cookie day

today i spent the day at my dad & stepmom’s house making christmas cookies. we do this every year (with my sister and my cousin), and it’s always a lot of fun. last year we experimented with vegan versions of our standard cutouts, and they turned out really well. so much so, that this year we did them again. yay!

we’ve been using the recipe for "mum’s sugar cookies" in garden of vegan, and the decorative icing recipe from the same book. the cookies are true sugar cookies, and they are a little sweeter than the ones we’ve been making forever, but they’re really good. the icing is nice and shiny, although both years we’ve had to thin it out more than the recipe calls for (we just add a bit more soymilk until we get the right consistency).

we also veganized our chocolate creme de menthe squares, which is something my dad has been making since i was wee (maybe even longer than that!). we did two pans last year (one vegan, one not), and they turned out well so we did that again. they are definitely not health food (there’s earth balance–and quite a bit of it!–in all three layers), but they are decadent and minty and sweet and they just say "christmas" to me, because they’ve been around as long as i can remember.

after a long day of baking and decorating, we all sat down to a dinner of vegan chili (thanks stepmom!) and cookies for dessert. as we were getting ready to leave, they started packing little tins of cookies for us to take home (can’t save them ALL for the holidays, you know!) and i learned one of the benefits of being the only vegan in the family: less competition for my favorite stuff. heh. that is to say, everyone likes the vegan versions, but they let me get dibs on taking things home. fantastic!