Macaroons? Cookie Dough Bites? (Gluten-Free, Vegan)

Have you ever gotten halfway through a recipe you found somewhere, and realized there was no way that it was going to work as written? With cooking, it's definitely easier to recover from and make tweaks, but when it's a baked good... well, all bets are off.

This happened to me about a month ago. I had come across a recipe for cashew flour chocolate chip cookies, and even though I had some warning bells going off in my head as I read the recipe, the positive comments convinced me to give it a shot.

Mix together dry ingredients - okay. Add butter - hrmm, no indication of the temperature or state of the butter given. Guess I'll soften it, that's pretty typical for cookies, right? Okay, now I have lumpy flour. Maybe when I add the liquid... liquid... there's no more liquid in this recipe. I guess the butter was supposed to be melted. Uh oh. Now what do I do???

Well, I'm not one to give up, especially when I've psyched myself up for chocolate chip cookies. I added some liquid, more flour, sugar (the original recipe also had no sweetener)... just guessing at amounts, until I had something that resembled a cookie dough. Whew! Let's get these guys onto a cookie sheet and bake 'em up.

7 minutes in - gee, these look awfully puffy and they're not spreading. I think I'll squish 'em down with a spoon and give them another few minutes.

12 minutes - well, these look like they're about as done as they're going to be. Yikes.

Hey, even though they look like they fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down... they tasted good! I fed them to my husband, who thought they had a similar texture to macaroons. Macaroons. I can get behind that.

The next time I made them, I decided to use coconut oil instead of softened Earth Balance to enhance the macaroon-iness of them. Coconut flavor without the chewy coconut bits, for those who don't care for that texture. I also rolled the dough into balls for baking and did NOT flatten them with a spoon this time.

Hooray! They looked more like macaroons this time. But - to further confuse matters, my husband said that he felt like he was eating cookie dough, but in a good way. Cookie dough bites? I can also get behind that.

This is my long-winded way of saying, this is a gluten-free, vegan treat that is having a slight identity crisis. Make the dough balls a little bigger (1.5" diameter) if you want to call them macaroons. Make 'em a little smaller (1" diameter or even a little smaller) if you want to call them cookie dough bites. Don't like coconut? Use softened butter or margarine instead of coconut oil. Mix in whatever other chocolate or nuts or dried fruit you want.

Just don't flatten them with a spoon.

Macaroons or Cookie Dough Bites
Makes approximately 20 2" macaroons, more if you make them smaller

Ingredients

• 1 cup gluten-free AP flour OR regular AP flour
• 1 cup nut meal (I used cashew meal - almond meal should also work!)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• pinch of salt
• 1/3 cup coconut oil, room temperature OR 2/3 stick butter, softened
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup non-dairy milk OR dairy milk
• 1 cup mix-ins (I used 1/2 cup chopped pecans and 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Mix together flour, nut meal, sugar, baking powder and salt in the bowl of your stand mixer until combined. Add coconut oil or butter and beat on medium speed until the dry ingredients look like they have small lumps evenly distributed throughout. 

Mix vanilla and milk together. While running the mixer on a low speed, slowly pour milk mixture into the bowl - the dough should come together. Add mix-ins and mix until just combined.

Roll dough into balls (1" balls for 2-bite treats, 1.5" balls for 3-bite treats) and place a couple of inches apart on the prepared cookie sheets. Bake for 9-10 minutes for smaller treats, or 10-11 minutes for larger treats. If they don't feel tacky to the touch on top and they're slightly firm, they're done - they won't brown much. Remove from oven and let cool on the cookie sheets for 5 minutes, then move them to a cooling rack.

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Maple Nut Oatmeal Cookies

Our oldest kitty, Oliver, hasn't been feeling quite like himself for awhile. Even after many vet visits, he ended up at the emergency vet for a couple of nights this past weekend. I don't want to get into too many details about what's wrong, but he came home with a feeding tube for meals for now. This has resulted in me making what can only be described as a "liver milkshake" in smell and texture out of canned food and water, for pumping into the feeding tube. Yummy.

Partially to distract myself from worrying about Ollie, and yes, partially to eradicate the lingering odor of his dinner, I set out to make some more oatmeal cookies. As much as I adore my double chocolate peanut butter oatmeal cookies (known as DCPBOC from here on out), I wanted to make something with a completely different flavor profile. I wanted to use the same basic recipe, with the building blocks of nut butter, oats and gluten-free flour giving the same soft-but-toothsome texture, so I settled on making a maple nut oatmeal cookie.

