What This Town Needs Is A Vegan Bakery

A brief detour, today, from the knitting to another household craft.  Background: my grandson has food allergies that include eggs and milk.  This makes him, in effect, a meat-eating vegan.  This also makes the bakery a very dangerous place for him.  Enter my heroines, the authors of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.  I've lately become so enamored of the cookies that I've wished somebody would start up a vegan bakery in Anchorage. (I can't do it myself. I just don't have time, energy, or desire for yet another career. Sorry.)

But on to the cookies!  The recipes are so good I probably will make my way through them all eventually.  Right now we're deep into the chocolate ones because the Grandboy adores chocolate, and he adores it so much that he picks chocolate chip cookies apart and only eats the chips.  You can imagine how long that takes and how messy it is, right?  Better to make them chocolate all the way through.

But pass the cookies, please, let's have a taste! 

These are Oreo knockoffs.  Cookie nerds would remind you that Oreos are already vegan, but when you make your own at home--WOWEEE!  And you can play around with the filling and make your own variations. I've tried cherry, mint, and peanut butter so far and all work out great.  Making your own also gives you an insight into what fat bombs these guys are.  An incredible amount of shortening and margarine involved here.  All the better for the Grandboy, however, whose doctor has advised calorie-dense foods.

And here are the cute chocolate pretzels and the Mexican snickerdoodles.

The pretzels are sweet; the "salt" is pearl sugar, although any big-grain sugar would do.  The snickerdoodles are cinnamon chocolate.  For adults you could include the little pinch of cayenne--for the kiddo it seemed better to leave it out.  I don't think preschoolers expect their cookies to bite back!

Ooops. I almost forgot. This is a knitting blog, isn't it?  Let's look at some knitting, then:

Up close and personal with the seasilk shawl.  I've got quite a bit more done, see?

Now it's a race against time because I have a serious chance of getting it done for my trip on the 3rd of July.  Done and blocked, that is.  And by the look of it, it's going to have to be, as they say, severely blocked if it's going to be as wide a shawl as its pattern.  That's it.  I've got to get off this computer and KNIT!