xmas cookies!

this was my first year baking christmas cookies, especially of the vegan persuasion.

the gingersnaps kicked ass...i used this recipe, but added chopped up candied ginger pieces and put a salt and sugar topping on it—i like my gingersnaps salty!

the snickerdoodles needed work. for one, they needed a real egg substitute, because they came out too dry...good for coffee, but you can’t always expect coffee with your snickerdoodles. i think i would add 1/2 an overripe banana (for 4x the recipe), add 1/4 to 1/2 a tsp of kala namak, and probably some more flour/corn starch to make up for the extra wetness.

then the shortbread...it’s good, as shortbread goes, but i think it needed more earl gray as that was the flavor i was going for. (i used 2 tbsp in place of the cocoa for the batch, but i feel like i should’ve doubled that—the cocoa was only for half a batch, after all.) and definitely should not have cooked as long.

still experimenting on the vegan benedict, mostly mentally. i’d had an incarnation of it at fellini’s in berkeley, but that was severely disappointing: way too salty, over a weird tofu scramble, and the bread they served it on was absolutely nasty. tia, my resident benedict expert, has offered to help me perfect a hollandaise sauce, so i need to figure out how to make a poached tofu "egg" to put it on. and maybe i need butter flavoring?