I’ve had pretty good luck so far cooking vegan meals — my recipe for success is that first of all, I rarely cook!  Amy’s Kitchen frozen dinners, Trader Joe’s frozen products, soup tetrapacks, bags of prewashed salad greens, and fake ice cream are what I “cook” at home.  If any of these involve sauteeing/roasting/etc., I substitute olive oil where I might have once used butter, and sometimes it changes the flavor of the dish, but the dish still works.  (Have I mentioned how great Divina olive oil is?)

But recently I made a foray into vegan baking.  I made my favorite sugar cookie recipe, and I substituted Earth Balance for the butter, almond milk for the milk, and Ener-G egg replacer for the eggs.  The cookies were pretty good right out of the oven, though they lacked the richness of egg-based sugarcookies, but really terribly, an hour after they’d cooled they became very tough.  Rocklike.

So, I’m a little bummed.  Am I missing something about vegan baking?  Should I not try to veganize nonvegan cooking recipes?  Is there something else I should do when veganizing cookie recipes besides just making substitutions?  Because this is my alltime favorite sugar cookie recipe I’m talking about here . . .

Also, I’m really not wild about Earth Balance.  It seems to have a strange aftertaste.  Are there any other good-for-baking margarines out there that don’t have a weird aftertaste?  Should I just use oil instead?

Categories : cruelty free