Gingerbread Cookies and NYE Resolutions

Dear Readers,

I have some new for you. Some perhaps shocking or bad news for those of you who like my sugary unhealthy desserts because my new years resolution is to be healthier. To be more specific: to eat better and exercise more. I know new years resolutions are a bit lame but I kind of like the idea of wiping the slate clean.

Don't worry I'm going to be realistic about it. So I know there will be occasions like xmas, birthdays, potlucks and perhaps cheat days. But on the whole I want to eat a lot less sugar. This is big for me, because sugar is my drug. Also less deep fried foods and just less oil in general. 

But since this is new years eve I wanted to share with you one last sugary dessert I made today to take to a friend house tonight.

I made gingerbread cookies with my new cookie cutter I got for xmas. The cookies cutter set is so great because they come with letters so you decorate with whatever message you want, like this:

Because it's so hot I decided to make ice cream sandwiches with them. These cookies tasted great and had a great texture, but unfortunately I made them a bit thick and I don't recommend freezing them as they are a big too hard when frozen. I also made some vanilla ice cream to go with it. I don't recommend making vanilla ice cream. Its so boring, you might as well buy it, seriously don't bother!

Anyway here is the recipe from the allergen-free bakers handbook. She has a special flour mix in her cookbook but since she uses the same mix for most recipes I don't think it would be fair to post it here. I will tell you though that I subbed the brown rice flour for regular white flour as I couldn't get any from my health food store and it still worked fine.

Gingerbread cookies (makes 24 small cookies or in this case 18 larger ones)
2 3/4 cup gluten free flour mix
1 teaspoon xanthan gum
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 Tablespoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup dairy free shortening (I used nuttelex)
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 cup agave
1/4 cup molasses (I used golden syrup)

In stand mixer fitted with paddle, combine dry ingredients. Mix on low speed for about a minute. Add shortening and apple sauce then mix until combined.

Add agave and molasses and again mix until combined.

Divide dough into two balls and roll in between two baking sheets until about 1/4 inch. Place in freezer until firm, about 20 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line two sheets with baking paper.

Cut dough using cookie cutters. Place on baking sheets. Bake for 10 minutes, Remove from the oven and let set for a few minutes and then cool for a few minutes before transferring them to cooling rack.




Happy New Year Everyone!

Anyone else making new years resolutions?

CT8N645GSWGQ

Choc Chip Cookies with Peanut Butter Ice Cream

I told you, it wouldn't be long til I tried making the gluten free chocolate chip cookies that I blogged about a few weeks ago. In fact it was only a week later but I thought it would be kind of boring to hear that I made the same cookies in one week. I do think it's worth sharing though because I made some changes, this time I used regular white agave and a mixture of white and dark chocolate. But I discovered that the strong after taste wasn't the dark agave but was the 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract, next time I will try with only 1 teaspoon to see how it compares. I do love the texture though and general flavour. I took some to a friend's house and then used the remaining leftovers to make peanut butter ice cream sandwiches using the recipe from vegan scoop. It is seriously my most used cookbook and this ice cream was another winner.

Gluten Free Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

The desserts on Elana's Pantry look amazing but the idea of importing some sort of special blanched almond flour just seemed a little too extreme even for me. So I was grateful when Toby come across blanched almond meal in Brunswick IGA. It wasn't cheap, it cost a little over $11 for 500 grams. I was a little worried though, I didn't want to buy some super expensive almond meal which didn't work in her recipes. Particularly because she says that you need to use certain brands of blanched almond flour since others don't work with her recipes.

I used lindt dark chocolate and cut it into tiny chunks and made her famous cookies.

Gluten Free Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies from Elana's Pantry

2 ½ cups blanched almond flour

½ teaspoon celtic sea salt (i used regular sea salt)
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup grapeseed oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
½ cup agave nectar
1 cup dark chocolate chips 73% cacao

1. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl
2. Stir together wet ingredients in a smaller bowl
3. Mix wet ingredients into dry
4. Form ½ inch balls and press onto a parchment lined baking sheet
5. Bake at 350° for 7-10 minutes
6. Cool and serve

Makes 24 cookies

I put them in the oven for a few minutes more than the recipes asked for but they were still quite soft so I was a little skeptical but after cooling for what seemed like forever they eventually firmed up and had a soft but wonderful texture kind of like mrs field cookies. Although, I made one mistake with this recipe and used dark agave. I thought that dark agave and regular agave were interchangeable in recipes but it turns out that dark agave has quite a strong flavour unlike it's neutral counterpart. So while these cookeis were delicious the dark agave really overpowered the other flavours.

To make up for the strong flavour I made some ice cream sandwiches to take to a friends house. I actually made ice cream to put inside but couldn't find the crucial part of our ice cream maker so had to settle for so good chocolate ice cream inside. I think the chocolate ice cream was a bit too much and I'm not really sure if our friends enjoyed them.

