Hi!

It has been a while  😦 sorry ! The last month and a bit life has been crazy but also exciting. I have left Dublin and I am briefly in County Cork with my big sis before I move to Sweden! I am going back to college to do a Masters in Photography… might mean improved pictures for the blog! How you guys stuck with me in the early posts I do not know! Everything looked so orange!!!!

I did make a final bake in our Dublin flat – “On the Move Coconut Macaroons” it was my second time making them, but they were a tad crumbly.. . so when I make them again and have the recipe perfected for nostalgia’s sake I will post a few pics from Dublin too.

I am still trying to pack and I leave County Cork tomorrow! But there is always time for a homemade classic chocolate chip cookies. I have no precariously balance baked goods on a windowsill… this time I put them in the garden and managed to keep them out of reach of my sister’s cute cat 🙂

So Celebrating my move north Vegan Cashew Chocolate Chip Cookies!

• Two dessertspoons of natural smooth cashew nut butter
• One rounded dessertspoon of organic raw coconut oil
• Half a teaspoon of vanilla extract
• A third of a cup of room temperature almond milk – don’t add it all yet
• A quarter cup of coconut blossom sugar
• A quarter cup of rapadura/ turbindo/ sucucant sugar *
• One cup of unbleached white flour or half & half with fine wholemeal **
• A quarter teaspoon of himalayan pink salt or fine sea salt
• Half a teaspoon of low aluminium baking powder
• Half a teaspoon of vanilla powder/ more extract/ half a pod***
• Approx. 30g or just over 1 ounce of chopped medium dark chopped chocolate. Mine was an organic 70% cocoa.

O I do love my footnotes !

* I could not get rapadura in my local health shop so I used organic raw cane sugar this time.

** I brought a bag of organic unbleached flour with me but could not get a fine wholemeal as normally I would do half and half. If you would like to do Gluten free I recommend half ground almonds and half a white gluten free flour mix.

*** you can NEVER have too much vanilla 🙂 Though they are also lovely with some orange zest!

Method

Preheat your oven to 170C/ 325F could go up a few degrees if not fan assisted. Make sure your oven shelf is in the middle, the top shelf = burnt biscuits. Have your lined baking tray at the ready.

Grab a medium to large bowl. Put in your cashew nut butter, raw coconut oil and vanilla extract and mash together. Mash mash mash until a smooth mix, a la picture.

I forgot to take my almond milk out of the fridge so I added a drop of hot water to it and added in half. Important not to add cold non-dairy milk as it will make the coconut oil go solid again and you will get knobs of it in your mix :-{ ugh.

In another bowl bung in all your dry stuff. Sieve the baking powder if lumpy. Mix until all one colour. I used my sister’s lovely wooden bowl 🙂

Chop your chocolate, fine-ish and no need to be precise in the size of the bits- the unevenness gives them character and also varies the chocolate experience!

Now, add your dry ingredients to your wet ingredients. You can use your spoon at first, but it will remain bitty and flakey unless you get your hands in there. I find it is better if your hands aren’t too warm so run them under the cold tap for a sec before you start. Press and fold the dough together once or twice and then sprinkle in your chocolate. If the dough is a bit dry add a little more of the left over almond milk and mix and press the dough again. You just want there to be no flour-y bits and for the chocolate to be pretty evenly distributed. It makes for quite a wet batter.

By the rounded teaspoon place them on your baking tray. Give them a little squish down so they aren’t too high as with the baking powder they will rise a bit anyway.

This made fourteen cookies. My sister’s oven is hotter at the back, so I had to turn them after ten minutes. The oven is not a crazy uber volcano hot oven like my one in Dublin was and I opened it a million times so they took FIFTEEN minutes. I am going to say ten to fifteen minutes because of my impatience and the unfamiiar oven-ness. When they are browning at the edges they are done. Leave them sit on the tray for a five mins before attempting to eat, they need time to firm up.

Look how safe those biscuits are, all on the ground not three stories up and half off a sloping windowsill. When I find somewhere to live in Sweden (O dear lord God I have nowhere to live!!) I will post as soon as possible, maybe with baked goods on a Swedish windowsill! 🙂

Xs Aissa