I woke up at 5:30 this morning to make peanut butter cookies and an eggnog cheesecake. I really should not be baking before noon and most definitely not before I finish a cup of coffee. I was making a double batch of peanut butter crisscross cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar for Christmas gifts. It is one of my favorite recipes from the book. However, I missed a section of the recipe and didn’t add the sugar, molasses & vanilla. Even as I was adding the flour, I was thinking to myself “it doesn’t seem right to add the flour before the sugar.” Eventually all the ingredients made their way into the mixing bowl, but the texture was a little off. If I was giving these as gifts, I would need to make another batch.
Meanwhile, I made the eggnog cheesecake from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen. It’s not quite as good as the pumpkin chocolate swirl cheesecake from Thanksgiving, but it’s still really tasty. I think vegan cheesecake is better than regular cheesecake and yet the whole time I’m eating vegan cheesecake, I think about how it tastes just like the real thing. I can’t figure that out. Maybe its a combination of the fat and guilt that makes eating real cheesecake not as enjoyable. I brought the cheesecake into work for dessert after our office lunch and it was a big success. I’ll take a picture this weekend.
UPDATE: Unfortunately, it appears that one ingredient is separating itself from the cake, so I guess it’s a dessert you need to eat in one day. No one wants to see pictures of an oozing cheesecake.
The second batch of cookies came out a little better. My mom always made these for Christmas and she added a chocolate kiss in the center. I saw a vegan version with chocolate ganache, but I didn’t think that would package well. Instead, I added chocolate chips to half of them.
