chocolate almond butter teff cookies

It’s loveaversary celebration time people!

Today Jef and I are on our way to Berkeley, where we will be spending a couple of days snuggled in our fancy bed and breakfast, eating lots of delicious vegan food, and enjoying some overall quality times. : )

We bid you adieu for a few days, but will leave you with this little recipe that we remixed from the Peanut Butter Teff Cookies that we are so fond of:

Chocolate Almond Butter Teff Cookies:

• 3/4 cup teff flour
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
• 6 tablespoons agave nectar
• 6 tablespoons coconut oil
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup almond butter
• Coconut flakes, for garnish

Mix everything but the coconut flakes together very well, and then bake at 350 degrees for about 8 minutes. Garnish with coconut flakes and then return to the oven for another 5-8 minutes. Let cool completely and then DEVOUR!

This should make about nine or so cookies, the perfect amount for a couple of cookie monsters looking for a fix.

valentines day treats!

First off:

NOMNOMNOM TREEEEATS!

Secondly:

MUWA MUWA MUWA KISSES!

Cool. We spent V-day baking, specifically Lemon Poppy Seed Almond Cupcakes and Brownie Pecan Cookies with Orange Zest. They won. We won. Everyone won. It was a good day. Sharing is caring, so we spread the love and even shared these with friends!

Cupcakes, a traditional Valentine treat, are great, and decorating them is a blast. We made a vegan buttercream frosting and then crafted little hearts out of strawberries for the cupcake decor. Über Cüte. Cookies are usually a St. Valentine favorite as well, but typically sugar cookies.. BORING. We love chocolate (yet another favorite for this Holy day), so we made some zesty chocolate cookies. Flavorful and sweet, but not disgustingly rich, I could eat them for breakfast!

We found these tasty treat recipes in The Garden of Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer, and only slightly adapted them to fit our palates.

peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

Inspired by some cookies Jef and I inhaled on the drive home from Santa Barbara (Uncle Eddie’s Vegan Cookies – the best chocolate chip peanut butter cookies we have ever had…EVER!) I decided that I wanted to try out a recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking, to see how it measured up. So I had my friend Shannon (a fellow vegan baker and vegan food fanatic) to be my cookie compadre.

We slightly changed the recipe due to what we had on hand to look like this:

• 1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons flax meal
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1 1/4 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
• 3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
• 1/2 cup Earth Balance
• 3 tablespoons unsweetened soy milk
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips (fair trade all the way!)

We preheated the oven to three hundred and seventy five degrees. To make the egg replacer, we combined the flax meal and water in the blender until it made a smooth paste. Shannon combined all of the dry ingredients in one bowl, while I combined all the wet ingredients in another bowl. We then added the dry ingredients to the wet mixture slowly until it was well mixed, and then added in the chocolate chips. We then rolled the cookie dough into little balls and placed them on a couple of greased cookie sheets, and Shannon used a fork to press down on them to make the nice crisscross design that peanut butter cookies are known for.

Ten to twelve minutes later these bad boys were ready to be devoured! Luckily Jef came home with our friend Frank to help eat these cookies, otherwise we would have had some wicked tummy aches. These cookies were yummy, but weren’t quite as good as Uncle Eddies. Perhaps with some practice (and an investment in an electric mixer!) we can perfect and even surpass Uncle Eddies delicious cookies…

chocolate chip cookies

WOW chocolate chip cookies!

This recipe was printed on a package of Bob’s Red Mill ® Organically Grown & Certified 100% Stone Ground Whole Wheat Pastry Flour, An Employee-Owned Company. Yay! Democratically controlled business with a long title for their product!

These cookies rule. Part oatmeal, part chocolate chip, 100% rad. When we blackbearberries want a midnight snack, especially of the chocolate variety, we often need to whip it up ourselves since our favorite local grocer closes at 10pm and the 24 hour supermarket is not necessarily the best option for ethical food. Refined sugars? Yuck! Ultra-processed flour? No way! Free-trade ingredients? I will not consciously contribute to the systematic rape of economies, local or foreign. Hardworking human-beings deserve fair wages.

But enough preaching, here come the cookies!

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup margarine (use something good like Earth Balance)
• 1/3 cup oil (something neutral like canola, we used grapeseed)
• 1 1/2 cups sugar (we altered to a 2:1 white-sugar to brown-sugar)
• 2/3 cups milk (we used soy)
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 1/4 cups rolled oats
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• dash of salt
• 1/2 cup walnuts
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large bowl, cream together margarine, oil, sugar, milk and vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix flour, oats, baking powder and soda, and salt. Slowly add the dry to the wet while stirring. When you’ve got yourself a big heaping bowl of delicious dough, add in the walnuts and chocolate chips (cookies pictured above are lacking the walnuts, and we added a bit more of the chocolate to compensate). Get out your favorite baking surface and toss some doughballs in the oven! Cook 9-12 minutes, edges should be golden-brown. Let sit 5 mins or so, and enjoy!