(Almost Vegan) Hearty Trail Mix Cookies.

(Almost Vegan) Hearty Trail Mix Cookies and (Soy) Milk

Every year, my friend Alison hosts a Christmas gift exchange. This year, instead of the traditional "spend $20 on crap no one wants" kind of gift exchange, we did a re-gift exchange. (Confession time: I don't keep presents I don't want—I return them or sell them or give them away or whatever, but I certainly don't keep them around. I bought my present for the re-gifting. I'm too ruthless in my purging.)

Anyway, I ended up with this:

Lord only knows how old it was. Or where it came from. Or what the ingredients even were. But since I don't have food allergies and I like cookies, I was happy.

I was even happier that the instructions were so simple, and that I only needed to add butter and eggs.

Anyway, skip forward a few months to, well, now. I've been thinking about making some cookies for a while, and trying out some vegan baking, but I don't want to go all-out on something that might not work, you know? I get really anxious about spending money on a recipe that either doesn't work out or tastes bad*. So I thought this would be a good "recipe" to test out the vegan baking waters.

I went off to the Herb and Spice to pick up some Earth Balance butter replacer (which does not taste like butter, keck, but worked out well for baking), and my roommate had some powdered egg replacer that I borrowed some of.


I dumped the contents of the jar into a big bowl—or at least I tried to. Like I said, I don't know how long this had been sitting in the cupboard of the person who gave it to me, but when I turned the jar upside-down a couple of chocolate chips fell out… And that was it. Huh. OK. Shake shake shake. Huh. There seems to be a layer of coconut that has formed an hard layer that is preventing all the other ingredients from getting out. Poke poke poke with the handle of a wooden spoon. Oh, that was easy enough. Dump contents of jar into a bowl.


Except for the layer of brown sugar at the bottom. Brown sugar gets really hard, really quickly. This was no exception. I eyeballed the amount stuck at the bottom of the jar, and measured out 3/4 of a cup from the cupboard into the bowl.


Then I added a stick of Earth Balance, a teaspoon of egg replacer and two tablespoons of water (for the egg replacer) and went at it on low speed with the hand mixer. It was… crumbly. So I added another 1/4 cup of water (a little bit at a time) and then it came together perfectly.


I would like to point out that in the time I was making these cookies, Andrew was asleep mere feet away on the Plus Two Couch of Napping. And he didn't budge, not even with the hand blender going.


I put the cookies on baking sheets in heaping teaspoonfuls, then baked them for 11 minutes in a 325 degree oven. 


Andrew couldn't stop eating them. I would like to say, for the record, that they are delicious with tea.


And they are only almost vegan, because of the chocolate chips and all. Not to mention that I have no idea what was actually in this mix.

*I once spent a lot of money on a shrimp dish recipe for Michael and I, and even the smell of it cooking made me nauseous. Although, to Michael's credit, he loved it and none went to waste.