At vet school, I’m one of the class secretaries. Funnily enough, I haven’t taken any minutes or scheduled any meetings. All I’ve done is bake.
Yeah.
It’s the secretary’s responsibility to help people celebrate their birthdays, usually with baked goods. This has given me an opportunity to try recipes I normally wouldn’t, like lemon bars, cheesecake brownies, and these vegan cranberry oatmeal cookies.
Guys, these things are out of this world. Fresh out of the oven, they’re crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. They cranberry taste works surprisingly well against soymilk, and Bobby couldn’t tell that there were no eggs or butter involved. Try it even if you’re not vegan–they’re SO good!
Vegan Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies
Adapted from Madhuram’s Eggless Cooking
3/4 cup vegan margarine (I used Earth Balance Natural Buttery Spread)
1/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
splash of vanilla extract
1/2 cup soymilk (original flavor)
1 cup AP flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp ground allspice
3 cups dried oats
1 cup cranberries
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream together the margarine and sugars until smooth. Mix in vanilla and soymilk. For some reason, my batter became really chunky, like bad milk. I was pretty nervous about it–does margarine always behave like this? I kept mixing it, futilely hoping the chunks would homogenize themselves.
After about 5 minutes, I gave up and just added in the flour, baking soda, and spices. Surprisingly, I got a nice, smooth batter. Huh.
Mix in the cranberries and oats. Spoon the dough onto a greased baking sheet. My cookies were pretty freaking huge…I used a quarter cup measuring cup as a scoop. An ice cream scoop would probably have been a better idea. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until the cookies are golden brown.
The cookies will still be soft when they come out of the oven, but should crisp up after sitting on the baking sheet for 2-3 minutes. Ideally, you should then transfer the cookies to a wire rack to finish cooling. Since I don’t have one, I turned mine upside down on a cutting board.
Check out that monster cookie. Om nom nom nom… The recipe makes 20 monster cookies or probably around 30 normal-sized ones.
Length of procrastination: 25 minutes
Coming up next on Cooking to Procrastinate: Bobby visited me last weekend, and we cooked up a mini-Thanksgiving meal. PLUS, we’ve got another giveaway in the works! :D
Cooking to Procrastinate 
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