Graham Cracker Cookies

This is a tale of two cookies [and a cracker, too].

Baking is totally a science. When I was a conventional baker it was pretty easy to hypothesize about how any given baked good would come out. Unfortunately, it’s a little harder with vegan baking. Still more so with vegan and gluten free baking. So we have a lot of experiments in this little kitchen of mine [much to the joy of my taste testers].

So when Landon fell in love with these graham cracker sticks by Back to Nature [that amazon price is ridiculous] while we were at my parents house I knew I had to recreate them. I found a basic graham cracker recipe and subbed in oat flour and earth balance’s buttery sticks.

I got the graham cracker recipe from here.

Graham Crackers
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup honey

So I whisked the dry together and then added the wet. I ran out of honey with only a 1/3 of a cup and so I filled my measuring cup up to a 1/2 cup with maple syrup. I really liked the extra depth the maple syrup gave the cookies. It was a sticky dough using the oat flour and vegan butter so I rolled it out between two pieces of parchment. I baked it on the parchment on my baking stone at 400 for 10 minutes [but my oven is a slow cooker]. As soon as they came out of the oven I used my pizza cutter to slice them up.

The verdict? The taste was great but the prep time left something to be desired. Feeding kids with allergies forces you to make a lot of stuff from scratch, so the easier I can make it on myself the better. The challenge: create a graham cracker cookie without refined sugar that can be made quickly.

And so, thus began the journey of two cookies. The thing that was bothering me about my initial batch was the use of the vegan butter. I appreciate that there’s an alternative to butter for Lucy but I don’t love how processed the buttery sticks are. I decided to make two batches of cookies: one using the sticks and one using coconut oil.

The bowl on the left is coconut oil and the bowl on the right is the vegan butter. Same with the cookies: those on the left are coconut and the right are butter. I knew at this stage the coconut oil recipe was going to need more flour than the vegan butter.

I feel like I should mention now that I’ve changed how I’m baking my cookies. My sister bought my mom a cookie sheet from Hartstone Pottery for Christmas. Mind blown. You mean you’re going to bake cookies on stoneware? Why? Because it makes them amazing chewy, pillows of cookie goodness. Give it a try; your pizza stone just may be the most under-utilized tool in your kitchen. And maybe [just maybe] you’ll be so enamored you’ll end up wondering what else you can cook on there [muwahahaha…].

So here’s the recipe I landed on:

Graham Cracker Cookies
Makes about 30 cookies

2 1/2 cups oat flour
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup honey, fill to 1/2 cup with maple syrup
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted
1/2 cup applesauce, warmed

cinnamon, to sprinkle

Preheat oven to 375F. Whisk dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Add wet ingredients [ensuring all are warm enough to keep the coconut oil liquid]. Scoop cookies onto parchment [I use a #40 scoop which is 1.75 tablespoons]. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Bake for 10 minutes or until you can press them without leaving an indent.

[I added the applesauce to make these less crumbly (and cleaner for toddler eating) but if you want a crisper snack just make the graham crackers. They are seriously delish.]

And don’t you worry, the little man was a big, big fan.

Gimme all your cookies, lady.

p.s. I may or may not have taken two cookies and made these s’mores. Wowza.