This is a first. The recipe I’m about to show you is something I came up with, inspired by a dozen other recipes and bakers, drawing upon my successes in trying their recipes and what I’ve learned from reading their (far superior) blogs. I’m super excited to bring you this recipe, so let’s get to it!
Why, hello there…
A can of pumpkin puree sitting in my cupboard, looking for a purpose, led me to another wonderful recipe from Maria and Josh at Two Peas and Their Pod. I was inspired by their Healthy Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies to try out my theory on cocoa powder and the result was marvelous. These cookies even won over a friend of mine who normally wouldn’t go near pumpkin!
Our first recipe for the year starts us off with a kick thanks to Christina Marsigliese at Scientifically Sweet and her delightful recipe. The pictures on her website should be enough to win anyone over, and in my search for a chocolate chili cookie to try out, her photos were easily enough for me to call my search complete. My pictures don’t do them justice (apologies again for the night-time photography; the color’s going to be a bit off), so definitely check hers out for some proper enticement.
This recipe comes to you courtesy of Karlynn at The Kitchen Magpie, after I had an inexplicable and sudden desire for that inimitable combination of mint and chocolate. Mint chocolate chip ice cream wouldn’t suffice, I wanted cookies! I came across Karlynn’s recipe and found it to be a simple, quick, and delicious solution.
Last November I featured the recipe for Orange Spice Cookies from “The Allergy-Free Cook Bakes Cakes and Cookies“, by Laurie Sadowski, which still holds the reigning position in my recipe collection for my favorite vegan recipe. Recently I tried another of her recipes, intrigued by the concept of using tahini, a sesame paste, as the substitute for eggs and butter. Tahini on its own is remarkably strong stuff, but when baked with a significant quantity of maple syrup the end result is delightfully flavorful with a noticeable, but not unpleasant, kick from the tahini complemented well by the rich sweetness of the maple syrup. After faithfully following Laurie’s recipe for the first batch that I made, I decided to test out a theory of mine:
There is no recipe that cannot be improved by the addition of cocoa powder.
A few weeks ago when discussing baking with a colleague of mine, the phrase “chocolate chip caramel pecan cookies” was offered up. This was too tempting of an idea to pass on, so I searched around for a recipe that I liked the look of and settled on Sally’s recipe for Salted Caramel Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies. What I ended up baking was very similar to an older recipe I’ve posted up here for Salted Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookies, with only a couple of ingredients having different quantities and then the addition of pecans. Just like with those cookies these are delicious, and they have the advantage of the caramel ingredient being slightly easier to come by than the caramel chips. I’m also a fan of the addition of pecans, so I decided it was worth writing this up as a recipe in its own right!
This recipe is courtesy of the label on a jar of Kraft All Natural peanut butter. I was amused that the particular kind of peanut butter that the recipe called for (crunchy) was on the label for a jar of a different kind (smooth), but considering how these cookies turned out I’m confident enough that either variety would work fine. The original recipe, “Morning-on-the-Go Cookies“, looked to me to be the kind of recipe that could involve a little bit of everything, so I experimented with the extra ingredients folded in at the end to come up with this variation on the original.
A few weeks ago I was experimenting with making hot chocolate from scratch using a base of cream and chopped chocolate and then mixing in a variety of other ingredients to see what happened. The short version is: “wonderful things happened”, and a longer version is on it’s way here once I’ve settled on a trio of recipes that I like the most. One of those experiments involved unsweetened chocolate and molasses and after recovering from the resulting delirium I decided that I wanted to make a cookie sweetened with molasses. I settled on Shauna’s recipe at gluten-free-girl for Soft Molasses Cookies.
A quick warning for this recipe: you will need a kitchen scale. The major ingredients are all listed by weight in the original recipe and I held true to that. The explanation accompanying the original recipe is worth reading through and I agree that it gives you a more accurate and reliable result. My scale is also one of my favorite kitchen appliances, which would be one of several reasons this recipe appealed to me.
Enough words! Let’s see some of these amazing cookies!
I mentioned last time that I’d be back soon to baking something with chocolate, considering the string of chocolate-less recipes I’d been trying, and I promise that is still the plan. The first recipe for February does however involve a slight detour on that plan and another fruit-filled recipe. Many thanks to Ketty and Kristy over at Keepin’ it Kind for this recipe. I’ve had “jam-filled thumbprint cookies” on my to-bake list for a while and this recipe served nicely to check that item off.
The first recipe for 2014 comes to you courtesy of Leslie Hammond and Betsy Laakso’s book, “Gluten-Free Desserts“. I have a couple other recipes earmarked in their book on account of the great pictures and the convenience of the recipes being explicitly gluten-free to begin with. I chose this one on the appealing thought of making something heavily involving apples. That makes for three fruit-centric recipes in a row after December’s Blueberry Honey Oatmeal Squares and November’s Orange Spice Cookies, all notably lacking chocolate. Don’t worry though, we’ll soon be back to something that makes appropriate use of unhealthy amounts of chocolate.
Regarding Recipes 