voting, cookies and other paraphenalia

As you may or may not know there is a General Election going on in the UK at the moment.  Every Thursday night there is a Leadership Debate on the TV where the leaders of the three main parties belittle each other in front of a live studio audience.  Think Jerry Springer with more politics and less barechested fighting.  The Election isn’t until 6 May but I voted on Friday night.  Himself and I have postal votes because he is sometimes away for work and the forms arrived yesterday.  To be honest if I don’t do these things straight away I don’t do them at all so I have made my decision and no gameshows are going to change my mind.

To celebrate this event I drank wine (half a glass, I know how to live).  The wine was also to celebrate Himself finishing a big work project and another decision we made (clue: the wine’s Australian!)

Had a pedicure

Bathed the cats.  They hid from us

But there was no escape.  They stank.  And are moulting.  And had dandruff.  The time had come.  It was an ordeal.  One I cannot go into again.  Himself has some great wet cat pics here.

Himself built me a light box for my photographs (go here if you want to know how to do the same).

And I  made vegan peanut butter cookies.  What’s that you say?  You want cookies too?  OK, here’s how.

First, put 60z (175g) rolled oats in a bowl and seive in 8oz (225g) plain flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and a teaspoon of salt.

In another bowl mix together 6floz (175ml) vegetable oil, 4floz (125ml) vanilla soy milk (any milk alternative is fine but the vanilla flavoured ones work well), 12oz (350g) brown sugar (I know it’s a huge amount of sugar!!!!  but you really need it.  This does make 12 huge cookies or 24 normal cookies so you might want to half the mix actually – now I tell you ha ha!), and 60z (175g) crunchy peanut butter.

This is what happens when you mix soy milk and oil.  It is like giant frogspawn

This PB is from the healthfood store.  They have a sort of grinding machine and all that is in it is peanuts.  It takes a bit of getting used to actually.  My palette is used to the additions in ordinary PB.

Start to mix the wet ingredients into the dry a little at a time until you have cookie dough.

Who likes raw cookie dough?

Roll the dough into balls and place on a greased and lined baking sheet.  Squash the dough balls down to make cookie shapes.  Then bake.

Now here is the tricky bit. Bake them at 180*C/350*F/Gas Mark 4.  I would normally say for about 15 minutes but these took half an hour.  I think there is something fundamentally wrong with my oven (which is great), so perhaps check them after 15 minutes and then keep checking at 5 minute intervals until they are golden.

Allow to cool for a couple of minutes then place on a wire rack to cool completely.

Yesterday was baking hot outside.  Today is cold and raining.  I wish I lived somewhere where the weather was more consistent.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 2:15 pm and is filed under baking, cats, food, vegan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.