Eats cake for breakfast.: Baking with a vengence

I have a dream. It involves peanut butter, as all dreams should. There's chocolate, banana and marshmallow too. It's called a fluffernutter, and if I could eat one everyday, I would. Friday I was brainstorming cookies with my friend Maggie (there, are you happy? You have partial credit now!) . I was expounding my love of peanut butter in a manner that didn't make me look lik a freak, and came off looking like an obsessed psycho. I probably shouldn't have mentioned that I would bathe in it if I could. Anywho, all of the sudden, I shouted "fluffernutter cookie!" and I knew it should be done. So I did it. I wanted to make a peanut butter banana cookie, but didn't know if I should go for crunchy, if possible with the banana, or cakey. I knew I wanted to make it a sandwich cookie though. So, I pulled out La Dolce Vegan, knowing there was a decent small batch peanut butter cookie in the book, and made that one. It was popular among my Christmas cookie tray. I used pureed banana and soymilk as the egg replacer, and also as a sub. for the oil. I wanted as much banana flavor as possible. What I got was a cakey cookie that could have used more peanut butter, but was good nonetheless. Pic:

This was only the first step of the journey to cookie perfection. Here's the recipe, with all my changes in parenthesis:

Wolffie's Peanut Butter Cookies (La Dolce Vegan by Sarah Kramer)

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

egg replacer to equal 1 egg (1/4 cup pureed banana)

1/4 water (I used soymilk, which I added with the banana in the blender)

1/2 cup peanut butter (I used half crunchy and half smooth)
1/4 cup oil (1/4 cup pureed banana)

3/4 cup sugar (I used 1/2 cup demerara and 1/4 cup organic sugar)

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

This is all me now:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a medium bowl, stir together flour, baking soda and salt. Add pureed banana, peanut butter, sugar and vanilla, and stir until well combined. The dough is wet, so you can't roll it with your hands. Spoon it into mounds on your cookie sheet. They don't spread too much, so make sure they are the size you want. Bake for approximately 8 minutes, until edges are starting to brown. Let them cool for a couple of minutes on the sheet, then transfer to cooling rack to cool further. I got 18 cookies.

Next time I might bake them at a lower temp. Since the cookies came out nice a cakey, I decided to make them into fluffernutter whoopie pies. I have been eyeballing the whoopie pies in My Sweet Vegan for awhile, but I have never gotten around to making them. I decided to use the recipe for the creme filling in that book for these pies. It's just powdered sugar, shortening, vanilla and soymilk whipped together until light and fluffy, your basic frosting type deal. My hand mixer went kaput in the middle of making the creme, so I ended up beating it by hand for several minutes, and it turned out fine. Though, my arm is a little sore. I'll be feeling that one in the morning. Maybe I should go back to the gym...

I chilled the creme for a bit in the fridge, and decided to melt some semi-sweet chocolate chips to put in the middle of the sandwiches. My initial thoughts were to dip the sandwiches in chocolate, which I may still do at some point. I also pondered drizzling them with the chocolate. I will try both in the future, but for now the chocolate and creme filling worked out great.

I pulled the creme out of the fridge and made some magic. Proof: