Sunnut Butter Buttons

Dairy-free/Egg-free/Nut-free

Holiday cookie season. Before we had food allergic-children, any day leading up to the holidays were easily among our most favorite times of the year, along with any one of the other 364 days on the calendar. 

Things are necessarily different now, but there's no need to despair. On a recent trip down the candy aisle at our local grocery store, as we were walking by the Hershey's Kisses, we were met by a recipe card for Peanut Butter Blossoms, starring melt-in-your-mouth but very much off limits Hershey's Kisses, and sometimes toxic and highly offensive peanut butter.

Our recent discovery (thank you Ms Lauren!) of sunflower seed butter, aka sunnut butter, has made these cookies much easier to replicate in a food allergy-safe way. Straight out of the jar, our kids want nothing to do with sunnut butter, but baked into a cookie, the taste is somewhat mild and very well tolerated by our otherwise sunnut butter-hating children. It's very bewildering, why they don't like sunnut butter. Except for the finish, it is very very very close in taste to peanut butter.

We considered making our own version of Hershey's Kisses, but opted against it. After all, that would have entailed a LOT of effort, and we go for easy whenever we can. Instead of melting safe chocolate and solidifying it into coins to later press into the cookie tops, when the time came we just pressed three or four chocolate chips where one much larger Hershey's Kiss would have gone. Worked like a charm.

We're providing the recipe as written by Hershey's, and noting the changes we made where appropriate.

Ingredients

• 48 Hershey's Kisses (we used about 200 dairy-free/nut-free chocolate chips)
  
• 1/2 cup shortening
  
• 3/4 cup Reese's Creamy Peanut Butter (we used 3/4 cup creamy sunnut butter)
  
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
  
• 1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
  
• 1 egg (we used one egg worth of Ener-G Egg Replacer)
  
• 2 tablespoons milk (we used soymilk)
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (we used this, even though our soymilk is vanilla flavored; you could omit it)
  
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
  
• granulated sugar, for rolling the dough in
  

Steps

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Remove wrappers from chocolates. 
   
2. Beat shortening and peanut butter in a large bowl until well blended. Add the 1/3 cup granulated sugar and the 1/3 cup brown sugar; beat until fluffy. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Stir together flour, baking soda and salt; gradually beat into peanut butter mixture.
   
3. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll in granulated sugar; place on ungreased cookie sheet.
   
4. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Immediately press a chocolate kiss into center of each cookie; cookie will crack around edges. Remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely.  About 4 dozen cookies.
   

Notes

• Egg Replacer works best if you prepare it with water before adding it to your other ingredients, so be sure to do that for optimal results.
  
• Our recipe made nearly 6 dozen cookies, so maybe they were a little on the small side, but the baking time didn't change. The three or four chocolate chips we added created the exactly right ratio of chocolate to cookie, so consider this when rolling balls of your cookie dough. Adjust the size of your cookie dough balls to suit your taste. 
  
• When the cookies came out of the oven, we enlisted adult help in the kitchen to get the chips on the cookies before the cookies got too hard and crumbly. The edges are supposed to crack, but we did have to act fast to get the chips to stick.
• After a day or two on the counter, store these in the refrigerator. There was some weird ingredient reaction as they sat out, and the center of the cookie had a funky green tinge. We tested multiple cookies and they all had it. Since mold doesn't grow in such a uniform fashion, and since the cookies smelled and tasted fine, we moved them to the fridge, and the green business cleared up. Anyone know an Alton Brown we can ask about that?

Boot Scootin' Biscotti

Dairy-free/Egg-free/Nut-free

Boot scootin'. As in, scoot your boot back to the kitchen to have another, and another, and likely yet another, of these really yummy, pretty, marbled biscotti.

Remember a few posts back, in our Bella Biscotti post for cranberry and chocolate chip biscotti, we said to stay tuned while we perfected our method? 

Well, bake baby bake!  

This recipe from Eating Well circa early 1990s (before they came off the shelves and then came back to life), has to be our all time favorite biscotti. And then we veganized it. And it is still our all time favorite biscotti. Vegan biscotti. Who knew egg-free biscotti could have the right mouth feel, texture, and crunchiness? We did, and now you do, too! 

As always, we've offered up the recipe exactly the way it was originally written, and we've noted our modifications where necessary. If your food allergy situation doesn't match up with ours, feel free to alter the recipe to suit your dietary needs/preferences.

As written by Eating Well, the recipe is pretty much fool proof. But with the modifications we have to make so these are safe to eat, well, let's just say it helps to have some idea what the dough is supposed to look like. If it won't send anyone in your household into anaphylactic shock, you might want to make up a batch of these as written, scrub and sanitize your kitchen, and bring the biscotti to work, game night, whatever you have to do to keep the offending cookies out of the wrong mouth. If that's problematic or just too much trouble for you (as it would be for us), give it a shot as we've modified it, take notes, and make additional changes to your recipe in the future. We don't mean to make it complicated, we just really want you to enjoy these.

Oh, one more thing. Our kids aren't into mocha, so we omitted the coffee. But it gives these biscotti their biscottiness, so if you can, leave it in.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup whole unblanched almonds (we omitted these)
  
• 2 cups all-purpose white flour
  
• 1 cup sugar
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
  
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
  
• 2 large eggs (we omitted these)
  
• 2 large egg whites (and we omitted these too - all of the eggs in the original recipe were replaced with: 1/2 cup whizzed up tofu - the shelf stable kind in the box,  1/4 cup drained applesauce, 1 egg-worth of Ener-G egg replacer, plus 2 to 3 teaspoons of canola oil to replace some of the fat in the whole eggs)
  
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  
• 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
  
• 2 teaspoons instant coffee powder (we omit this)
  
• 4 teaspoons water
  
• 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate, melted (or make your own from cocoa powder and oil)
  
• 1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract (we replaced this with an additional 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract)
  

Method

• Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. 
  
• Spread almonds on a baking sheet and bake for 12 to 14 minutes, or until lightly toasted. Set aside.
  
• Stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. 
  
• Whisk together eggs, egg whites (or alternatives) and vanilla, and add to the dry ingredients; mix just until smooth.
  
• In a small bowl, combine cocoa, instant coffee and 4 teaspoons water.
  
• Divide the dough in half. To one half, add the cocoa mixture and melted chocolate. Mix just until incorporated.
  
• To the other half, stir in almond extract and almonds. (If you're using the almonds, you probably want to cut them up a bit first.) Assuming you're not using the almonds, do what we did and replace the almond extract with a little more vanilla extract, so you get the right consistency. 
  

**We're going to continue with the original recipe as written, but have a look at our notes at the bottom to see how we make this next part easier.**

• *Place half of the almond dough on a well-floured work surface. Pat into a 4-by-8-inch rectangle. Top with half of the chocolate dough. roll up into a cylinder, then roll the cylinder back and forth to forma 14-inch long, 1 1/2 inches thick. Repeat with the remaining doughs. Place the logs on a prepared baking sheet.*
  
• Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until firm to the touch.
  
• Transfer logs to a rack to cool. Reduce the oven temperature to 300 F.
  
• cut the logs diagonally into 1/2-inch thick slices. Stand the slices upright on the baking sheet and bake for 40 minutes. Let cool before storing.
  

Makes about 4 dozen biscotti.

Notes

We don't go through the patting rolling thing. Here's what we do instead:

• Position a non-stick sprayed baking sheet on your counter so it is wider than it is tall, when you're looking at it.
  
• Put half of the almond dough on one half of the baking sheet, and the other half on the other half. The dough is going to spread just a bit, so don't put the two logs so close together that they may end up touching.
  
• Use a spatula to make a long, thin, relatively flat (maybe 1 1/2 to 2 inch thick) log out of it.
  
• Put half of the chocolate dough on top of one of the logs, and the other half on the other log.
  
• Use your spatula to mildly marble the dough. Do your best, it'll be okay no matter what.
  

At this point, get back on the recipe train and pop the baking sheet in the oven. See above to finish off the biscotti.

These are awesome on their own, dunked in a cup of coffee, or dipped in a glass of non-dairy beverage alternative.

P-Yumpkin Cookies

Dairy-free/Egg-free/Nut-free

What's scarier for you on Halloween?

A) Your food-allergic kid getting un-safe Halloween candy from your otherwise well-intentioned neighbors. 

B) Not having something safe at the ready to trade for the 90% of Junior's Halloween booty you had to confiscate because it's not safe to eat. 

C) Having that confiscated candy tucked away in your house, just begging for you to eat it after the kids go to bed because, let's face it, the kids can't have it and you don't want it going to waste, after all...

D) The weight you'll gain from eating all of that damned Halloween candy by yourself, because all your spouse likes is candy corn.

The answer is E) All of the above. So, to help allay your Halloween worries this year, we've got a really yummy dairy-free, egg-free, and nut-free pumpkin cookie recipe. This recipe is ALL OVER the Internet, so there's not really any one to credit for it. But how dumb are we that we've never thought to do a search on egg-free pumpkin cookies? And really good ones at that.

If anyone deserves credit for this recipe, it's our prima preschool teacher, Ms Lauren. We love Ms Lauren, who herself has a food allergic child, and who introduced us to this recipe. She did a simple Google search and voila, there it was. She made a few adjustments to the recipe - not sure why, but it worked out great - and we copied.

And how exactly does this tie in with the scary Halloween question above? Make these cookies and neither you nor your kids will care about that stuff they can't eat, and you won't be tempted to eat the contraband. Until the pumpkin cookies are gone, that is. 

Ingredients

• 2 cups sugar (or 1 cup white plus 1 cup brown, unpacked)
  
• 1 cup shortening (we used 1/2 cup Crisco plus 1/2 cup Earth Balance)
  
• 1 15 ounce can pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
  
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  
• 4 cups all-purpose flour (or 3 cups ap flour and 1 cup whole wheat flour)
  
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
  
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon (or 1 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice) (but we used apple pie spice because we didn't have pumpkin pie spice)
  
• 12 ounces dairy-free, nut-free chocolate chips (optional) (we used Trader Joe's brand, and we used between 1/2 and 3/4 cup - just pulled a Rachel Ray and eyeballed it)
  

Steps

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
   
2. Cream the sugar(s), shortening, pumpkin, and vanilla until light and well combined.
   
3. Mix the flour, baking soda and cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice. 
   
4. Stir the dry mixture into the wet mixture.
   
5. Stir in the chocolate chips.
   
6. Drop by teaspoons onto an ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until set.
   
7. Let cookies cool on a rack.
   

They apparently freeze well, but if you want them fresh, you'll have to eat them within a day or two.