Adventures in Vegan Baking

Recently I stumbled upon the FatFree Vegan Kitchen blog. Although I'm not vegan, I do enjoy vegan food and have been intrigued by vegan baking. One of my favorite local coffee shops sells some amazing cookies from Pattycake Vegan Bakery. Inspired by that, I decided to try baking a few things of my own. 

For Christmas I first tried FatFree Vegan Kitchen's Vegan Eggnog Cheesecake. It looked amazing on the blog (check it out!), and since I've been cooking tofu a lot more lately, I thought it would be fun to bake with it. Also, I really wanted to see my family's reaction to tofu (shh, they didn't know). 

I started with the Fat-Free Oatmeal Cookie Crust, but things didn't go so well with it. Although it tasted amazing, and even my little brother wanted me to make it into cookies, it was by no means a crust. I thought it was strange that there was baking soda in the recipe, but since I had never tried it before, I still followed it. Unfortunately, I think this is 

what caused my crust to bubble up and rise rather than sticking to the bottom of the pan as a crust should. Oh well! I'll have to try again or figure out how to make cookies from it because it's so yummy.

The cheesecake part itself was also slightly off. I liked it because it wasn't very sweet and was kind of boozey :-) but I'd definitely tweak the amount of sugar and alcohol for people other than myself. Other than that, the texture was really great, and my dad even thought it was ok (shh, he still doesn't know it's tofu). 

My next challenge were these tasty Lower-Fat Peanut Butter Banana Cookies. These are really simple and quick. The outsides are a little crispy, while the insides are soft and cakey. I usually prefer flat frisbee-like cookies, and I somehow overlooked the part of the recipe about flattening these with a fork, so I'll have to fix that next time. I think I'll be keeping this recipe around. Maybe nuts next time instead of chocolate chips...