Vanilla-Cardamom Orange Spritz Cookies

These pretty little cookies are completely easy to make. Lightly crispy, sweet vanilla cookies made a little more exciting by orange and spice.

Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies

In addition to s'mores cookies, I also made Chloe Coscarelli's Vegan Ginger Molasses Cookies this weekend. I was totally pulled in by a picture of them I saw, along with the description- chewy and sweet. I love a good chewy cookie. Plus, I've had some molasses in my cabinet for a while that just needed to get used.

S'mores Cookies!

I went cookie monster crazy this weekend for the Super Bowl. There were so many cookies they seemed to be flowing out of the oven. Two recipes, two teams, too many cookies? No way. They were too good.

Birthday Sugar Cookies

Some of our good friends had a birthday party for their one year old last weekend, so I brought along these sweet frosted treats to help celebrate! These roll-and-cut sugar cookies are easy to make and fun to decorate. They taste sweet and sugary, and just a little buttery, with just the right crunch-to-chewiness consistency.

My Holiday Vegan Eats

One thing I was both looking forward to and a little anxious about was making meals while home over the holidays. I live a 6 hour flight from where my family is, so it's not like I could just pack up my car and bring home all my favorite ingredients. I really wanted to share dishes with my fam that showed off how delicious & flavorful vegan food can be, but I didn't necessarily want to buy the wide array of oils, grains, and products I've collected over the past year of being vegan. I found a good balance- buying a few staples like non-dairy milk and margarine, flax seeds for baking, a little nutritional yeast, and using what was already in my mom's pantry to pull together some holiday meals I was happy to share with my family. It was definitely a little more challenging to find some of the fresh veggies and vegan items I've grown accustomed to, but with some helpful grocery store employees and a few modifications, I whipped up some great vegan eats while home for the holidays!

Persimmon Pumpkin Cookies

Hello persimmons. Meet pumpkin. I think you two will work well together...

The last pumpkin cookies I made were soft little bites filled with melty chocolate chips. But the pumpkin didn't shine quite as much as I wanted it to. I wanted pumpkin cookies that SCREAMED pumpkin. I wanted to up the PUMPKIN ANTE...

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies & Other Weekend Treats

As promised, we're leaving the tropics behind and moving on to Fall-themed recipes. I ran around the Farmer's market this weekend excited to find squashes and persimmons (yes! it's persimmon season again!) in addition to my usual leafy greens. I whipped up these pumpkin cookies Friday night, and they reminded me a little of my mother's pumpkin bread, in cookie form, with mini melty chocolate chips. Well hellllloooo there Fall, I didn't realize I'd missed you so much!

Candied Cacao Nib Cookies

Want something a little nuttier than your typical chocolate chip cookie? Try these on for size! They're chewy, sweet, and a little crunchy.

Chloe's Cinnamon Espresso Chocolate Cookies

These are my new favorite cookies. They are quite decadent, so make 'em to share. In fact, I've made them to share TWICE within the past month, and both times they were a complete hit. Espresso, cinnamon, and chocolate come together in this rich little cookie.

Vegan White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies

I love white chocolate. In my pre-vegan days, it was definitely my favorite type of chocolate. Now, I've developed more of a taste for dark and semi-sweet chocolate, but when I heard about these vegan white chocolate chips on Amazon, you bet your vegan butt I was ordering 'em. And since you have to order them in batches, I am now the happy owner of 3 bags of these suckers. When they arrived, I had to hold back from tearing into a bag to see what they tasted like. But it wasn't long after that I was coming up with a recipe to use them in.

Vegan Valentine's (Vegan Dinner Party #3)

I'll admit I'm not much of a schmoopy, romantic comedy type-of-gal. Usually, I'm not one for pink sparkly hearts. But.... okay, I got a little caught up in things this year. I made schmoopy cookies. And a lot of them, at that. This weekend, I hosted a full-on Valentine's dinner party. What's with all the schmoopy-ness, anyway? 

