We've got one of her books and another on the way and so far she's been a big fat 10 out of 10 on every scale. Every savory item from the books and blog has been delicious. Yes, we've modified the recipes, but we're both good cooks and that's what cooks do.
That being said, before tonight I kind of smugly held the belief that while vegan savory cooking is all fine and dandy, it's essentially impossible to make good vegan sweet kitchen items.
You see, I'm a red-seal chef trained by a German Master pastry chef. When I learned to make cakes and cookies and sweetbreads and desserts, there was never ever any mention at all of dairy-free alternatives. The very idea would have been laughed out of the bakery. We used to make 30lbs of puff pastry at a go. Each day we'd go through 40 or 50 dozen eggs -- at least.
When I look over sweets in most vegan books I think the following (in no particular order):
- I have neither flax meal, arrowroot powder, agar essence nor ground tetrapanax papyriferus;
- I don't want to use En-er-g fake egg things;
- Why would you even bother to eat a cookie that doesn't have chocolate?;
- Oh boy: another bland cornstarch pudding.
Thus I was skeptical, I confess, but I was craving cookies and so I found something that looked like a real recipe in her book Eat, Drink and Be Vegan.
Turns out that her Chocolate Chunk Spice Cookies are good. She calls for barley flour but I don't have such high-falutin' things so I used wholemeal oat flour. Moisture comes from a mix of maple syrup and oil, yielding a nicely moist cookie with a nicely short crumb. Heavily spiced with 1 1/4tsp of cinnamon for 1c flour (and more of other spices), which both of us liked but more timid palates might find overbearing.
The instructions to cook the cookies were a little OCD -- exactly 11 minutes in the oven (no longer!); cool on parchment exactly 1 minute (no longer!), transfer to cooling rack for 12 minutes exactly (no longer!)... but with more than a hint of Hob-Nobs mixed with Hagen-Daz Mexican Chocolate ice cream, I'm willing to embrace the paranoia.
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