chocolate muffin-ish breakfast snack

Preheat oven to 190°C (375°F)

Blend in blender until thick, smooth and oily:
1/2 cup sunflower oil
1/2 peanuts (unsalted, although salted would probably also work)
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/4 t ground nutmeg
1/4 t ground cloves
1 t ground cinnamon
3 bananas

Blend in 1/3 cup of almonds, leaving them as if they had been chopped.

Mix in bowl:
3 cups of oatmeal
1 cup of whole wheat flour (harina integral)
1 teaspoon of soda
1/4 brown sugar (azúcar dorada)
1/3 cup coconut (optional)

Mix together liquid mixture and dry mixtures
Bake the cookies about 10 minutes. They tasted sort of like whole-grain muffin tops. I like the recipe.

chocolate cookie breakfast snack

Chocolate cookie breakfast snack

So these aren't choc. chip cookies. The idea of these cookies is that they are for breakfast. Rather than a granola bar...since my granola bars turned out a bit to chewy and loose. Like they weren't bars, they were more granola than bar. So anyway I thought, how bout a cookie for breakfast. Portability and unprocessed foods being the key factors of this recipe. They actually taste a bit like a whole-grain muffin. Which probably is a good breakfast idea as well. So I just looked at an oatmeal cookie recipe and a chewy chocolate chip cookie recipe on the postpunk kitchen website and came up with my own recipe using the ingredients on hand. This is more or less how it went:

Preheat oven to 190°C (375°F)

Blend in blender until thick, smooth and oily:
1/2 cup sunflower oil
1/2 peanuts (unsalted, although salted would probably also work)
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
ground nutmeg
ground cloves
ground cinnamon
1 banana -- next time I might add 2 or 3 because I could barely taste it. I think the whole wheat flour hides the banana taste.

Blend in 1/3 cup of almonds, leaving them as if they had been chopped.

Mix in bowl:
I can't remember how much oatmeal (prob. between 1-2 cups)
1 cup of whole wheat flour (harina integral)
1 teaspoon of soda
1/2 brown sugar (azúcar dorada)
1/3 cup coconut

Mix together liquid mixture and dry mixtures

Meanwhile, I heated a chancaca square in the preheating oven. Surprisingly, it didn't melt at all!
So I took it out, and I could actually cut it. So I sliced/chopped half of the square and threw the chancaca in the mixture.

I baked the cookies about 10 minutes. They tasted sort of like whole-grain muffin tops. I liked the recipe. Next time am thinking of adding quinoa for the next time...we'll see.

August 10th: definitely tasty with three bananas! The chancaca is not necessary.

Here we go

So I've been messing with my standard chocolate chip cookie recipe and boy have I had some interesting results. My problem is I can't remember which recipe rendered which result so I've decided to start a blog about it to see if I can't straighten this mess up. So officially the temporada de galletas está abierta. It's cold outside... and inside too. Nothing like warming up the body with some bombas calóricas. I made some chocolate chip cookies the other day for a friend's birthday, and used a tip for vegan bakers that I'd come across. This is to substitute the eggs for a banana. Hahaha. What a joke. The cookies turned out to be banana cookies with pieces of chocolate, because the banana flavour overpowered everything else. Besides that, the cookies turned out quite well. The lack of eggs also affects the cookie in that it doesn't rise quite as much, I think, which wasn't a problem because the cookies were still tasty, if a bit flatter than normal. Adding a banana to peanut butter cookies might make for a yummy result.

Anyway, I'm thinking of making cookies again today and here's the recipe I plan to follow:

not-quite vegan chocolate chip cookies #

1 cup of sunflower oil
1 cup of white sugar
1 cup of brown-ish sugar (azucar rubia)
2 teaspoons vanilla (the real stuff)

1.5 cups flour
2 cups oats
1 teaspoon baking soda

chocolate - about 700 grams

I've found that to best pack the cookies full of chocolate, it works to but some chocolate (a cut up 200 gram chocolate bar) in the dough, and then cut up a bunch of squares of chocolate and insert them in the hot cookies just out of the oven. This allows the chocolate to warm up and melt, fuse with the cookie, but then cool again. This is so tasty, I swear.

Another change I've made is that if you set your oven at 375°F (190°C) rather than Betty Crocker's suggested 350°F (180°C) and cook the cookies 8-10 minutes rather than 10-12 minutes, they turn out a bit more raw inside. Half-baked. Te lo encargo.

# one cool thing about "not-exactly vegan" cooking is that most of the ingredients can sit in your cupboards for months and they don't go bad, whereas eggs and butter do go bad sometimes before I get around to using them.

I like vegan ideas but there's no way I'm committing to a vegan diet (at least for now), so I'm a bit influenced by what I've read about veganism-and thus am looking to perfect a cuasi-vegan chocolate chip cookies recipe-but I am not vegan. I've read that not all sugar is considered vegan because "During the final purification process, cane sugar is filtered through activated carbon (charcoal) which may be of animal, vegetable, or mineral origin..." And I think chocolate is often not vegan.

So perhaps I'm vegan influenced, though "experimental" would probably best describe my cooking.

woah. Check these cookies out.