It must be a vegan thing ;-) . I made so many desserts, we would have needed an extra 10 people to finish them all (although I did send everyone home with a little bag of cookies). Here's a sampler of my third (successful!) vegan dinner party:

Vegan Superbowl Spread and Cookie Mania

 

Well, we didn't end up hosting a party as I'd hoped, but we did go to a great one, and I brought tons of treats. Since we were traveling with them, I put these awesome pretzel & cheese bites (to veganize) back on my to do list, and instead picked some more portable pop-'ems I've been wanting to make.

On my menu: 1) Vanilla & Spice's Black Bean Cups with Plantain Guacamole, 2) No Bake Chocolate Oat Cookies, and 3) what I'm calling "Not-So-Chubby Hubbies"

Carrot Cake Cookies

 Need I say more??? Best. Cookies. Ever.

I don't know about you, but I love carrot cake. Of course you do too. On those rare occasions when I come across someone who claims they don't like carrot cake, I have been known to tell them that's impossible, there is no way anyone could not like carrot cake. (I have a similar disbelief when people say they don't like ketchup. Yes, very American of me.) BUT, even if you are one of those crazy people who says they don't like carrot cake, trust me, you will LOVE these cookies. Just take a look at the ingredients, and you'll be convinced.

The Smart Cookie Remake Attempt

Recently I had a cookie made by The Cookie Department - "The Smart Cookie." It is made with sweet potato, cranberries, oatmeal, and molasses, and sprinkled with a little bit of sea salt. It's big, sort of flat, and soooo chewy. It is AMAZING. And they sell it at the coffee bar across the street from me. This could be trouble.

Check it out here.

Oh yeah, and it's vegan.

I decided I had to attempt to make it myself. Anything that good, I wanted in my recipe arsenal.

Easter Egg Cookies (aka Glitter Balls)

I found these cookies on the great site Cosmo Cookie and the pictures were so enticing I had to make them. The original name is the "Glitter Ball" cookie, but I think I'll call them Easter Egg cookies since that's what they remind me of!


I'll copy the recipe here but I have no problem saying Cosmo Cookie does a much better job of going through it with beautiful pictures, so it's worth going to that blog post!

Some comments: the cookies are kind of dry- they are basically butter cookies, with a shortbread-like consistency. But the finished product, with all the sugar sprinkles and the creamy frosting filling, comes out tasting pretty good. They're sweet but a little heavy. A good "let's get dressed up and go to a party" cookie, not so much a "let's have cookies by the fireplace and read a book" cookie.

See also my note at the end about the filling!

-----Here's the recipe: -----
Ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
1/4 teaspoones salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Sanding sugar, in assorted colors

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat butter, confectioners' sugar, and salt with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes, scraping down side of bowl as necessary. beat in vanilla. Reduce speed to low; add flour, and mix just until combined. Shape into 3/4-inch balls (chill dough if too sticky). Place sanding sugar in shallow bowls. Roll each ball in sanding sugar, and place on parchment-lined baking sheets, spacing 1 inch apart.

Bake, rotating sheets halfway through, until edges are lightly golden, 15 to 18 minutes. let cookies cool completely on a wire rack. While cooling, make filling!

Creamy Ginger Filling

Ingredients:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
1 cup confectioners' sugar
1 tablespoon honey
2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger

Beat all ingredients by hand or with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until smooth. Filling can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 3 days.

Spread 2 cookies with just enough filling to allow them to stick together.
---------

*I played around with the filling flavoring, because I thought it would be fun to have each color be a different flavor. After mixing only the sugar and butter, I split the frosting into 3 separate bowls, and then added the reduced amount of ginger & honey to one bowl for the original recipe. In addition to the ginger filling, I also made a cinnamon cheesecake filling (I have some cheesecake flavoring from a local bake store that came in handy!), as well as an almond filling which worked really nicely with these cookies (add a little almond extract).

Overall: a good, pretty cookie. Some cookies are better seen than eaten; I wouldn't go quite that far with these, but they are no chunky monkey. ;-)