Breakfast cookies

Breakfast cookies.  Always a good thing.  No matter what.  I read a blog called Love, Life and Lollipops, where Eve makes amazing vegan food, and shares her recipes.  I am no vegan, but I decided to make these anyway because they seemed easy, and she said these could be used for dessert of breakfast.  I am one of those persons who leaves without breakfast because my stomach aches just thinking about food.  Most of the time I would be fine not eating until after 11, but with work I cannot eat whenever I want, so I try daily to eat, and often times I just throw the breakfast away when I get to work because it repulses me (maybe that's too strong a word, but its close). 

So anyways, I found this recipe yesterday, and this morning after work went to the store (for brown rice syrup and whole almonds) and made the cookies.  They turned out super amazing.

They are called Vegan Thumbprints.  I am just going to call them thumb prints.

It is a pretty simple recipe, minus the ground almonds. To ground them I put whole almonds in my magic bullet and ground them into very small pieces.  Make sure you don't blend for too long or it may turn into almond butter.  And I also took her suggestion to chop the oats a little to make them smaller. When mixing the ingredients Eve suggests adding water if it is too dry.  Well I thought mine was too dry so I added 1/4 cup of water, and when I was putting the dough out on the trays it was very gooie, so I think next time I won't be adding water.

The end of my dough and jam

And the brown rice syrup I found at sprouts for $3.50 so it was a good deal for me.

These cookies did turn out very good.   The batch at first seemed really big, but if you eat three at a time I can see how they will go fast.


I was so excited I kept checking them every few minutes.  Making my cooking time longer, but they still worked out very well. 

I'm linking here: Homework. Homemaker on a dime.  Making me do.  Sumo's sweet stuff. Lil Luna.  Sew much ado.  Someday crafts.  Ginger snaps. Show n' tell saturday.  thirty handmade days.  Sweets for a saturday.  A vision to remember.

Gluten Free Chocolate-Banana Bread Muffins

What a title huh?

I began by scouring the internet for gluten free banana bread recipes.  I found hundreds of people offering their gf (gluten free) recipes and I studied a dozen or so of these recipes.  I decided to use other peoples recipe as my guide, then I created my own recipe.  It was another cooking experiment.

When I did this I made 1/2 the batter plain banana bread muffins.  Then I put cocoa powder in the remainder of the batch.  I already calculated that into the recipe.  [If you want to make a whole batch of choco-banana use the 1/2 cup, if you want half a batch of plain and choco banana use 1/4 cup on the remaining batter]

The recipe:
2 cups Pamela's gluten free baking flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup cocoa powder (OPTIONAL)
5 bananas 
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons agave
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 brown sugar
1/2 cup butter

Combine wet ingredients with sugar and butter, then I added the bananas into this as well.  Then mix into the combined dry ingredients.
Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes.


Since this was an experiment I was thinking that next time I will add 1/4 cup of water because the batter seemed too dry, and its not something I thought of until after the fact anyway.  I was wondering if it really was too dry as I made it, but only when talking to other, more experienced cookers I learned that maybe more water or oil would make them even better.


Fun Picture:

Wet ingredients
looks pretty unhealthy, but turns out pretty good.








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Granola

The other day I decided I should make granola bars so that I would eat breakfast in the morning.
When I wake up I am so not in the mood to eat anything, which means I usually end up starving by the time I get off work.  This is a bad cycle which I am trying to stop.  I figure granola bars are super convenient and easy to eat, so it would be a perfect breakfast for me.  Yet, when I tried the store bought ones, I find them way to sweet to be eaten in the morning right after brushing my teeth.  So I endeavored to make my own. 

I looked through food blogs and found various recipes and combination's.  I decided to make my own recipe because I did not have all the ingredients needed to follow one of the ones already posted.  After looking and studying each recipe I came up with my own.  So this was definitely an experiment.


And this experiment yielded granola not granola bars.  It is not too sweet, with a great amount of crunch. And the baking cooked the oats enough so that they are not tough.

I used two different recipes to guide my experiment, which can be found here and here.

The Recipe:

2 cups oats

½ cup pecans

½ cup walnuts

1 cup cherry crasins

1 scoop protein powder

4 tbs butter

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup peanut butter

Some honey

Mix dry ingredients together.  Melt butters, sugar, and honey in saucepan.  Bring the ingredients in the saucepan to a boil, but don’t let the liquid burn.  Combine all ingredients and mix well. 

Bake at 300 degrees for 30-35 min.

I baked these in a deep dish which may have made them more prone to crumble.  Next time I make them I will put more liquid into the bars (like eggs, oil, more butter), so that hopefully they will hold them together better.  I will also use no such a deep pan, maybe if they are thinner they will hold more too. 

This calls for another experiment.  But only once I finish my current granola.


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