those crazy vegans...

My sister recently got me a pizzelle iron for my birthday, so I thought it would be nice to make her a batch of tasty pizzelles for a treat. Unfortunately (for me) she eats a vegan diet. So the normal "4 eggs, 2 sticks of butter" recipe wouldn't work very well for this purpose. Interestingly, as far as I could find, there are no "vegan pizzelle" recipes on the Internet, so I got to make up my own. Not a big deal... there's plenty of egg substitutes and margerine to choose from out there.

So during lunch the other day, I ran over to Whole Foods (not a normal stomping ground for me) and finally found some Ener-G Egg Substitute. I figured I could get the rest of the ingredients at the local megamart, for about $302 less. I figured wrong. I started the process of gathering ingredients, and I noticed that the margerine had whey in it. Whey is dairy-derived, so I made an honest effort to find a whey-free margerine at the local megamart. No such luck. Butter-flavored Crisco it is! Of course, since I regularly eat meat and dairy and eggs and such, I am not 100% sure that Crisco is really *really* vegan, because none of the sample recipes I looked through (other cookie recipes, etc) ever used it. To me it seemed like an obvious choice - it's (artificially) buttery flavored, it's vegetable shortening - what more do you want? Apparently, from what I can tell, the big thing about shortening is that it's "hydrogenated", which, according to this site, is bad. I quote:

Hydrogenating vegetable oils is one of the worst forms of processing as it produces unnatural trans-fats which have an even worse effect than ordinary saturated fat in raising cholesterol and increasing heart disease risk.

To me, that sounds like a fair tradeoff. I'm making COOKIES. I'm making them in such a way as to avoid the use of animal products, because that's what my sister doesn't eat. Cookies are not supposed to be healthful. They are cookies. There's a bunch of similar rules that say you're
supposed to use "unrefined sugar" and fancy flour and crap like that. Maybe if I was making pasta or something, which as a main course should be the thing providing you with nutrients and such, I would use the fancy flour that wasn't super-processed. I'm not. I'm making cookies. If you're relying on the cookies to be healthful, and provide you with your daily nutrients, you're shit out of luck. If you want tasty cookies, well.. I can try to help out with that. I'll post the recipe I used below. If you stumbled across this page looking for vegan pizzelle recipes, feel free to use it. Post it elsewhere, if you want, providing you credit me. Linking to it is preferred.


The pizzelles turned out... okay. I ate one. They seemed... harder... than the ones I made a few weeks ago. I did, however, make those on a different pizzelle iron. So maybe this is a product of the hardware, and not the software. They are definitely harder, though, and much more dense. And they didn't seem to brown as quickly, which could be due to the fact that I was using an iron for the first time and it runs at a slightly different temperature, but most likely is a result of there not being any butter or eggs in the recipe.


*shrug*


Anyhow, the recipe I used is as follows.

• 1/2 cup butter flavored Crisco


• 1 cup sugar


• 2 eggs worth of egg substitute (I used Ener-G Egg Replacer - 1 Tbsp powder and 4 Tbsp water, mixed together)


• 2 tsp baking powder


• 1 tsp anise oil
  
  
  • or 2 tsp vanilla extract
  
  
  • or 2 tsp lemon extract
  
  
  • or 2 Tbsp cocoa
  
  
  • or 2 tsp cinnamon


• 1/2 tsp salt


• 2 1/2 - 3 cups flour - or enough to make firm soft dough. (not sticky)

Directions:

• Cream fat and sugar


• add wet stuff


• add dry stuff


• roll dough into balls. The size of the ball is dependenent on whether you have a 3" or 4" pizzelle iron


• put dough on heated pizzelle iron. Cook according to manufacturer's directions. My grandma timed them by saying a "hail mary", whereas my dad used the equally effective (if not quite as holy) stopwatch method.

That's about it.