ME WANT COOKIES

Hello folks! It's a Friday evening and I'm vegging (hee!) at home with my boyf, watching the Late Late Show...I don't always watch it but my hand slipped and I accidentally pressed channel 101 on the remote control. Whoops.

Anywho, I have a nice weekend of eats lined up - I'm going to The Happy Pear tomorrow! I'm so excited! I've been wanting to go to this vegetarian café for so long because of the two handsome twin brothers who run it of all the lovely food they do. I've never been to Greystones, but I'll bring my camera and take a pic or two for you. They do lots of fresh juices and desserts at The Happy Pear as well as lovely main courses, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to sample a bit of every course. It's a tough life.

The weekend is when I tend to do most of my baking, especially Sundays. I'm from Cork City originally, and every few weeks I go back to see my lovely family (including my veggie brother who's been veg for more than two years now - we call him an 'etarian' though as he doesn't eat many veggies...ahem...sorry Nick!) so when I get a Sunday up here in Dublin where I have nothing lined up I do a bit of baking. Then I eat lots of the cakes/cookies and have to force myself to put the rest in a box and bring them in to work the next day to fatten up my lovely colleagues.


I've only been baking properly for the last year or so, so I'm on a bit of a learning curve. That means that when I find a nice, easy recipe that tastes good and contains no animal ingredients I am a very happy bunny indeed. So here's the latest recipe I've tried and it's a keeper - or more importantly, it's a COOKIE recipe. Cookies are great, aren't they? And they're even better when they're almost fat-free (not that I advocate a fat-free life, I'm all for the good fats, but to my mind fat-free cookies = more cookies to eat), contain whole-wheat/spelt flour, are refined sugar-free and contain oats! Yum!

The recipe is from the fantastic Fat Free Vegan blog, which is run by Susan V (I like to pretend her surname stands for 'Veg', heh). Click here for Susan's recipe. Her recipe is for Banana-Maple Oatmeal cookies. When I made mine I made a few substitutions, but you just go ahead and do what you want, (non-refined) sugar!

• I used organic whole-grain spelt flour
• I used organic brown rice syrup instead of maple syrup
• I didn't add raisins
• Instead of lemon juice, I added a few teaspoons of organic blood-orange juice (adding more flour so the recipe wouldn't be too wet)
• I also added the zest of one organic blood-orange - zingy!
• Instead of cinnamon I used allspice, as I had left my cinnamon in work (for my morning porridge, yum)

So what I ended up making were really Banana-Blood Orange-Brown Rice Syrup-Oatmeal cookies, which doesn't quite have a ring to it, ahem. What it really shows though is how versatile Susan's recipe is! I love that.

These are simple, healthy and - most importantly - tasty cookies. They go a little soft overnight but are still yum. I crumbled some into peach soya yogurt the next day and it was heaven. Their consistency is almost cake-like, so don't expect a crunchy cookie. Instead, expect a soft oaty pillow of fruity yumness (TM).

If you make these, let me - and Susan - know how you get on!