V for Vegan Vendetta

If you have a vegan friend to include in a celebration, you had damn well better make sure they have something with which to celebrate. I’m making a separate, vegan alternative to the sheet cake. And since I know that separate but equal is inherently unequal, I’m not shooting for an equally good vegan dessert. I’m shooting for a superior one.

To do this, I paged through the Rebar Modern Food Cookbook. It’s the house cookbook of a regionally famous (so I’m told) restaurant in Victoria, BC. I figured that if anyone knows how to smack down a sheet cake, it will be Pacific Northwest hipsters. Hmm, vegan fudge brownies sound good… but wait, whaaaa?

“Sprinkle the top with carob chips…”

No. Nothing says “sanctimonious hater of pleasure” like carob. Plus, I examined a bag of “organic vegan carob chips” at Whole Foods: “Contains traces of milk.” Would someone with a first grader’s reasoning skills please call these people and help them reconcile the front of their bag with the back?!

The icing part of the recipe also annoyed me. You melt together some dark chocolate and some… ech… margarine. Oh hells no, not in my house. I used virgin coconut oil instead. It is solid at room temperature and melts at body temperature. Just like the butter it is so obviously meant to replace.

Hmm, well it doesn’t look like it’s going to shame any sheet cakes. The middle sank and the glaze did nothing to conceal this fact. So I embellished it with a floopy letter V for Vegan made of slivered almonds. Tomorrow we can add an update about how the brownies taste.

To be continued! Continued:
The verdict: “Super-ass delicious.” The vegan brownies beat the sheet! Haha, now V stands for Victory in my Vegan Vendetta.

Rebar vegan fudge brownies with the crap ingredients replaced
I also left out the ½ c chopped toasted walnuts because walnuts, ech.

1½ c flour
½ c cocoa
1½ c brown sugar
1½ t baking soda
¾ t baking powder
1 t salt
¾ c coffee
¾ c soy milk
⅓ c vegetable oil
½ c dark chocolate chips – NOT milk chocolate, yo.

Glaze:
7 oz dark chocolate
5 oz coconut oil

Heat oven to 325°. Grease a 9 x 9 pan and line it with parchment.

Sift together the dry ingredients except the chocolate chips. Combine the wet ingredients. Then stir everything together well. (Do not mix in any walnuts here. That is just a nasty, nasty thing to do to brownies.) Pour the batter in the pan and sprinkle the chocolate chips on top. Bake about 25 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

Melt the chocolate and coconut oil together, stirring well. Pour the glaze over the brownies, then put in the refrigerator to set. Cut into 12 squares.

Lemon Lavender Shortbread

I don't know what's wrong with me lately. I just can't get enough of lavender. I love the way it smells. I love the sight of it in my garden: the silvery leaves and happy purple flowers thrive in a hot, sunny spot where other plants might wilt. I can pretend that we, the lavender and I, are in Provence or Sicily under a baking and bright Mediterranean sun. Cheers, lavender!

Lately I even want to eat lavender. Every time I turn around, I'm finding a use for just a subtle hint of its scent and flavor. This week, those pretty flowers are in full bloom. If we bake them into shortbread, the palest of cookies, then we can still enjoy their color. Lemon zest adds more fragrance to the cookie; so do vanilla ice cream and fresh strawberries on the side.

Lemon Lavender Shortbread
10 T butter, softened
¼ c powdered sugar
1 ½ T granulated sugar
¼ t salt
1 ½ c flour
2 t lavender flowers; you may include some tiny, tender leaves
2 t lemon zest

Preheat oven to 300° F. Cream the powdered sugar, granulated sugar, and salt into the butter until light and fluffy. Sprinkle the flour, lemon zest, and lavender over the mixture and stir until well incorporated.
Pat the mixture into an 8 x 8 pan. Prick all over with a fork if you like. Bake until the shortbread is just thinking about turning golden brown; but take it out of the oven before it does anything much about that idea. This should take 45 to 50 minutes.

