Melissa Clark's Gingerbread Blondies But Vegan
#NYTCookieWeekButVegan2023
Hello, and welcome to Cookie #3! ICYMI, this post is part of a series wherein I veganize all the cookies from the New York Times Cooking Cookie Week, arguably my favourite part of the holiday season. The challenge kicked off with an emotional introduction and some easy vegan butter and egg recipes right here. Cookies 1 and 2 were Eric Kim’s Matcha Latte Cookie and Vaughn Vreeland’s Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookie should you wish to catch up. Onward!
Cookie 3: Gingerbread Blondies by Melissa Clark
—> The Actual Recipe (gift link!)
—> TL;DR:
I want to be Mother; my friends are great; I only wear baggy dresses now.
I used 1 tsp psyllium husk + 1 tbsp fava flour + 5 tbsp water for egg sub this time.
I made vegan brown butter with an assist from 2 tbsp powdered coconut milk, toasted.
I took out all the spices except black pepper and added a bunch of bourbon!
When I said in my introductory post that Melissa Clark is Mother, that wasn’t an original thought. I read it in the YouTube comments on Clark’s Cookie Week entry last year — Flaky Coconut Twists, very good, easily veganized! — and it just resonated hard.
I’ve had a year to process why this comment felt so important to me (aside from the fact that I am, once again, a classic white nineties hag who loves ballroom culture and/or the appropriation thereof). I’ve deduced largely via feverishly drafting this post that there’s something about Melissa Clark being Mother that pleases me greatly because she’s not that traditionally cool? I mean, she’s fully cool, obviously — the woman has over forty cookbooks to her name, a personal recipe-tester who comes to her house several times a week, I could, of course, go on. But while she does exude confidence about her career and cooking chops, I’m not sure “cool” is the first way she’d describe herself?
Take, for example, her commitment to the word “sneaky” in last year’s Flaky Coconut Twists. This is precisely why I fell in love with her and will remain so for life. Who even says “sneaky”? Who gets this excited about a cookie that’s trying to trick you into it’s being a cheesy breadstick? She does! And so. Do. I.
I’ve been thinking about this issue of “being cool” entirely too much for most of my life. A week-ish ago I had the pleasure of hanging out with fellow woman novelist over forty, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and briefly discussing the subject head-on. Kathryn told me about recently doing a quiz to determine whether or not she’s “cool,”She’d been pleased to win the day in part because she could confidently check “Yes” on “Do you have a personal sense of style?” I nodded knowingly, proudly, as lately I, too, feel I could finally check that box — I’ve entered my art-lady-bag-shaped-dress era, bitches!
But I also balked at the very idea of this quiz. I’m paraphrasing here, but I spluttered something to Kathryn along the lines of “There’s different ways to be cool, though, right? There’s the people who know they are, and maybe it comes naturally, but they also actively cultivate the tendency by not smiling or wearing their hair strategically a little dirty or whatever. But then there’s people like Meryl Streep. Like, she’s so cool, but I don’t know if that’s how she reads herself. Like, maybe she does know she’s a great actor, but it seems like she also might still think of herself as weird or fuzzy or awkward or socially fucking up sometimes?”
Kathryn nodded, maybe agreeing, maybe just hoping I’d quiet down, which I did because she was a brand new acquaintance and one thing I’ve learned the hard way is not that cool is expounding loudly on a half-baked grand theory within moments of meeting someone.
Upon reflection, I knew exactly why I’d balked at the quiz, and where my Meryl Streep example came from. Maggie — my best friend since we were thirteen years old, cool as hell in her own special way, but also slightly more traditional ways because she smoked in high school — has compared me, if you can believe it, to Meryl Streep for years. “You’re just like her!” Maggie will say, and do a very endearing impression of my and Meryl’s apparently comparable weird, spacey, excitable ways, to demonstrate. Then she’ll add, “And then out of nowhere you’re also the best writer in the world!” Or something like that. There’s been many variations of the compliment all these years we’ve been friends. She’s always trying to get me to love myself like she loves me, and I hope she feels that effort goes both ways.
At first I believed none of it, but slowly the groove wore deeper in my brain. Not like “Now I see I’m Meryl-Streep-tier-talented, so obviously I’m cool!” I don’t think that! It’s just that I can now, with Streep’s imperfect graces in mind, hold a framing of myself as “fit for public consumption,” or sometimes “enjoyable to be around,” or sometimes even “cool”? I wouldn’t be who I am without Maggie in so many ways, and this is one, and I guess this is just a story about getting older as a woman and feeling so, so lucky to have women (and some men!) around me who are invested in helping me frame myself as cool and loveable and good? At nearly-forty-five, I’m buying what I’m selling most of the time, and if you’re not, that’s totally fine; I like my too-long sentences, tysm; it’s okay with me that almost everything I write is about myself; and I no longer think of the ability to perform a bitchy, bored expression as superior to whatever I’m typically doing with my face. JESUS CHRIST, JULIA, THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A BLOG POST ABOUT COOKIES! The long and the short of it is, Melissa Clark is “uncool” like Meryl Streep is “uncool,” and I’m like Meryl Streep and Melissa Clark is Mother, so maybe I could, in fact, be Mother too? Wow. Melissa is mirror? Okay. Okay. The cookies. Okay.
