winners

The winner of the Double Chocolate Decadence Cookie is Jason G with his entertaining cake baking story: “I have a couple, but I’ll go with the semi embarrasing one. I was making a vegan cake for my wife’s birthday. It was a chocolate cake with raspberry filling with a splash of vodka. The two layer cake came out fine, cooled them, set them up for filling. I mixed up the filling and put it on the first layer. Finished the second layer and frosted it with a chocolate frosting. Time for the refrigerator. Well, I come down a few hours later to make sure the kids haven’t sampled it and something happened right down the middle of the cake. There was a gap and now the cake looks like a chocolate frosted rear end. My wife said it tasted great, but I still felt bad about its appearance. Ah well”

and the winner of the Colossal Chocolate Chip Cookie is Sara with her veganizing chocolate chip cookie story: My favorite baking memory is a recent one. I am a new vegan and a single mother of two; a 9 year old boy and a 15 year old girl. Thankfully both of my kids are food adventurous otherwise this past year of vegan transformation would not have happened. The kids and I have missed regular old just like mom used to make chocolate chip cookies. We had the family recipe and had tried, not less than 10 times to convert the recipe into a yummy vegan version. It just wasn’t that simple! We ended up with bitter hockey pucks, small hard balls, dry hallow-ish puffs. All of them were awful and most of them ended up in the trash. Along with our hopes of ever making a vegan version as good as my moms.
I was not to be defeated. My kids and I deserved chocolate chip cookies, right? We were trying again and the three of us talked about what we thought was wrong in the past. We discussed small changes to the recipe again. No milk. No eggs. All of the basics. We then decided the cookies were too dry and we made modifications for that. We took turns mixing. My son in his petit chef apron. It looked good and smelled great. We made a pan for the oven and watched like hawks as they baked. The house was full of the yummy aroma, that I remember from my own childhood. They were ready. Excitement and our hopes were on the line. All three of us could hardly wait. I bite into the puffy roundish vegan choclate chip cookie and I am transported to another era in my life. I look at the kids and everyone is all smiles.
Triumph!”