But I have high hopes for the recipe with regular agave and plan to make them properly very soon because the texture is so bloody awesome for a gf baked good and I can tell that they will taste great without the strong agave flavour.

In the meantime, does anyone have any suggestions for dark agave recipes?

Gingerbread cookies and xmas lunch

For xmas, we decided to make gingerbread people and animals, I used the colourful choc chips, white icing and a black icing pen to decorate them in all sorts of way. I used this recipe from post punk kitchen but I halved the amount of ginger and I still think they may have been a tiny bit too gingery and added only a pinch of cloves and I used golden syrup instead of molasses:

Gingerbread cutout cookies
1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup plain soymilk (I used rice milk)

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour (I just used white)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

spice blend:
1/2 teaspoon each ground nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

Directions
In a large bowl beat together oil and sugar for about 3 minutes. Add molasses and soymilk. The molasses and soymilk won't really blend with the oil but that's ok.

In a separate bowl, sift together all the other ingredients.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet in batches. Mix together with a firm spoon or spatula until well combined. You should have a pretty stiff dough. Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and chill for an hour or up to 3 days in advance. (If you chill longer than an hour you may want to let it sit for 10 minutes to loosen up a bit before proceeding).


Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease your cookie sheets.

On a floured surface roll you dough out to a little less than 1/4 inch thick. You can do this in 2 batches if you don't have the space. Cut out your shapes with your cookie cutters and gently place on cookie sheets (if you are using them to decorate with remember to cut a hole with a straw or something before baking). Bake for 8 minutes.

Remove from oven and let them cool for 2 minutes on the baking sheet then move to a cooling rack. Wait until they are completely cool before icing.

The icing was following was made using the suggestion from PPK of mixing icing sugar with a tiny bit of wter until you get the right consistency, it was so simple.

It was lots of fun cutting out the gingerbread shapes, and it made me realise that I want to make more cut out type cookies, however I found that the dough cracked quite a lot when I baked them as you can probably tell from the santa looking one here:

we also made vegan caramelised onion quiche from vegan brunch and my mother provided the rest of our yummy lunch, which consisted of roasted vegetables, corn and peas cooked with Nuttelex and cheezy broccoli/cauliflower with our family's Vegemite gravy, it doesn't actually taste like Vegemite just adds a depth of flavour.

Thousand steps potluck

We went to ferntree gully for my potluck, it was small in numbers but I am kind of glad about that, as it was quite embarassing how many times I had to stop doing the thousand steps walk. At the top though we enjoyed the nice weather (it was a few weeks ago) and lots of good food.

Craig made green caspcium, red capscium and eggplant dips.


and mushroom dip which actually had me the mushroom hater liking mushrooms
Rebecca made rice apricot balls
Jo made an assortment of yummy sandwiches in cute shapes and with the crusts cut off.



I made these bacon and potato puff pastry things. I simply added mashed potatoes and bacon bits to puff pastry. So simple but quite good.



And anzac cookies with orange blossom water which were sadly a little bitter but I guess I used too much baking soda.

Mr T made cheesy mite scrolls using cheezly. They were so amazing the night before, all hot and gooey but the following day were kind of average.(excuse the pic)
It was really pretty and we saw lots of different birds
Afterwards we went to belgrave manor earthly pleasures cafe which is in this really cute old building. Earthly pleasures is an omni place but has lots of vegan options.
We shared a piece of chocolate pear tart, it was rich and soooooooo good!
Belgrave Manor Earthly Pleasures
1627 Burwood Hwy
Belgrave
9754 7899

Spritz cookies

On the weekend I was feeling a lot better and thought I would go to a party and make some cookies to bring. I decided to give my cookie press a try and make spritz cookies. I followed Kittee's recipe minus the food colouring. It took me ages to figure out to use the cookie press and as you probably tell from the pic below some were prettier than others. Now that I have figured it out though it will be easier in the future and I plan on experimenting with the other shapes and with different flavours. The trick is to make sure the dough is just started to peek out of the disk and then press the handle. Also you need to make sure that the cookie press is actually pressed up against the liner on the tray. It properly sounds really simple, but when you have no idea what to it's not that easy.




They tasted fine, but just a little bit simple. So I coated the back of the cookies with melted white chocolate and covered them with chocolate sprinkles (from rishons.) I didn't coat them completely because it would have taken away from the detail in the front (as you can see in the above pic). I think this worked out better too the white chocolate didn't over-power the taste of the biscuits.



Sadly the cookies didn't get to the party because my energy levels were still really low and I ended up having an early night but I found lots of people to happily eat the cookies the next day. Next time I am going to try spritz cookie sandwiches.