Valentine's Day Pancakes & Cookies!

Happy Valentine's Day to you! 

 this morning's special breakfast! 

This year Valentine's Day lands on a Tuesday... which means I'll be busy teaching two back-to-back yoga classes tonight. But we didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to do something fun and special together... so of course we decided to eat pancakes! Special breakfast is pretty much my favorite way to celebrate almost any occasion, so I don't actually mind missing out on a dinner date. We've been looking forward to our Valentine pancakes for a while now, actually.

kitty love!

My favorite pancake recipe is the Puffy Pillow Pancakes from Isa Does It (or online here). They always turn out perfectly and puffy, just like the name promises. I like them plain, but I also love them with with bananas and walnuts added in. That's what we went for today... except, you can see from my bottom pancake and extra banana that I forgot to add the bananas to the first few pancakes. Ooops. (the truth is, I stepped in cat barf and got distracted. thanks, Yummers!) No worries, even the ones without bananas were perfectly delicious. We enjoyed our pancakes with coffee and fresh OJ (squeezed from oranges from our orange tree!). I put out lots of toppings - vegan butter, two kinds of peanut butter (his and hers - organic trader joes for me, Skippy for him), two kinds of syrup (natural maple syrup for me, artificial syrup for him), apricot jam, and applesauce. Yum. Pretty much the best way to start a day!

Stevie says Hi!

fancy cookies!

Like I said, I'll be teaching two evening classes tonight - and Valentine's Day isn't always a great turn out for evening classes. So I promised my students that I would bring some treats for them - and that the treats would definitely involve chocolate! That's just straight up bribery, and I'm not afraid to admit to it. Ha ha. I made a double batch of the Soft Batch Chocolate Chip Cookies from the Aquafaba Cookbook. This is by far my new favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe! I usually add in a few extra tablespoons of coconut flour, to get the batter to the consistency that I like. Wow, they are so perfect and soft and chewy and great. I also got a cookie scooper for Christmas, which makes me feel very fancy, and now I can easily make cookies that are uniform in size. The nerd in me is very pleased about this. 

Snoopy has a Valentine for you! 

After baking the cookies, I tempered a few of the remaining chocolate chips and used the melted chocolate as "glue" to attach the fancy vegan chocolate hearts to each cookie. One way to guarantee a huge class is to only bring 10 cookies. If you only bring 10 cookies, it is for sure that 15 people will show up. On the other hand, if you make 20 cookies, probably only 4 people will show up. And yet, you must play it safe. So, with any luck, we will have some left over cookies ourselves after dinner tonight! 

Dottie wants to shake your hand! 

gf cookies!

I also always like to have a gluten-free offering in case some of my students are gluten free. I actually made these first, so that I wouldn't contaminate any of my cooking utensils or surfaces with gluten. As you can see, my original "brilliant" idea was the bake the fancy vegan hearts right on top of the cookies, but that clearly didn't work out as planned. Ha ha. Sorry, gf students! Oh well, at least they still taste fantastic. And, I'm also glad this mishap occurred with my smaller half-batch of gf cookies, rather than with my big double batch of regular cookies. 

By the way, have you tried baking with this new Gluten-Free 1 to 1 Baking Flour from Bob's Red Mill? I'd read good things about it online and I finally found it at our natural foods store. It really works so well in baked goods. I've used it so far for cookies and bars, and have had great success with it. If you don't do much gf baking, this would be the way to go, because you don't need to have separate bags of white rice flour, sorghum flour, xantham gum, tapioca starch, etc in your cupboard. Also, it doesn't have chickpea flour in it, which means it doesn't taste beany - a much appreciate improvement, especially for sweet baked goods! 

I hope you have a good day today - with some love from pets, pals, family, and yourself... and hopefully a little chocolate or a pancake too. 

Mr. Vegan Eats and Treats out delivering Valentines

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