In a Tizzy

A short-term challenge for the month of December courtesy of Earth Balance! I am pretty excited to have some motivation to do some vegan baking this month. Some of the recipes are out of order from the website’s sequence, but I’ll make sure we cover everything.

****

Pumpkin Cookies

It was a beautiful thing to revisit my pumpkin days with this new recipe (that I will definitely keep handy for next October)!

While I have trouble believing that the icing I created could have possibly turned out the way it did on the photos that accompanied this recipe, I am very pleased with how soft and spongy these cookies turned out. A recipe that could be good year-round, and I bet you could do it with squash, as well!

****

Cranberry Orange Shortbread Cookies

This was a tough recipe! I struggle with the shortbread ones, especially with the lack of stand-up mixers and pastry blenders (just learned what those are) in my life. However, despite the struggles, I believe these cookies turned out quite well.

The texture was a chewy shortbread one, and while they do not look like the recipe’s in large part due to the whole wheat flour, I think that these are a fun one with their fruity chunks and flavours.

****

Peanut Butter Chocolate Buckeyes

Finally, we reach the end.

This was a long journey for a 12-day challenge, due to life things such as sickness, travel, workloads, and preparing for the holiday break. In the end, though, we made it! I even had a stand-up mixer for this final recipe, so the batter turned out very smooth while I mixed mounds of peanut butter and vegan butter and icing sugar together.

At first, I was concerned about people being willing to eat them because they turned out so sweet. And I think they were meant to. However, upon melting the chocolate in which to dip them, I discovered that the extreme bitterness would help neutralize the strength of the sweetness a bit – and it worked!

****

Big thanks to Earth Balance for producing delicious and healthy vegan goodness and for offering up these recipes for me to experiment with during this wild month. Many thanks to those of you who supported these 12 recipes by eating them whenever I placed a plate nearby and said “please help me, I’ve made too many cookies” every time.