Cut the shortbread in the pan while it’s hot, then cool in the pan on a rack. Pop them out with a metal spatula. Serve to acclaim.

Gluten-Free Sparklemas Cookies

I feel a little bit sick to my stomach from eating 15 square inches of mistakes, and I’m wondering what kind of gastrointestinal hell there will be to pay later. But overall, I’m going to declare a success of my first foray into gluten-free baking. Yay!

Last weekend I made the season’s first gingerbread cookies to share with friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family. A small but growing number of people in my life are eating gluten-free. Many are trying to avoid refined sugar, dairy, and other animal products. I want to include these people in my cookie plans, but who wants to get a cookie they can’t eat?

Thanks to Kim Christensen, who pointed me in the direction of The Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen blog, where I found a recipe for Spiced Teff Cookie Bars. I dialed down the vanilla to 1 teaspoon, the cinnamon to 2 teaspoons, and the ginger to the full 2 teaspoons. Well, I measured the ginger kind of sloppy because I like ginger.

This recipe tasted great—just like traditional gingerbread. The texture was a little bit gritty, as gluten-free baking is wont to be. Once the bars cooled, I could make fairly clean cuts using a sharp knife. The bars held their shape well, too.

I thought I’d use my deep metal cookie cutters to make Sparklemas shapes, which I would then decorate with nuts and dried fruits. Pushing the cutter into the pan was easy, but convincing the cookie—like a very soft brownie—to pop out of the cutter in one piece was more of a challenge. Cutting the bars warm definitely did not work. Cutting them cold was better, and cutting them slightly frozen was best of all. The larger and simpler the cutter, the easier a time I had. (No gingerbread people shapes, alas.) I used the side of a knife tip to push down on the corners a little at a time, and soon my cookie slid free.

I set out to make a dozen or more cookies, but I only got eight usable ones. I screwed several of them up while learning the principles outlined above. There was a high ratio of trimmings to cookies as well. I think I will make these again, but perhaps I will cut them into squares or diamonds and decorate each one with a dried cranberry, a slivered almond, a sprinkling of coconut flakes, or a dusting of cinnamon. They will not be as cute, but they will still taste great. And as my overfilled belly will attest, you don’t really have to eat very many of them to feel like you’ve had an abundant amount of gluten-free Sparklemas cookies.

Beware the Ides of March: Fallen Caesar Cookies

Cook ‘Em if You Got ‘Em is pleased and proud to present you, for the first time EVER, a holiday recipe well in advance of a holiday: Fallen Caesar Cookies for the Ides of March!

OK, so it’s not really a holiday, and I’m the only one who celebrates it, and the cookies usually freak people out. But still!

Here, I’ll let you in on the backstory. When I first moved to the Twin Cities, it was in the middle of a recession. I worked for a school library book publisher. A lot of the staff were, like me, Gen Xers right out of school. In college, we’d been writers, visual artists, English majors, theater minors. Now we were working for abysmal pay in a company with a World War II–era business model. We were energetic but cynical; creative but financially crippled.

Those times were an anxious mix of compliance and defiance. The myth of the American Dream was evaporating for college graduates across the country who would NOT be doing better than our parents. As well, I didn’t know anyone my age who was interested in the Baby Boomer live-to-work ethic. We didn’t want to be like the older adults around us, but we were scrambling to establish adult identities. For me and everyone I knew at Lerner, this included finding and using our creative voices as artists.

So we were constantly doing things like, say, composing haikus about our lunches. Or making Jello aquariums, complete with Swedish fish, for the company potluck. Or using decorative gourds to create dioramas of famous characters in literature.

Or commemorating the Ides of March by baking sugar cookies decorated with stab wounds and staging a recital, in a Boston accent, of Marc Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar. This was so much fun that I started doing it every year.

Now we’re in a much worse recession than the one in which I came of age. I look at the young adults around me and I can remember how it felt, but I can’t imagine what’s going to happen: what career paths will they have? How will the world change because of them, and how will it change them?

