MoFo Day Three: Cookies!

  We had arranged to visit a friend of ours today, so we wanted to bake something to take with us. Joan always describes us as being 'bad visitors' because we always make something to take with us! We didn't have very much time before we were supposed to going, so I needed a very quick recipe. We have a chocolate chip cookie recipe which is very fast to make (actually, it might be fun to time myself making them!) but we didn't have any chocolate chips, so I opted to make peanut butter cookies instead which are very quick too. In fact I was SOO quick that I'd made the cookie dough, rolled it out, made about 30 cookies with the children, put them in the oven and washed up, and got the cookies out again, all while Miranda was still pricing up our cats on a very funny website called WeBuyAnyCat.com that someone on Twitter told us about, at www.webuyanycat.com . You can even find out whether your cat is worth their weight in gold!  We just checked and one of the VegaNation cats turns out to be worth £233,763.33 in gold bullion- I think that's about what we gave Wood Green Animal Shelter for him and I must say, it was an absolute bargain!

  The recipe I made was our famous Peanut Butter Cookies which is from a children's recipe book 'My Fun To Cook Book' by Ursula Sedgwick, which Miranda has had since we were about 7 or 8; the funny thing is that I barely remember making the cookies when we were children but since we veganised them a few years ago we've made them often and they always work perfectly. The great thing is that everyone likes them, even Pony, so we don't need to make a batch of something else as well, alongside them.

   If any of you live in London you may have seen our friend Joan and one of her beloved cats on  posters as part of Animal Aid's 'Victims of Charity' campaign, protesting the big medical research charities' use of animals as research tools. She is now 92 years old and still an active animal rights campaigner, working hard to help animals.
   We first met Joan about twenty three- or four years ago, at the time when we first discovered that there were people in the world who felt the same way about animals as we did! Before that we were vegetarian and the most 'extreme' people we knew- we thought we were doing all we could to help animals at that time, even tho' we were drinking their breast milk, eating their eggs, wearing their skins. Then,  we met some hunt sabs- who were all VEGAN!  At around the same time, we read the Vegan Society's leaflet 'Milk Marketing Fraud' about the dreadful suffering involved in dairy, and it was as tho' the world shifted on its axis- and has stayed that way ever since.. So, Joan is very dear and  important to us for lots of reasons, and we love visiting her and so do our children.
  I would like to include the recipe for the cookies here- asked for advice about this and the advice was to ask permission from the author- I'm not too sure how quickly the author of an out of print recipe book, published forty years ago, is likely to get back to me- possibly not by the end of the day? But, looking at the recipe, I have removed the egg, added soya flour and veg oil, swapped cow's breast milk for plant milk, reduced the sugar, added more flour and dramatically reduced the cooking time, so does that make it my recipe now?

  You'll Need:
3 oz margarine
6 oz sugar
6 oz plain flour
equivalent to one egg: PLEASE READ: I don't mean egg replacer, just the equivalent to an egg e.g about 1.5 tbsp soya flour and 1.5 tbsp veg oil. We don't always bother with replacing the egg, actually.
4 tbsp peanut butter
1 level tsp sodium bicarb
pinch salt
I tbsp, more or less, soya/rice/nut milk

What You Do:
1. Cream marg and sugar.
2. Add the egg-equivalent, if using, and the peanut butter, beat in together.
3. Add flour (sifted, if you must..), sodium bicarb and salt.
4. Add smilk and mix again.
5. Turn on oven- Gas No 7, Electricity 425*/ 220*
6. Now, EITHER place teaspoonfuls of mixture 3 inches apart on a very lightly greased baking sheet and flatten with a fork, OR if you like your cookies to look a bit neater, as I do, roll out and use cookie cutters. If you take the cookie cutter option, you will probably need to add a little bit more flour to make it a little drier and easier to work with.
7. Cook for.. I'd say about 8 minutes, but our oven is a bit fierce! Anyway, keep a close eye on them after about 7 minutes! My cookies were probably in the oven half a minute too long today because I was washing up while they cooked and was enjoying myself so much that I lost track of the time..
8. Leave to cool and firm for a few minutes before removing from the baking sheet.
Enjoy, preferably in the company of a seasoned animal rights campaigner..!!