The recipe is quite similar to the DCPBOC - almond butter instead of peanut, grade B maple syrup (for a distinct but not overwhelming maple flavor) instead of brown sugar, extra flour and less milk, and pecans instead of chocolate chips. The resulting cookies, based on my initial guesses at amounts for substitutions, were everything I hoped for - maybe more! Salty, sweet, nutty... just like me.

As with the DCPBOC, I made these gluten-free and vegan, but regular all-purpose flour and dairy milk should work just fine here. Even though we don't typically eat vegan in our house, I love making eggless cookies because I can rationalize "taste-testing" a lot more cookie dough without raw eggs giving me pause. So go ahead - let your kiddos and your grandmothers grab a spoon and eat the dough too - I won't tell.

Maple Nut Oatmeal Cookies
Yield: approximately 2 dozen 2" cookies
Adapted from Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 cup almond butter (9 oz by weight)
• 1/2 cup grade B maple syrup (if you dare to use pancake syrup, we can no longer be friends)
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup gluten-free AP flour OR regular AP flour
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/4 cup non-dairy milk OR dairy milk
• 3/4 cup chopped nuts (I used pecans, but walnuts, almonds or hazelnuts would also be nice)

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a couple of sheet pans with parchment paper.

Add almond butter and maple syrup to the bowl of your stand mixer, and beat on medium speed until well combined (2-3 minutes). Add vanilla extract and beat until mixed in.

Stop the mixer. Add the flour and mix on a low speed until just combined. Stop the mixer again, add oats, baking soda, and salt and mix again on low speed until just combined.

The dough at this point should be somewhat crumbly and sticky. With the mixer running at a low to medium speed, add the milk in a thin stream. By the time you finish adding the milk, the dough should come together and pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Stop the mixer, remove the bowl and mix in the chopped nuts with a spoon. Using a cookie scoop (I used my OXO Good Grips Medium Cookie Scoop) or 2 spoons, drop rounded tablespoonfuls of dough a couple inches apart on the prepared sheet pans. If you're using a cookie scoop - don't overfill it - this dough is pretty sticky and thick, so you don't want to overtax the spring release mechanism. Flatten them out to about 1/4 inch thick with the palm of your hand - they won't spread much in the oven.

Bake for 9 - 10 minutes (11 minutes in my oven, but I tend to always need another minute past the upper bound of recipe times) - the tops of the cookies should look slightly dry and may be starting to just barely crack in places. Remove from the oven and let cool on the pans for 5 minutes, then transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to finish cooling. Enjoy with a glass of milk, or with more cookies.

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Recipe Shout-Out: Chocolate Hazelnut Coconut Fudge

While looking for easy recipes for gluten- and dairy-free sweet treats a few weeks ago, I came across something that sounded too good to be true: creamy, rich vegan fudge made with only 5 ingredients (6 if you count the fleur de sel sprinkled on top). I had all of the ingredients on hand though, so I gave it a try.

Guess what? It was every bit as good as the original recipe promised! "Real" fudge has a slight sugar-graininess that I don't love, but this "fauxdge" had a smooth, almost truffle-like texture. I also really liked that it isn't super-sweet, but it's very chocolate-y. It came together quickly in my trusty food processor - the only hard part was waiting for it to set up in the fridge.

I've got some plans for experimenting with some other flavor combinations - if I come up with something brilliant, I'll write about it! For now, though, you should give the original recipe a try, because you can't really go wrong with chocolate, coconut and hazelnut (well, unless you're allergic, in which case, I'm sorry!).

Get the recipe: Crazy Delicious Dairy-Free Chocolate Fudge from Oh My Veggies

Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

Hello, fellow lazy foodies! After an extended spell of putting the slacker in Slacker Gourmet, I'm back! Don't worry, I hadn't forgotten about this humble little corner of the food blogosphere.

What have I been up to? Well, here's the thing. A few months ago, my husband was diagnosed with a whole slew of food intolerances, including gluten, wheat, rye, yeast and casein. The doctor put him on a strict elimination diet to avoid all of the trigger foods, which ended up lasting 3 months (right through the holiday season - yikes!). So I was cooking, all right, but much of it was far from Slacker Gourmet - there was a lot of experimentation and substitution. For the most part, I stuck with recipes that other, far smarter, bloggers and chefs had developed.

The hubby is off the elimination diet now, but has discovered that he does indeed feel better when he avoids dairy and gluten most of the time. Since this is now a part of our everyday lives, I've started to adapt and streamline recipes to fit into our busy schedules, and I'm looking forward to sharing them! I've also restarted Project 365, so I'm taking more and more photos (and learning how to take proper food photos). Now that I keep my camera close to me at all times, it's much easier for me to remember to grab a few photos of something I've made so I can write about it! I'm hoping to settle into a weekly update schedule eventually.

