Cookies and brownies and cookies and beautiful coal tar poison

We have had a sweet-filled kitchen the last few days.

These are the oatmeal raisin cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, which I am just going to call VCIYCJ because I am lazy. And also I think I might make all of these recipes and that is a lot of typing that stupid name. These used flax seeds for an egg replacer, and my ground flax seeds are quite old, so maybe that made a difference. They came out too smooshy so next time I’ll bake them longer (the recipe says 10 minutes for soft and 12 minutes for crispy, I did 11 minutes and got almost unbaked, and my oven is the right temperature). I put in golden raisins instead of regular because they were on sale but they are not aesthetically pleasing to me. And some chocolate chips too since I don’t even like oatmeal raisin cookies.

These are the brownies from The Joy of Vegan Baking that sweetie made on Sunday. I was very skeptical since they are missing the key ingredient in any baked good (fat), but they are quite good. They are very chocolatey and fluffily cake-like. They have chocolate chips which helps a little bit with the lack of other fat. They have apple sauce, which I made myself, not because I am Martha-like crazy but because I had 11 sad looking apples (recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking as well). I would still like to try some other fat-filled brownie recipes.

I just finished making these damn cookies (and it is after midnight). Thumbs up to yummy even better then Oreos, thumbs down to the most time-intensive cookies I have ever made. I didn’t have a 1.5 inch cookie cutter so I used a skinny IKEA vase, it worked ok but some of the edges are sloppy. And rolling out all that dough a million times to 1/8 inch got very old very quick so some are too thick. Bryan thinks they are worth it, which of course he does since he wasn’t here when I was making them. Although he did take a fancy picture so I guess I’ll let him enjoy them. They were a request from my office mate whose birthday it is tomorrow. And it’s the big 3-0 or I would have abandoned these at the cut out stage.

And I gave in to the siren call of my copious amounts of poisonous food coloring. I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from VCTotW with oil. The red is kind of pale because that’s the one color I didn’t have any fancy super-poison gel color for, since I used that all making my baby her first birthday cake, the evil mother that I am. And I should have figured out the amounts a little better so the circles would turn out more the same size. I have to haul the cake and frosting on my bike tomorrow and frost and decorate the cake at work. I wonder what the inside looks like! Can you handle the suspense?

Oh and I did day 1 of couch to 5k today, even though it was dark AND raining. I am very proud of myself.