Bakeroise

Yo. I’m glad to say that I have some new content for you today. This post was originally published on January 11 but because it’s a practically a brand new post, it’s republished at a later date.

As I mentioned on Instagram or Facebook, I’ve decided to slow down and focus more on increasing the quality of my posts.

My original vegan compost cookies recipe (adapted from Christina Tosi’s original recipe) post was not super great. I think I was riding high from having finally published a first post so I immediately dove into it without any real planning. It was the kind of recipe I’d be annoyed with while cooking due to mistakes in it that I would’ve called “disrespectful of my time” because of the errors in the actual recipe, not because of the narrative that precedes it. By the way, I happen to like reading a lot of the personal narratives food bloggers have.

Oh but I didn’t realize I was human. I thought I was a robot!

Ha.

I thought my original vegan compost cookies were pretty decent and my husband actually liked those more than my current ones. Here are some photos of cookies from the older recipe:

I, on the other hand, wasn’t 100% satisfied with it. If I’m publishing recipes on my own blog, I think it’s only fair that they hold up to my own standards. Cookies, especially ones that are similar to chocolate chip, are indeed tricky because we all have different preferences. Some like them chewy. Others like them crispy. I like a little of both. And yes, taste is obviously subjective.

When I first made the compost cookies a couple of weeks ago, I made it using pantry ingredients that I already had, specifically a huge bag of thin pretzels and even a massive bag of kettle cooked potato chips that we never got around to opening. I got mostly good feedback on the cookies themselves but I knew deep down that I could do better.

And I did.

I would’ve conducted an actual science experiment out of this but I’m a busy mom and I just wanted to recklessly try to fix this recipe in one go. I do hope to conduct some experiments with my kid.

I want to clarify some things about myself and my intention to live a relatively vegan lifestyle. Most of my family and friends are not vegan so I want to talk about some things based on questions they have asked me throughout the years and even as recently as today.

While I do have a vegan diet, it’s not all cruelty-free. Nor is my lifestyle. There is no way for anyone to exist on this planet while living a 100% cruelty-free life. That’s a fact. During this pandemic, I haven’t been leaving the house to do anything so I don’t drive or take the bus. I don’t ride my bike or even walk. We’re just at home. But then we order our groceries and have someone else use their car so that we can put food on the table. Every option we have will lead to someone or something else being destroyed.

But aside from all that, at least I’m trying.

I don’t eat anything that is a byproduct of an animal. I also try not to eat “accidentally vegan” products if the listed sugar isn’t organic. I used to eat Oreos even as a vegan but only because it was a total oversight. While I already had that vegan common sense of knowing white sugar was filtered through bone char, I didn’t even stop to look at the ingredients for Oreos. It was just never on my radar. And yes I get that it’s better to consume those products as opposed to products that have other animal-derived ingredients. That’s obvious. I just mentally don’t feel comfortable with consuming said products myself.

When referring to vegan products, “vegan” does not automatically mean “cruelty-free” and they are not interchangeable terms. There are companies who make this mistake all the time when marketing their products. I can’t get into all of that right now.

The layers of complexity are never ending to this and removing each layer for everyone to actually understand the nuance of This Dilemma is going to take more than a blog post.

In addition, something is only 100% cruelty-free to me only if it doesn’t use animal or human slave labor. While people can be annoying and destructive to the earth, human beings are still living and breathing creatures and, well, I care about them too. My personal veganism doesn’t center only on the welfare of animals – although animal welfare is indeed a big motivation for it. I actually care about the greater good – so everyone and everything.

In the world we live in, however, the best we can do is try. Don’t even get me started on how messed up it is to rely on each individual consumer to change their ways and not even try to hold big corporations accountable for their own harmful practices that negatively affect the animals, humans and the earth. That’s just not realistic or fair.

If you have any questions about anything, you can leave a comment or email me. Just try to be civil. There are a lot of rude people out there and posts like these are a magnet for those kind of people. But before anyone leaves a rude comment, just remember that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Over the past several days, I’ve been reading quite a bit about both conventional and vegan baking. I made the following changes below based on what I learned.

The Vegan Butter

In Recipe 1.0, I used room temperature vegan spreadable Earth Balance that wasn’t even unsalted. Yikes. To be fair, it’s just what this overwhelmed mama had in the fridge! And no, it doesn’t feel good to use palm oil even if only sometimes. While it’s vegan, it’s not cruelty-free.

The salted Earth Balance made the cookie thicker than I wanted. I don’t like thick, almost cake-like cookies.

In Recipe 2.0, I used a whole pack of Miyoko’s unsalted vegan butter. My hot mess self didn’t even prepare. I just happened to have this block from a recent grocery haul. I didn’t even know it was meant for baking! So it was like I struck gold when I went through my fridge. Instead of bringing it to room temperature though, I let it slowly melt halfway in my butter warmer and then used my spoon to gently cut up rest into smaller little pieces resulting in the whole thing resembling cottage cheese in a tiny pot.

This caused the cookie to spread out nicely like I wanted. It was ¼” thick across the cookie whereas the other recipe was almost an inch thick in the center.

The Chocolate

In Recipe 1.0, I used half a cup of chocolate chips. The amount of chocolate chips ended up overpowering the saltiness that was supposed to come from the potato chips and pretzels which resulted in it tasting more like chocolate chip cookies to me than it did compost cookies.

In Recipe 2.0, I unexpectedly ran out of vegan chocolate chips so I chopped up a bar of organic 85% dark chocolate I luckily had in my dusty chocolate bar stash. It’s nothing fancy but it’s the chocolate I eat daily “for health reasons”. I always forget to eat it though so I’ve set a timer to remind myself to eat a specific amount of it before bed. It’s not fancy but it works.

The Baking Sheets

In Recipe 1.0, I baked the cookies on a dark, parchment lined, nonstick baking sheet. I think it was one of the bigger reasons as to why my cookies were harder than I’d intended.

In recipe 2.0, I baked the cookies on a light, parchment lined, aluminum baking sheet instead. These baking pans were less harsh in terms of the heat…which is perfect for my ridiculously intense induction range.

Overall, my second recipe is new and improved. I think these new cookies are pretty awesome. One friend and neighbor with very similar taste to my own, who wasn’t in love with the first batch of cookies, thought that these were fantastic. And I am inclined to agree.

With that, here is my new and improved recipe for Vegan Compost Cookies.

Oh and by the way, I’m not a robot. So if I missed anything in this post or recipe despite trying my best to clean it up, please don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m not making errors on purpose. I only want to share good stuff with y’all.

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