Bread and Art , Vegan Gluten Free Cookies - Jan 16th

 What makes someone take the time to create a space to play?

Sometimes it's inspiration by looking at what other's have done, and seeing the possibilities. I was digging around on the internet and found some focaccia art. It looked interesting and I remember liking focaccia but am trying to eat healthier. I found a whole wheat recipe and decided why not give it a try?

So on Sunday I made the dough and let it rise, then slathered it in oil, as one does. The classic dimpled look comes from poking your fingers in the dough and then letting it rise again. 

Then you get to play!

What you're looking at here is from left to right, top to bottom: 
cherry tomato sun,  red onion clouds and mountains, yellow bell pepper and black olive black eyed susans, parsley and dill trees, mini pepper flowers and black olive and black sesame seed rocks and gravel. 

I wanted something blue for water ,but there are no naturally blue vegetables. 

I may have to go sweet instead of savory for a beach scene. Still this wasnt a bad first attempt: 

Once baked, it took on more of a flowers in the sand look that I was happy with. 

I covered it in (nearly invisible) garlic powder, sea salt, and oregano. 

It tastes herby but not as good as the first focaccia recipe I made in school. Probably the bread being white and the herbs much more prevalent. 

I cut it up into bar shapes and have been eating it with eggs in the morning or soup/ salad at lunch, even sides for dinner. It kinda goes with everything. 

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The other form of exploration is to see if I can create a reperatoire of Vegan Gluten Free treats that I would eat - can be difficult, I'm very picky. 

First, let me tell you: there are SO Many Flours out there that you can use instead of All Purpose white flour made of wheat. So many. 

And often the recipe calls for 4 or 5 of them. They aren't going to be $1.69 per 5 lb bag either. 
But if you're going to commit to learning a craft, such as VGF baking, you need to invest. I added up all the ingredients to try out this cookie I made - were talking about $22 cost. This compares to a normal cookie averaging $3 for a batch, you can see why bakers have to charge so much. 

Also its much more of a challenge than regular wheat flour/egg/butter baking, since the bakes can be dry, too crumbly, not brown as well, etc. There are a lot of factors. 

All that being said, I dont back away from challenges, so I grabbed the first on the pile and tried out Vegan Gluten Free White Chocolate Cranberry Macadamia nut cookies. It's a mouthful to say, I know. But you know what they were good! I was shocked, to be honest. 

Now keep in mind, the recipe calls for no white chocolate but in the notes says you can add them. There is no vegan white chocolate chips at Kroger, however, so I had to be sure it was a good recipe before investing in the chips that are vegan, in case the rest of the recipe was gross. 

So its vegan except for the white chocolate chips: 

The scoop I used was the smallest I had. What this does is make it so you get a whole cookie for as little cost as possible. Plus, again if it was gross i didnt want a big cookie (hee hee)

This is the final cookie. it looks good, right? Nice and toasted, soft, fairly small. A cranberry for bite and white chocolate for sweet. 

You can see it looks good, but let me tell you , it does taste good. 

The difference is, it is a grainy sugar texture because we use cane sugar. We use this because white sugar contains bone char to make it white like we are used to. So that makes it not vegan, make sense?

i'm not here to sway you however, and if you asked me for a white chocolate cran mac cookie that was made with traditional ingredients, I would do that. But I am saying I would like you to have the option in case you chose that lifestyle and wanted something sweet. 

Hopefully you had a good weekend. I know I learned a lot, and got some reading in, which was good too. 

Take care and see you next week!

Vicky