Anyway... enough about me! Let's talk about cookies, shall we?

I'm not much of a baker to begin with, but add in the constraint of staying gluten-free and dairy-free, and I'm ready to just break out the box mixes and be done with it. However, there were some recipes that the hubby really loved that I wanted to try to adapt. In general, the less reliant a baked good was on flour, the better chance I had of adapting it successfully.

One of the recipes that worked really well was this recipe for Healthy Peanut Butter Chunk Oatmeal Bars. It was already dairy-free, so I only had to use gluten-free oats and swap in a gluten-free AP flour blend (I've been using Namaste), and it worked beautifully.

There are a couple of drawbacks, though. When I make bars, brownies, etc., I really love using my Chicago Metallic Slice Solutions Brownie Pan - it's got the convenient sling to lift the bars out, and the cutting grid gives me beautiful bars every time (if I try to cut them myself, I inevitably end up with a crumbly mess). But the darn thing is a pain to grease (even though it's nonstick, i don't trust it that much), and even more of a pain to wash.

The bars themselves are also pretty serious. They're thick and filling, which is great sometimes, but not always what you're looking for. I've taken to cutting them in half from the original bar size, but... see above about the crumbly mess. Yeah.

I got to thinking - can I adapt these into cookies instead? Parchment-lined cookie sheets don't need to be washed (usually). If I could make cookies... then all of my equipment could go into the dishwasher. Plus, I could make them a little more manageably sized. For cookies, though, I was afraid that the amount of flour in the bars would make for a crumbly, dry cookie, so I swapped out 1/4 of it for raw cacao powder.

The results? A resounding success, I'd say! These cookies come together quickly with a stand mixer - you can have these mixed, baked, and cooled in well under an hour. They're also perfect for nearly any food restriction (well, except for a peanut or chocolate allergy) - no one would be able to tell that they are gluten-free or vegan unless you tell 'em. Plus, you can go ahead and eat the uncooked dough - no raw eggs to worry about!

Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies
Yield: approximately 2 dozen 2" cookies
Adapted from Healthy Peanut Butter Chunk Oatmeal Bars

Ingredients

• 1 cup peanut butter (see below for measuring tips)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup gluten-free AP flour OR oat flour OR whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup raw cacao powder OR cocoa powder
• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 cup non-dairy OR dairy milk
• 1 cup semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips (check the label to make sure they fit in with any food restrictions) 

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a couple of sheet pans with parchment paper.

Add peanut butter and brown sugar to the bowl of your stand mixer, and beat on medium speed until light and fluffy (2-3 minutes). Add vanilla extract and beat until mixed in.

Stop the mixer. Add the flour and cacao powder, and mix on a low speed until just combined. Stop the mixer again, add oats, baking soda, and salt and mix again on low speed until just combined. Stopping and starting the mixer keeps you from throwing the dry goods all over the kitchen - don't ask me how I know that.

The dough will look very dry and crumbly now - that's okay! With the mixer running at a low to medium speed, add the milk in a thin stream. By the time you finish adding the milk, the dough should come together and pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Stop the mixer, remove the bowl and mix in the chocolate chips with a spoon. Using a cookie scoop (I used my OXO Good Grips Medium Cookie Scoop) or 2 spoons, drop rounded tablespoonfuls of dough a couple inches apart on the prepared sheet pans. Smush 'em down a little bit - they won't spread much in the oven.

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes (13 minutes in my oven, but I tend to always need another minute past the upper bound of recipe times) - the tops of the cookies should look slightly dry and may be starting to just barely crack in places. Remove from the oven and let cool on the pans for 5 minutes, then transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to finish cooling. Try not to eat all of them in one sitting.

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Let's discuss the elephant in the room - peanut butter.

I hate measuring peanut butter. Even with a handy little plunger-style measuring cup (like this one from OXO), it's still a sticky mess. I've found a couple of ways to lessen the pain, though.

If you have a kitchen scale, a cup of peanut butter is 9 oz by weight, so you can just put your stand mixer bowl on the scale, zero it out, then scoop 9 oz right into the bowl. In fact, go right ahead and add 3 5/8 oz of brown sugar in there too - now you don't have to pack it into a measuring cup!

