Peanut Butter Cookies

I haven't always liked peanut butter. I wasn't a huge fan of the taste or how it would stick in your throat afterward. All of that has changed. I eat it by the spoonful from the jar, on toast, with bananas, anything with peanut butter is amazing. My bananas were not ripe enough for banana bread but I still wanted to bake something so I opened the pantry and there it stood, the peanut butter. Within an instant it hit me...peanut butter cookies! 

I grabbed my Martha Stewart cookies book and flipped to her peanut butter cookies. I really like her cookie book and a lot of my cookies were born from altering her recipes. When I change recipes to become vegan and gluten free I almost always start by making it vegan. For me making something vegan is far more challenging than making it gluten-free. Now this hasn't always been the case. In the beginning when gluten-free flours were unknown to me I was so confused as to what flours to use and that was the hardest part. But now that I have become familiar and more comfortable with gluten-free flours it's almost second hand. I know each flours properties, how they work, and generally where they work best. Of course I still have disasters and everything is still trail and error, but for the most part I think I have a good handle on things. So back to making a recipe vegan. Its important to think here what each ingredient is doing in the original recipe in order to find a product that will do similar things. I also use my gut instinct and my previous recipes for guidance. Here is kind of a step by step way I go about it.

    - If a recipe calls for butter I usually go for either Earth Balance or an oil. 

    - If the recipe calls for any milk, I generally reach for the rice milk. Its a personal preference.

    - For eggs I always go to my chart of egg substitutes and reread how each egg replacer works and what it works best in. For example flax seeds are perfect for chewy things and applesauce provides great moisture.

    - White processed sugar is easy to substitute with a raw or unrefined sugar. I do like to use agave nectar in recipes but I feel it works best in cakes, quick breads, or muffins. Things that are soft. Agave has the tendency to make things soft and "cakey" so I generally do not use it in cookies. I like my cookies crunchy or chewy.

Once a recipe is vegan I pick the flours I want to use, add some xanthan gum, and start baking. Even though this sounds simple, it's given me way to many headaches and mental breakdowns.

My peanut butter cookies turned out great. I dipped half of them in chocolate, even better! I am going to remake these again tomorrow with a few slight adjustments and take them to work where they will be taste tested. 

 

I'm obsessed with my new cake stand I got from Crate & Barrel. It was half off so I had to buy it. Speaking of buying things, ever since I saw the movie Country Strong I have wanted cowboy boots. I have been searching all over for some but none that I really like...until today. While these are not exactly cowboy boots, I think they have a nice twang. What makes them more perfect, they are vegan! I got them at ModCloth, my favorite online store!