Holiday Baking Adventures

I baked a lot today. I like to give tins of holiday goodies at Christmastime, so I thought I'd better get started.

First, I made the chocolate chip cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance. I think the only substitution I made was to use white whole wheat flour instead of regular white flour. They turned out good but not as good as my own chocolate chip cookie recipe. (Not to toot my own horn, but it's true. Toot.) To be fair, the flour change could have had a negative impact... who knows. Anyways, they are good, just not fantastic.

I also made Mocha Almond Biscotti from The Glad Cow Cookbook.* They are fantastic! This was my first attempt at making biscotti and I'm really happy with how yummy they are. Once again, I used white whole wheat flour and it worked well with this recipe. I thought they would have looked prettier if they were dipped in chocolate instead of just smeared with it, but my melted chocolate chips were kind of too thick for dipping... I was afraid to add soymilk because I thought thinning it might make it not harden up like it should - anyone have any tips?

* You should buy this cookbook; it's tiny but packed with awesome recipes.

Finally, I made a Cinnamon Swirl Loaf from the Love Like a Vegan blog. I think for this one I used half unbleached flour and half white whole wheat. I think I must not have cooked it long enough because it came out doughy in the middle, but I can tell from the edge pieces that this is an awesome recipe and one that I will definitely try again - next time though I will either cook it longer or use mini loaf pans or perhaps a small cake pan.

So... that was my day today. Oh, and Carlos and I went for a walk in the beautiful winter sunshine. I was hoping to get some workshop time in this afternoon while Carlos napped but he decided not to sleep today. Hopefully I can get him down for bed early tonight and go get some work done after that... I have some patient customers who are waiting for rings.