making cookies, but trust me:
chickpea flour makes the dough taste icky but the cookies taste awesome. You
just have to be patient.
Drop spoonfuls
of dough onto a baking sheet. Bake 10 minutes.
Makes about 2
dozen cookies.
The chickpea
flour is what happens when you realize you don’t have enough conventional flour
mid-process. It’s a happy accident. Chickpea flour makes the cookies slightly
chewy and adds a flavor that I think of as butterscotch and my students have
compared to peanut butter. It also boots the protein level. You can add more or
less chickpea flour for texture and taste.
Baker’s tip:
drink a glass of sangria while working. Good for writing, too.
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Courtney Elizabeth Mauk's second novel, Orion's Daughters, will be published by Engine Books in May. She is the author of Spark (Engine Books, 2012) and an assistant editor at Barrelhouse. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, PANK, Wigleaf, and Five Chapters, among other venues. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop and Juilliard. More information can be found at www.courtneymauk.com
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