Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Vegan Valentine's Day Treats

Valentine's Day Sausage & Biscuts

Chuck made us a Biscuits, Sausage and Gravy Brunch for Valentine's Day. Fairly simple, just the "gimme lean" sausage that you can find at a lot of grocery stores, and we've been trying out using Bisquick for biscuits and pancakes recently. It seems to work pretty well for both! Chuck used our heart shaped cookie cutter to make it all very adorable! He also improvised the gravy which was yummy.

 Vegan Homemade Oreos


And then we made the Oh-la-las, or Homemade Vegan Oreos, from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. As the cookbook points out, Oreos are already vegan, but making them at home is fun! I'm very glad I decided Valentine's day was the time to try out this recipe. After I mixed up the cookie batter I realized I didn't have the 1.5" round cookie cutter it called for and our heart shaped cutter was probably the next closest thing. I guess heart shaped oreos would still be adorable on any day, but I'm happy that they seemed especially appropriate this week.

Vegan Homemade Oreos 
The process was a little intense so it  helped to be looking at lots of adorable chocolate hearts. It uses a lot of parchment paper for rolling out the dough, cutting out the cookies & then transferring the whole shebang over to the cookie sheet. Assembly was also tricky; smooshing all the filling in place broke a few of the thinner cookies. For the filling, I split the mix in half adding vanilla (per the org. recipe) to one half, and 1/2 tsp. peppermint flavoring and a few drops of red food coloring to the other. So we have pink and white filled hearts! It helps to have a small team to assemble these, which is mentioned in the recipie description. I really love how Isa's cookbooks usually give you such a good idea about what you're getting into before you get started!

I can't believe I've only made two recipes from this cookbook, these Oh la las, and the Lemon Bars:


which is crazy cause there are so many good looking recipes in it. I've been really wanting to try the Vegan Samoas (yeah, like the girl scout cookies, but veganized!) since I got it. So maybe those will be up next, once we recover from all these oreos!