My other sneaky peanut butter measuring trick? Well, most jars of peanut butter are 16 oz, which is not quite 2 cups. But Whole Foods sells their peanut butter in 18 oz jars, which is exactly 2 cups. If you want to be really efficient, go ahead and make a double batch of cookies (though I will warn you that you will be pretty much at max capacity in the classic 4.5 qt KitchenAid mixer).

Baking: Turning Quick Bread Mix into Chewy Cookies

As the holidays approach, all sorts of festively flavored quick bread mixes have started gracing the supermarket shelves. Pumpkin, gingerbread spice, cranberry-walnut, chocolate peppermint... the list goes on and on. The problem is, I don't want a loaf of bread, I want fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies. 

As I've mentioned before, baking is not this Slacker Gourmet's forte. I love some homemade sweet treats as much as the next person, but I have very little patience for measuring out and sifting dry ingredients. Boxed cookie mixes don't come in the most exciting flavors, however, all of the yummy seasonal varieties of quick breads sound like they'd make excellent cookies. But how can we convert the quick bread mix into a successful cookie recipe? 

I took a look at homemade quick bread recipes, and made a mental note of the proportions of the major dry ingredients (flour, leavener(s), salt, sugar*) for one loaf. Then I looked up a few recipes for chewy cookies (since that was the texture I was hoping for), and checked out the proportions of dry ingredients for those. 

It turned out that the dry ingredient ratios were very similar between the 2 different types of recipes (quick breads seem to have a little bit less sugar, though). The amount of dry ingredients called for in a quick bread recipe yielding one loaf was the same amount called for in cookie recipes that yielded approximately 2 dozen good-sized cookies. The question was, could I add the dry ingredients from the quick bread mix to the same amount of wet ingredients from the cookie recipe (in this case, 2 eggs and 2 sticks of butter), and get cookie dough?

Cookies are typically made by the creaming method, in which you cream (mix) together butter and sugar until it's light and fluffy, then slowly incorporate the eggs. Once the eggs are in the mix, the dry ingredients get added slowly, just until the dough comes together. However, the quick bread mix already had sugar in it, but since quick breads are not quite as sweet, I added a couple of tablespoons of sugar to the butter to help it get even lighter and fluffier. Is it necessary? I'm not 100% sure, but it didn't hurt matters here. 

Once the dough came together, it seemed like it was indeed a cookie dough - maybe a little softer than I'd thought it would be. Chilling in the fridge for an hour or two could improve the texture. I was impatient, though, so I forged ahead and dished out 1 1/2 tablespoon portions with my handy-dandy cookie scoop onto my prepared cookie sheets, slightly doubtful that this would actually work.

20 minutes later, after baking and cooling, I ended up with...

It worked beautifully! Chewy, chocolate-y and minty, these were some darn tasty cookies! 3 days later, we're still eating them, and they're still chewy and delicious.

Chewy Cookies (made from a quick bread mix)

Approximate yield: 2 dozen 2 3/4 inch cookies

Ingredients

• One box of quick bread mix (meant to yield one loaf)
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened (cut up and microwaved on high for 20 seconds does the trick)
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 cup nuts, chocolate chips, or other mix-ins (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Cream together butter and sugar in a stand mixer or with an electric hand mixer, until light and fluffy (about 2-3 minutes). Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each egg.

Slowly add the quick bread mix in batches, until the dough just comes together (scrape down the sides of the bowl as necessary). If using mix-ins, gently stir them in after the dough is fully mixed.

Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls (although really, the cookie scoop will make your life easier) on the prepared cookie sheets, leaving a couple of inches in between each cookie.  Bake for approximately 10-12 minutes (begin checking them around 8 minutes). Remove from oven and let cool on cookie sheets for 10 minutes, then move them to wire racks to cool completely... or move them to your mouth. 

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I'd originally planned to experiment with 2 different types of quick bread mix. Sadly, the bag of pumpkin mix met an untimely end on the kitchen floor, so that experiment will have to wait until I return to Trader Joe's. I have a good feeling about further experimentation, though!

*Yes, I know sugar is typically considered a wet ingredient in baking, but since it is already incorporated in the quick bread mix, I needed to consider it as a dry ingredient for this experiment. Back to where I left off...

Breakfast (or Dessert) Couscous

This morning, I was ravenous, and I wanted to make a hearty stick-to-your-ribs kind of breakfast. Unfortunately, the hubby woke up after a night of stomach troubles (poor guy) and asked that if I were to make breakfast, to please make something innocuous. Now, for us, innocuous means no eggs, no dairy, no grease... so basically, 90% of my breakfast ideas were not an option, especially since I had no desire to go out food shopping in order to get ingredients.

