You're a Vegan, What Do You Eat? (Dashboard Cookie Edition)

It has been an embarrassingly long time since I have made a YAVWDYE post.  Might as well jump back into the game with a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies, baked on the dashboard of your Prius!

It all started last winter, when one of my favorite vegan cooking sites (Plant Based on a Budget) published a recipe for Trail Mix Cookies.  I love these cookies.  The beauty of them is that you start with a basic dough (vegan butter, flour, sugar, brown sugar) and you can add pretty much anything you want to them.  They always turn out great.

Here is how I usually make them:

1/4 cup Earth Balance

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup sugar

Dash vanilla extract

1 tsp baking soda, dissolved in 1 tablespoon warm water

1/2 cup (heaping) flour

1/2 tsp salt

~1 cup quick cooking oats

chopped peanuts

chopped dried apricots or dried cranberries

non-dairy chocolate chips

--> Occaisionally I also add sunflower seeds, ground flax seeds dissolved in water, and/or shredded coconut.

They are delicious:

You can also add molasses to them and they turn out darker, still delicious:

 

Earlier this week, Snarky Vegan reposted the link to her blog entry on how to bake cookies on the dashboard of your car.  Basically, you just need a car, some vegan cookie dough, a very hot day, and cookie sheets lined with aluminum foil.  Visit her site for the full instructions on how to do it.

I thought this would be a fun project for me and Will last Friday-- he often likes helping add the ingredients and stirring when I bake things (though he rarely if ever eats the finished product).  I tried to get him pumped up about baking cookies in the car, but he was decidedly unamused and preferred to play with his trains.  The dashboard cookies turned out to be a largely solitary effort.

I started off with some basic vegan cookie dough:

 

Then I placed the cookie sheets on the dashboard of the Prius:

 

And waited.  And waited.  While it was definitely a very hot day, our driveway is a little shady, so it took a while for the car to get hot enough for the cookies to bake.

 

At last, I decided they were done!

*Note: be sure to use potholders to get the cookies out of the car! This pan had been out for a couple minutes already so it was cool enough for us to touch it like we are in the picture above.

 

I was hoping Will would be excited to have a cookie for a snack.  He did seem interested in the cookies, so I took one off the cookie sheet and handed to him.  He smiled and shook his head.  I asked him to please try it, and to his credit, he did bravely take one bite.  But then he handed it back to me and said, "I don't want it," and ran back inside.

If you have a kid who eats food, please, please, consider yourself lucky.  

More for Rob and me to enjoy, I guess.  

I thought the cookies turned out pretty well, and it didn't heat up the house to make them.  They were a little gooier (sp?) than usual, but there's nothing wrong with that.  

Many more hot days ahead in St. Louis this summer--I'm definitely planning on making these again.  Hopefully Will will eat one this time, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Thanks to Snarky Vegan for the tip, and thanks for reading!