A caveat off the top: as mentioned, my partner David abhors anything “Holiday spiced,” but he does enjoy a blondie. So I nixed most of the spices, leaned hard on Clark’s suggestion to replace vanilla with bourbon, and gave these the working title Bourbon Black Pepper Blondies, which sounded delicious to me (spoiler: correct!).
I used my own butter as per usual, but I’m excited to share that I BROWNED IT (more on that later) and I did something new for the eggs. In addition to the psyllium husk this time, I used…drumroll…fava bean flour. To be abundantly clear, this is not me venturing into the (to me) sad trend of making brownies from black beans and chickpea “cookie dough.” I’m talking about the recipes that attempt to make a “treat” into a healthy snack by sneaking in protein and fibre and, well, that’s not really my way. If it’s yours, no judgment, but there was a horrible period when wet bean mash with chocolate chips was all you could get in terms of vegan baked goods at Toronto coffee shops, and it scarred me. I won’t go back.
That’s not to say legumes have no place in desserts — think of the glorious, fudgy laddoos and burfi of South East Asia often made from chickpea flour and ghee and/or powdered milk. In fact, the more I thought about that, the more I thought, whoa, blondies and burfi are cousins and I never even saw it!
Anyway, I’ve been messing with fava flour for a while now after a bout of strength building last year had me replacing some of the flour in my baked goods with protein powder. One cake I made came out positively custardy which made me go, “What the fuck is in this protein powder anyway?” Well, among, admittedly, a zillion other things, it listed flax seeds, fava protein, and powdered coconut milk. So I’ve been experimenting with those ingredients to see if I could attain that custardy vibe on demand. To my mind psyllium and flax seeds work the same, so I used a teaspoon of those here as per usual. Then I added one tablespoon fava bean flour (you can just blast dried fava beans in a high power blender) and five tablespoons of water, whisked it up, and let that sit for about thirty minutes to hydrate while I made the brown butter. I think you could sub with chickpea flour, too, but it might impart a stronger flavour.
Though I used to run screaming from recipes that called for browning butter, fearing they could never be veganized, I feel like I’m getting closer to dialling it in? Or at least achieving things that create nice extra layers of flavour. Last year I saw no less than three recipes that called for toasting powdered milk along with brown butter to ramp up the nutty flavour, including Cookie Week’s own White Chocolate Macadamia Nut cookies by Sohla El-Waylly. For that recipe, I tried toasting powdered soy milk and I thought it was pretty good — the cookies were a hit! In the summer, I tried toasting almond flour to mimic brown butter in my tomato tart crust — also very nice! This time out, I wanted to try powdered coconut milk partly to attain the trifecta included in my protein powder. Coconut is the sole ingredient in the powdered coconut milk I bought at Bulk Barn (please watch this Bulk Barn TikTok if you never have) so I suspect it’s just very finely ground dried coconut, which we all know tastes great toasted. I toasted two tablespoons in my dry pot on medium for two or three minutes (maybe a bit more?) till it was fragrant and just turning brown, then added my pucks of butter straight out of the freezer. I let it melt and then sizzle for a while, probably fifteen minutes all told, till it looked and smelled great.
The rest of the recipe I kept the same except in terms of “seasoning,” only added a scant half teaspoon of pepper, 1.5 tbsp bourbon, .5 tbsp vanilla, and then an extra tbsp of bourbon when the dough was inevitably too stiff upon the addition of flour. I also baked the blondies a grand total of 50 minutes, checking frequently after 35. Many commenters on the original recipe complained that bake time was too short, but Clark seems to have a great fondness for very intense squidge. Me, not as much. To me, the 50-minute texture is perfect: some crunch on the outside, some fudginess within.
The day after I made the blondies, we had a couple of friends over, one of whom was Lauren Bride, an avid and amazing baker, writer, and all-around mensch. She spontaneously, hilariously reviewed all of the cookies I had made to date, and I’ll give the last word on these blondies to her. (For completists: the first two reviews are saved in my Cookie Week highlight on Insta and they will not disappoint).
Thank you one trillion to all who have engaged with #NYTCookieWeekButVegan and made this project so fun for me. It’s been just the welcome distraction I needed after a weird, rough fall, and during these dark days in our murderous world. I hope you’ll all be as happy as me to know the next post will comprise the veganization of three cookies, so we’re drawing close to the end!
As threatened, I did start a chat should you wish to discuss the veganizing of your fave cookie recipes, or whatever else. You can find it here I think? No pressure!
Final FINAL thing: also no pressure, ever, but should anyone wish to throw a tip my way via subscription, feel free! Annual subs are 50% off, plus you get my first novel, while supplies last! Byeeee!
This looks so good!! I want to make these
another fun read, Mother