Lemon Icebox Cookies
Next on our cookie agenda are these lovely lemon ice box cookies. These tiny little cookies are the perfect bite-sized snack or after dinner treat. They would be great gathered in a pretty bag and given as a gift. They’re sweet and crunchy with just the right amount of lemon.
You start with the lemon zest. There is something that always excites me about putting lemon zest in a recipe. Perhaps it’s because I know it’s going to be delicious. I can’t wait till we have a home where I can have a lemon tree. I hate buying lemons, as I never seem to use them quickly enough, so I often don’t buy them and then I don’t have them when I need them…but I digress.
For this recipe we’re going to use a food processor. Make sure you have a big enough bowl (a mini food processor won’t do) or you’re better off just working by hand with a dough mixer. It is rather pleasing to watch your flour and Earth Balance mixture turn to dough, just like that, but don’t get carried away and over mix. Remember to pulse!
This makes a fairly large batch, probably double what I was expecting, but the tiny cookies will most likely “magically” disappear once made. Plus you can keep the dough frozen for a few weeks and bake a few whenever you like.
Now I have a little confession with this recipe. As I mentioned before, one of the most difficult parts of taking a standard cookie recipe and making it vegan is replacing the eggs. Eggs play many different rolls in baked goods and different substitutes serve different purposes. Since this recipe used only egg yolks, I wanted to add a little bit of moisture back into the cookies. The obvious answer here is water. So I plopped in 3 tablespoons of water, before I had mixed the dough, and right before I remembered that there were only egg yolks, not full eggs (think less volume). Immediately the dough was overly wet and impossible to handle. I had to add back about a 1/4 cup of flour to bring it to a better consistency.
That being said, you might be fine just leaving out the water all together and only using 2 cups of flour, but I’ll give you the recipe as I made it since I’m sure it still comes out tasting fantastic.
Lemon Icebox Cookies
from Martha Stewart, originally found here
- 2 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp lemon zest (about 4 small lemons)
- 1 tsp fresh lemon juice
- 1 cup Earth Balance
- 3 Tbsp water
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar for rolling
Put the flour, sugar, salt and lemon zest in your food processor and pulse until combined. The lemon zest will basically disappear.
Add the Earth Balance into the bowl and pulse until it combined into a granulated mixture. Add water and lemon juice until a dough is formed.
Separate the dough into 3 sections and shape into 1 – 2 inch rolls. Wrap in plastic and freeze for at least two hours.
Preheat the oven to 300º and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. On another piece of parchment, sprinkle the remaining sugar and roll your logs to coat the outside. Slice into 1/4 inch rounds and lay about an inch apart on your baking sheets. Cook for 16 to 18 minutes, rotating the sheets half way through. Let cookies cool on a wire rack and enjoy.
Espresso-Bean Shortbread
Dear readers, in the next few weeks, Cute and Delicious will be filled with cookies. You don’t mind, right? I was searching for inspiration for some holiday cookies and kept coming back to a bunch of Martha Stewart recipes. I felt it was most necessary that these be veganized, so I’ll be doing just that, and sharing my experience and recipes with all of you.
I started with a very simple and appealing recipe for Espresso-Bean Shortbreads. This appeared to be not only one of the most enticing flavors, but also the easiest to make a vegan version. The only non-vegan ingredient is butter, which I personally don’t even think about for a second, as Earth Balance is such a superb replacement. It’s really a no-brainer. With cookies, it starts getting tricky with replacing eggs.
Now there are a few things you need to know about Martha Stewart cookies.
- They use a lot of butter. This recipe uses 1 1/2 cups. Mostly they average about one cup. Consider yourself warned. Like I said, Earth Balance works great as a substitute.
- They involve a bit of advanced preparation. There is nearly always a fair amount of chilling time, so make sure you read through each recipe in advance. Don’t think you’ll just be popping these out of the oven in 1/2 an hour.
The little espresso guys are easy to make and easier to eat. They’re dense, slightly crunchy and not too sweet. Moreover, they definitely pack a caffeine kick. Not cookies you want to eat right before bed time, trust me. I didn’t have a single complaint with the recipe, except that it took quite awhile with multiple chilling and freezing periods. I would recommend making them sort of flat, and not to make sure they are cooked all the way through.
So here are the humble but delicious beginnings of my cookie marathon. I personally think cookies make a great gift, and the ones here are sure to impress, but also travel well. Even though I’ve just begun, I can already see how easy it will be to get lost in a black hole of holiday cookies…but off we go anyway.
Espresso-Bean Shortbread
from Martha Stewart, originally found here
- 1 1/2 cup Earth Balance
- 3/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp powdered sugar
- 1 Tbsp instant espresso powder
- 2 Tbsp warm water
- 2 Tbsp finely ground espresso beans
- 3 cups plus 2 Tbsp all purpose flour
- 3/4 tsp salt
Cream together Earth Balance and sugar in a stand mixer. Using the paddle attachment, beat until slightly fluffy.
Combine the espresso powder and warm water in a small bowl and stir until combined. Beat the espresso mixture and beans into the EB and sugar.
