VeganMoFo Day 8: Can’t stop the cookies

Firstly, congratulations to the winners of Friday’s Outback Spirit giveaway- Panda, Claire, Moonsword and Mari, check your emails if you haven’t already! To everyone else, don’t despair because there will be more chances to win some of my favourite Australian ingredients this month, I promise.

Today was the happiest day in the Canberra calendar- it was Family and Community Day, the inexplicable public holiday that we get and don’t have to share with the rest of the country (I think it’s really just to make up for us having to, you know, actually live in Canberra). But regardless, we had a really great day doing next to nothing. After a big weekend last week, it was great to have some time to relax- in a comfy dress, of course!

This dress is a super soft, kind of flannel-y fabric that makes me want to curl up and get comfortable with a cup of tea. But what’s tea without cookies? All the brown going on in this dress, combined with the old fashioned bow and ruffles, made me think of chocolate chip cookies- rustic, homestyle chocolate chip cookies.

Since reading about Dreena Burton‘s peanut butter chocolate swirl cookies in Amey’s amazing wedding cookie buffet post (that’s right, cookie buffet! Genius!), I knew I had to make these soon. But being lazy and comfortable as I was, I wasn’t about to leave the house just for a couple of missing ingredients (like dark chocolate) when I had an excess of other things that would make fine stand ins. Thus, double chocolate macadamia butter swirl cookies were born.

As the original recipe is Dreena’s and my changes were pretty slight, I won’t repost it here without her permission- but it can be found in her severely underrated book, Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. These are crisp, delicate cookies, and while chewy cookies are usually my favourites, these are a great change of pace. They taste like something your grandmother might bake if she had a pantry full of macadamias and vegan white chocolate- or at the very least, something that you could find at the supermarket made by a company with ‘farm’ or ‘cottage’ in its name, and with ‘homestyle’ emblazoned across the packet.

I had intended for some of these to accompany my brother to the airport this afternoon, so that he would have something to eat on the plane and wouldn’t be tempted by overpriced mid-air snacks. Unfortunately, the cookies had all departed well before his 5pm flight- but at the very least, he was surely too full after the weekend here to need those airline Pringles. Mission accomplished? Not a bad effort for a lazy day at home, anyway.

Tagged: cookies, veganmofo

Comments: 11

Maggie Muggins October 10, 2012 at 2:48 am Reply

Definitely one of my favorite cookbooks and I’m a big fan of those chocolate peanut butter cookies. Great spin on them! I’ve got a big bag of macadamia nuts that I bought in Hawaii that have been calling my name, me thinks I may need to make use of them.