Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I hope you are all enjoying this holiday season with your friends, family and loved ones. I sure am 🙂

Every now and then I like to back away from the electronic devices, social media, and cell phones as much as possible and just take a break and re-calibrate…I challenge you to do the same!

See you next year!

XO,

Adventures of a Dairy Free Mom

Dairy-Free: No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

I’ll just get the bad news out-of-the-way so we can focus on the good news! This past week I’ve failed on three separate occasions and I never, okay hardly ever fail! I tried to make peanut butter truffles, easy fudge and cranberry coffee cake and all of them turned out to be sub par. Just goes to show that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet even in regards to recipes.

But my saving grace, we shall call her Heather, restored my faith in baking or lack their of, and shared a chocolate peanut butter no-bake cookie recipe with me that I transformed into a dairy-free one!

Dairy-Free No-Bake Cookies

2 cups sugar

4 tablespoons cocoa

1/2 cup Earth Balance

1/2 cup unsweetened coconut milk

1 cup peanut butter

1 tablespoon vanilla

3-4 cups oats

I combined the sugar, cocoa, earth balance, coconut milk, peanut butter and vanilla in a large pot and brought it to a boil, stirring constantly. Let it boil for a minute or two and then remove from heat. Add oats to the pot and stir until the mixture is well mixed. It should be thick, I started out with three cups of oats per the recipe but actually needed to increase it to 4 cups. Drop the cookies onto wax paper and let cool.

I’ve actually never made these incredibly simple cookies but they were so moist and yummy! I also made a big batch of my Homemade Granola but added in dried cranberries and walnuts and another batch of my Chocolate Raspberry Shortbread Cookies; I made this batch with gluten-free all-purpose flour and it changed the texture of the cookies a bit, I think that more liquid would have been beneficial to add in.

I packaged up the goodies to share with others! Sharing is caring 😉

We have a yearly Christmas Eve pizza party that we are attending this evening. I have a big bag of fresh jalapenos sitting on my counter, can you guess what I’m contributing? I’ll post the recipe later 🙂

UPDATE!

I made Jalapeno Poppers! I did half of the batch with your traditional cream cheese for all the cow milk lovers and half of the batch with hummus. They turned out pretty well but I will definitely be tweaking this recipe until it is perfect. I halved 12 jalapenos length wise, cut the stem off and cleaned out the middle. I then put a dollop of hummus/sour cream in the jalapeno, wrapped it in cooked, uncured and nitrite free bacon from Trader Joe’s and stuck a tooth pick through the middle to hold it all together. I cooked them at 400 degrees for 20 minutes! Yummo!

Happy Holidays 🙂

Vegan Chocolate Raspberry Shortbread Cookies

Christmas is in the air! This was my first holiday recipe and it turned out so good! I can’t wait to share the other goodies with you that I have up my sleeves.

My mom always makes cookies, breads and candies for Christmas and my two favorite things are her thumbprint cookies and the Russian tea cakes. These shortbread cookies are my take on her thumbprint cookies 🙂

The recipe is incredibly simple. I melted chocolate to drizzle on the top and I burnt it twice so, the moral of this story is watch your chocolate! I tried over the stove and in the microwave, you could use a double broiler as well.

 

 

Vegan Chocolate Raspberry Shortbread Cookies

Yields approx. 40 cookies

1 1/2 cups of dairy-free butter, I use Earth Balance

1/4 cup vegetable oil

4 cups flour

1 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Jar of raspberry jam

2 bags of dairy-free chocolate chips, I use Enjoy Life

Pre-heat the oven to 350. Cream together the butter, oil and vanilla. Add in the sugar and flour and mix together. The dough will have the consistency of play-dough.

Roll the dough into balls, mine were similar in size to a ping-pong ball. Press your thumb in the middle of the dough ball to create a little bowl to hold the jelly. Add a tsp or so of raspberry jelly in the middle of the cookie. Bake for 12-15 mins.

While the cookies are baking  melt your chocolate. I made my cookies in separate batches, which by the way this dough does great in the freezer, so I guesstimated how much chocolate to melt for each batch. Put the melted chocolate in a baggy with a small opening at the tip and drizzle the chocolate on top of the cookies after they have finished baking.

These cookies are so good and taste just like the kind filled with butter and eggs! They are a perfect combination of soft and crunchy, and are definitely a must for the holiday!

Happy Baking 🙂

 

Dairy-Free and Gluten-Free: Toddler Breakfast

I hope you all are embracing the holiday season and enjoying your friends and family! As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted a blog in a while. I don’t want you all to think I’ve forgotten you…because I haven’t, so wipe away those tears. I have just become busier than I have been in quite some time, but I won’t bore you with all the details.

I have a couple things that I would like to share in the upcoming days and weeks, and there may or may not be some recipes for all those sweet treats that we must devour during the holidays. So many of the recipes call for dairy in some form or another, but I am thinking that we can treat ourselves to something just as good, if not better, than the original versions.

Over Thanksgiving I made an Apple Crisp, it was actually called something else but my brain is not working on all its cylinders right now, and we served it up with ice cream. So the obvious question was (to those who can eat dairy), “do you want coconut milk ice cream or cow milk ice cream?” This received a little chuckle, and then the adage that when its put that way the coconut milk ice cream sounds much more desirable. So that brings me to wonder, how do you classify your “milk” products? I can’t be the only one that refers to dairy as cow milk! Here is where my mom would mention that I used to call milk, foot milk…maybe I should go back to calling it that instead, hehe. Okay, I have gotten side tracked.

Let’s talk breakfast! You may notice a trend here, eggs and toast! This breakfast was incredibly simple, I scrambled some eggs and tossed in some fresh chopped baby spinach, just a handful or so. Peeled a little cutie and made a cool design! And popped a piece of gluten and dairy free bread in the toaster, cut it into an awesome dinosaur shape with my amazing skills and spread a little peanut butter on top. Simple and nourishing! As a side note, after the toddler dug into breakfast, I realized I could of turned this into a little scene and put the eggs at the bottom of the plate and had the dinosaur walking on them, and then have the little cutie sun shining down from above. Next time around! I basically ate the same thing, but I had a plain ‘ole boring square piece of toast. Oh, and I put Earth’s Balance on it instead of peanut butter.

Happy Eating 🙂

 

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