Whisk together flour and salt and gradually add to butter mixture, beating until combined. Wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Using a tablespoon or cookie scoop, and your hands, create small ovals bean shaped cookies. Place each cookie on the baking sheet 1 – 2 inches apart. To create the split in the coffee bean press a chopstick over the top of each cookie. Place each tray in the freezer to firm for 10 – 20 minutes
Bake for 16 to 18 minutes rotating sheets half way through. The bottoms should be browned, with the tops, just barely browning when you remove them. Let cool completely on a wire rack before eating.
Weekend plans
Oh goodness it’s almost the weekend and I’m awfully excited. This weekend, we don’t have a lot of plans which means I’m extra happy. It doesn’t mean we’ll be hanging out and relaxing though. This weekend will be full of wedding planning mostly. We’re going to design our invitations for one which I’ve been dying to do. I have an idea in mind and we’ve got a few key elements to put them together.
It’s hard not to tell you all about them right now, but once they’ve gone out I’ll have tons of photos I promise (and there might be some clues in this post). They’re going to have a Victorian theme (mixed somewhat with handmade, if that’s possible). I have to say, it’s hard to balance the dark creepiness of the Victorian era that Shawn and I love with the sweet romantic feeling of a wedding. While we both love skulls and medical instruments and such, they’re not something you’d exactly want to see on a wedding invite. I think we’re going to do a good job of making it all work though. I can’t wait to get started. Right now I’m super inspired by this video of invitations being made.
We still have about a million other plans to work on for the wedding, so hopefully we’ll be able to make a dent this weekend. We have about 2 1/2 months left! We still haven’t picked a caterer yet. We found a cool hotel for our out of town guests to stay at only to have them tell us a week later that they were totally booked. I can’t even tell you how many times family members have asked me why we don’t have a registry yet. (We do now, by the way, as of last night.)
We still have official engagement photos to take, even though we’ve been engaged now for awhile, I’m not passing up this opportunity to take some awesome photos of me and Shawn. We have decorations to think of and wardrobes to finalize. Not to mention a super secret project I’m working on for our guests that is taking me a ridiculous amount of time. Not that I mind a bit. I love it, in fact.
Besides that I’ll be cooking up some holiday treats and doing some decorating…maybe even getting a tree. I think our first batch of holiday cookies will be made this weekend plus whatever else I can come up with. I am hopefully going to start testing some holiday recipes. What are your favorite holiday foods?
Also, in case you hadn’t heard, Earth Balance is holding a recipe contest where 8 lucky winners will get a $400 gift certificate to Whole Foods and a years supply of Earth Balance. How cool is that? From a girl who uses more Earth Balance than a normal person should, I totally want to win this. I’ll have to think of something really awesome to make.
Holiday decorations
While it seems most people got the jump on their holiday decorations right after Thanksgiving, I’m a little bit behind. For one, the minimal decorations I do have are in our dreaded storage. Hopefully I’ll be able to dig them out this weekend.
To get things started I made these paper garlands to hang in our dining room / kitchen area (in a small apartment it’s all the same thing really).
I wanted to create a bunch of white garlands to give a snowy feeling. I used lined notebook paper, because I like it and thought maybe it would give it a tiny hint of blue, that snow has. I then just strung them up on a strand of mono-filament.
I think it goes really well with the black and white theme of our dining area. It feels festive and wintery. Even a little holiday elf came to check out the California snow. Have I mentioned that our apartment is teaming with winter creatures, like that little guy? I’m not sure where they came from but they’ve been multiplying. Luckily they’re cute so I don’t mind that they seem to be taking over.
I must confess there were a few more strands of garland just last night but the cats already had their way with them. They like to sit on top of our china cabinet and it was the perfect height for them to swat at the nearby garlands. I suppose the the Fargo
poster will just have to be part of the design…it is snowy, right?
vegan hot wings
Hello my dears. Happy December! With all the holiday advertising I feel like December has been here for weeks. Needless to say, while it’s chilly in Los Angeles, our city doesn’t quite have that winter wonderland feel. I guess I need to get with the program and put up some holiday decorations.
So let’s begin this lovely month with hot wings, shall we? Let’s also pretend I didn’t have these for dinner because they aren’t exactly dinner fare. You know, I was never even interested in hot wings, but ever since we went to Portland and I had some at the Mash Tun, I’ve been secretly dreaming about tempeh hot wings. I was going to make some over the holiday weekend but we were too stuffed to eat them.
I used this great recipe from Vegan Dad for the breading and sauce (although I used some bread crumbs as well as the corn flakes since I didn’t have enough). Instead of making seitan, I just coated some pieces of tempeh and tofu. The whole process of double coating the pieces with the “buttermilk” mixture is genius. So many times I have breaded something only to have it get cakey or fall off all together. Of course, with the tofu pieces you have to make sure they’re pressed and there isn’t extra liquid, or the breading still won’t stick.
I whipped up some dill dip to go along with them, with just some tofutti sour cream and a seasoning packet. I think next time I’d rather go with a homemade tofu ranch dip, something a little less flavorful even, just to cut the heat of the sauce, but not overpower the spiciness. Needless to say, these guys were awesome; spicy and flavorful. They definitely fall under the category of “just because it’s vegan doesn’t mean it’s healthy” but pay no attention to that. (On the other hand, you can tell the non-vegan naysayers the tempeh is a great source of protein.) They make a great snack or appetizer and would be perfect for a party.
Ok, now I think I’ll get to my decorating. Where are those darn Christmas lights?
