Vegan Recipe – Holiday Cookies

Every Christmas Eve my family visits my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousin.  My grandparents like traditionally midwest food and usually prepare ham or turkey every Christmas.  I used to just eat rolls and cookies since I never really liked meat.  This year, since most of us are either vegan or vegetarian, we planned ahead and offered to bring a lot of hors d’oeuvres rather than doing a sit-down dinner.  Everything we brought was vegan.  My mom made meatless meatball sliders, so I made my Tempeh Tornado filling for a Sloppy Joe slider option.  She also brought curry soup “shots” which were a nice, little portion of soup.  My sister put together some spiced nuts.  We also had a fruit and vegan yogurt platter and a veggie and dip platter.  Not pictured are my mom’s famous cream cheese filled pepper appetizers.  I plan on doing a post on those soon because they are delicious and so easy to make!

Christmas Eve Spread

The meatless meatball sliders were made by marinating the meatless meatballs from Trader Joes.  My mom also added some homemade vegan cheese, which was such a great touch.

Meatless Meatball slider

Now we have come to the recipe portion of the post…

I brought peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies, chewy ginger-molasses cookies, and chocolate chip cookie dough truffles.

Yummy Christmas Cookies!

For the peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies, I used this recipe from Kirsten’s Kitchen.  Just before scooping the dough onto the pan, I mixed in dark chocolate chunks.  These are awesome replacements from our usual favorite of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups wrapped in peanut butter cookie dough.

Next, were the chewy ginger-molasses cookies by Chef Chloe Coscarelli, found here.  They were the simplest cookies to make out of the three and I would recommend them because they are like an awesome gingerbread cookie without being hard.

Finally, I made the chocolate chip cookie dough truffles, found at Fragrant Vanilla Cake.  These came out moist and impressive.  I would recommend making them much smaller than I did (they ended up to be about 3 bites each – way too big), and you will need about twice as much chocolate for dipping.  When making them from the recipe found at the link, don’t freak out when it says to add the baking powder.  That’s a mistake.  I didn’t have fleur de sel, so I added a sprinkle of sea salt on each truffle.

Try them out yourself for your next big family get together or holiday!

Advertisement

Healthy Halloween Treat

This is obviously a late post, but I felt it was worth sharing.  I am in school for my liberal studies degree with a teacher preparation option.  This means that I am required to log 50 hours of observation and participation in an elementary school classroom over two semesters.  Last semester I was assigned to a kindergarten class and this semester a third grade class.  My host teacher is awesome and enthusiastic.  It’s infectious and her students are generally very motivated to learn and participate.  When students seem to lose focus or just before a big test, the teacher leads them through some simple yoga and tells them that since their right and left brains are balanced, they are at their absolute smartest and ready for the test.

Anyway, I was scheduled to observe on Halloween and wanted to bring a treat.  I figured that they were going to get enough candy, so I should bring something healthy and fun.  I can’t take credit for this idea, because I believe I saw it on Pinterest and don’t have the source, but it is awesome.  I bought two bags of clementines, washed and dried them, and drew jack-o-lantern faces on them with a sharpie.  I tried to vary the faces, making them both scary and goofy.  The kids were really excited to get a snack and happily took them to the cafeteria to eat with their lunches.  Some even requested certain faces.  My only suggestion is to keep the sharpie to a minimum – don’t draw big black smiles.  The waxy surface of the clementine peel causes the sharpie to rub off on your hands when you peel it, although not when you just hold it.  Try it out next Halloween!