vegan baker

As previously stated, South American grocers stock black sugar. Increasingly, I suspect that “black sugar” is what they call “brown sugar” here, rather than a proper exotic food, but let’s not talk about that. I want to believe I’ve stumbled upon something rare and wonderful. Anyhow, for a while I didn’t have an oven, and then for a while longer I completely forgot about that bag of sugar I’d wedged behind the potatoes. Then along came fingerprint cookies.

In the future, if I make a brown (or black) sugar based cookie, I’m going to have to add molasses for depth of flavor, but these really were quite good. How can anything be bad with little clumps of jam on top?

It’s obvious, but I’m going to say it anyway. Chocolate chip cookies make everything better. Miserable family holidays? Negative feedback on your meticulously researched paper? Snuggling with the bunnies in front of the fireplace?

Though I feel ridiculously something for saying it.

My favorite recipe is in The Vegan Family Cookbook. Once I stumbled through that recipe half-alive with exhaustion, and when I woke up about fifteen hours later, the cookies were the beginning of a lovely day.

I really like tea. Not just the beverage, though I do find tea comforting and helpful pretty much whenever a cup is around. But what I really like is the afternoon tea, that white gloved, obsolete, calling card occasion. This usually translates into a little tea party, minus the dolls.

Above is a picture of an Easter tea party I had a couple of years ago. The cucumber sandwiches have been gobbled up and the chocolate petits fours are long gone. The tea pots are elsewhere, as are the guests. But you can see the unglazed lemon marzipan petits fours still on the table, on the plate in the foreground. They’re oversize because my then-boyfriend preferred them that way (more manly, apparently), and they lack my favorite pink glaze (which was actually less of a threat to the testosterone). But they were amazing nonetheless, because petits fours are the perfect food.

I mean it. Perfect.

I know cupcakes have gotten a lot of press lately, and I love cupcakes. I do. But they’re hard to eat. You have to do a lot of weird frosting-to-cupcake ratio adjustment, and you have to peel off paper. A petit four fits in your mouth easily, has the ratio solved, and only ever touches paper when you get all 50’s and put a doily underneath. Assuming you don’t drown it in fondant, it tastes as good as a rich, moist cake. And it makes you look like the fussiest cook in the world, even though it is damn easy to construct.

When I first started making these little gems, there was absolutely nothing online about veganizing them, and hardly anything about them at all. Now there is a good description of making them at VeganYumYum. But the true magic of petits fours is not in following a set recipe. They are infinitely versatile. Pretty much any cake, any icing that hardens, and any filling will work. The fondant-and-jam formula is something that got codified in the US in the middle of last century, but the French still consider all kinds of shapes and formulations to be true, even traditional, petits fours glacés.

There is a line in Plutarch about a new husband and wife eating quince together just before they knock boots. (I don’t think he phrases it quite that way.) Other than this and, you know, all of Latin American cooking, quince doesn’t show up a lot.

But my parents bought this ridiculous house that looks like an embassy and behind it were an apple tree, a pear tree, and a quince. Guess which one flowered and bore fruit. So every fall my stepmother makes quince jelly.

It is a magical process. Quince is this inedible, rocky, half-rotted pitted monster until you peel it, core it and slice it and hit it with gentle heat. Then it turns amber-colored and smells better than anything else. The jelly is perfectly clear and beautiful, and makes the most wonderful fingerprint cookies.

Now I am in Argentina, and I found commercial quince fingerprint cookies in the grocery store that are made with vegetable margarine and no egg binder. They’re not as pretty as the ones at home, nor quite as good, but they do a damn good job of making me feel better about all the dulce de leche I’m not eating.