And THAT is why I’m putting out the call: everyone bake these cookies for March 15. Take them to work if you have a job. Or take them to school, or to church, or send a box to a distant friend. Just share them however you can. Read the funeral speech. Not for any logical reason. Just because it’s the Ides of March, and we should all beware, and tough times call for ridiculous measures.

Fallen Caesar Cookies
Use your favorite cookie dough recipe to make my traditional non sequitur response to The Man. My favorite is Rich Rolled Sugar Cookies from Joy of Cooking.

1 recipe sugar cookie dough
1 tube of red Cake Mate decorating gel
1 cookie cutter shaped like a person, i.e. gingerbread boy

Roll out the dough and cut out the shapes. Transfer shapes to a cookie sheet. Use the decorating gel to make seven marks—one for each conspirator in Caesar’s assassination—on each cookie. Use a little pressure to make a slight dent in the surface of the dough.



Bake the cookies, watching carefully. You want to bake them until they are just done, rendering as pale a cookie as possible without underbaking. This will make for more lurid contrast between the cookie and the stab wound. The decorating gel will bake into the cookie and will not brush or smear off after the cookie cools.

Peace, Love, and Gingerbread

True confession: I don’t like Christmas much. I don’t like the music. I don’t like the decorations, or Salvation Army bell ringing, or cards. I don’t like shopping. I don’t like how the presumption of Christianity blots out other perspectives at this time of year. I don’t like how it all happens against a deepening backdrop of cold weather and dark skies; or how in January, all the lights will fade and I will feel abandoned to a bleak winter without even the respite of Christmas’s unwelcome distractions.

One thing that keeps me peaceful at Christmastime is gingerbread. I love the alchemic ritual of boiling molasses, sugar, and fat. I love perfuming the flour with splashes of dark, sweet cinnamon and sharp, warm ginger. I love the surface of the rolled-out dough, smooth and cold like black marble. I love my cookie cutters—those old friends I see just once a year. Tin ones from Mom that we used when I was little. Plastic ones that I bought for myself as a young adult, an act of self-assertion for my first holiday on my own.

In those days, I was slowly realizing that I can define this season however I want. I don’t have to be in the office gift exchange. I don’t have to decorate a tree or send cards. I don’t have to let someone else tell me how and when to give. And I can leave all these things behind without losing what’s important: warmth. Light. Faith that, even in the looming darkness of winter, there are human connections to be made. There are cookies to be baked.

I love to decorate each cookie shape in a particular way. The stars and bells get red sugar sprinkles. The trees and holly leaves get green. The dreidls and stars of David get blue sprinkles. The blue cookies are for friends whose philosophies get crowded out this time of year. I want to say to them, “True, this cookie exists because of Christmas. But I know you don’t ride that train, and I see you.” And really, when I bake gingerbread, that’s what I’m saying to, and for, myself.

Gingerbread Molasses Cutouts
Makes 7 or 8 dozen cookies, each 2 or 3 inches across. The great thing about this recipe is how many times you can roll and re-roll it. You can keep cutting out cookies until the dough ball is too small to make a single ‘nother one.

1 c shortening
1 c molasses
1 c sugar
1 c vinegar
2 eggs
6 c flour
½ t baking powder
½ t salt
1 t baking soda
1 T ginger
1 t cinnamon

Combine shortening, molasses, sugar, and vinegar in a large saucepan. Heat, stirring constantly, and bring to a rolling boil. Cook 2 minutes. Remove from heat and cool. Add the two beaten eggs.

Sift, mix, or whisk all the dry ingredients together. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix well. Roll the dough into a ball and chill it well. Overnight will do it.

On a floured board, bench, or countertop, roll the dough ⅛ to ¼ inch thick. Cut out shapes. Decorate them with colored sugar, currants, and small candies as desired. Bake on greased or nonstick cookie sheets 6 to 9 minutes at 375°.

Use your cookies to celebrate—or not—however you want. But I do hope they'll make you happy this season.