Then, I started thinking... what about couscous? A quick google search revealed that sweet couscous was not a novel idea - there were tons of recipes already out there. But alas, most of them involved dried fruit, which I didn't have on hand. After a quick survey of the pantry though, I had formulated a plan that fell somewhere in between Middle Eastern and Indian inspirations.


Breakfast (or Dessert) Couscous
Serves 3-4 for breakfast, more for dessert

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cup milk (I used almond milk, soy or coconut would probably be good here too)
• heaping 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• heaping 1/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 1 1/2 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• pinch of salt
• 1 cup instant whole-wheat couscous
• 1/4 cup shelled pistachios
• 1/4 cup sweetened shredded coconut

Directions
Microwave instructions:
Combine all ingredients except couscous, pistachios, and coconut in a microwave-safe measuring cup, and stir to combine. Heat in microwave until boiling, about 3-4 minutes (keep an eye out for boil-overs, which I didn't watch for - oops).

While the liquid is heating, measure out the couscous in a heat-safe bowl. When the liquid mixture is heated, stir once more, pour over the couscous, and cover the bowl until the couscous has absorbed the liquid, about 10 minutes.

Once the couscous has absorbed the liquid, fluff with a fork and mix in the pistachios and coconut. Serve hot, mixing in a little extra milk if desired.

Stovetop instructions:
Combine all ingredients except couscous, pistachios, and coconut in a medium saucepan (seriously, use one size bigger than you think you'll need) and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Watch for boil-overs!

As soon as the milk mixture is boiling, kill the heat, and add the dry couscous directly to the pot. Stir, cover, and let sit for 10 minutes. Once the couscous has absorbed the liquid, fluff with a fork and mix in the pistachios and coconut. Serve hot, mixing in a little extra milk if desired.

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This was so satisfying. Even though couscous is not a grain (it's technically a pasta), the form factor and texture makes it comparable to steel cut oats or grits, so it makes perfect sense as a breakfast food. Plus, most couscous sold in the US is of the instant variety, which is basically foolproof as far as cooking goes.

Sorry for the inexact measurements. For this first attempt, I used the smaller amount of almond milk, and the larger amounts of brown sugar, cinnamon, and cardamom. Both the hubby and I agreed it might be just a touch too strongly flavored and too sweet like that, so I would recommend going between those seasoning measurements to taste. As for the liquid amount, I think a slight amount of extra liquid would add just a bit of pleasant creaminess to the whole shebang. Also on the list to try next time - 1/2 cup golden raisins, added to the dry couscous.

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Update (10/23/10): I made this again and adjusted some of the amounts. I upped the milk to 1 3/4 cups, reduced the cinnamon and cardamom to a heaping 1/4 tsp each, and reduced the brown sugar to 1 1/2 Tbsp. I think the flavor profile was a little more balanced. I also made it on the stove. If I'd had any extra milk, I would have also poured just a bit into each bowl to give an extra bit of creaminess. The recipe has been updated to reflect these changes.

Avocado "Pudding"

So, you have a recipe (say, Tuna Avocado Ceviche) that calls for 1/2 an avocado. No matter how well you wrap it up, even if you sprinkle it with citrus juice, that other half is just never going to be the same the next day. So what, pray tell, do you do with it?

Make dessert, of course!

*crickets*

No, I'm serious.

Avocado's a fruit, and the buttery taste and texture are just as at home with sugar as they are with savory citrusy applications. In all of 2 minutes, you can have a cool, refreshing pudding-like concoction that will be unlike anything you've ever had before, but you'll want to make it again and again. No pictures this time - lumpy green glop isn't particularly photogenic, even if it is delish!

Avocado "Pudding"
Serves 1

Ingredients

• 1/2 avocado
• 1 tsp sugar
• splash of vanilla extract
• splash of milk (non-dairy milks work well, I used almond milk)

Directions
Put avocado half in a bowl and begin mashing with a fork. Sprinkle sugar on the mashed avocado and mash some more - the sugar crystals help cut into the avocado flesh so it mashes easier. When the avocado is pretty well smooshed, splash the vanilla extract into the bowl and a slightly bigger splash of milk and mix well. You're looking for a pudding-y consistency, so if it's not quite there, keep adding splashes of milk and mixing until it's the consistency you'd like. If you're a perfectionist, I suppose you could do this in the food processor, but I don't mind the lumps. If you have more patience than I do, chill the pudding in the fridge until it's really cold, or just grab a spoon and CHOW DOWN!