Canadian bakin'

A few recent developments led me to make today's baked good. The most notable influence was the presence of ground flaxseeds in my house. As you may recall, I purchased these for use in vegan chocolate chip cookies. In anticipation of preparing further vegan or otherwise weird baked goods, I had also obtained ingredients like coconut oil and agave.

Despite my residual lack of enthusiasm about cookies (or anything) that do not contain butter, eggs and sugar, today I felt inspired by all these new members of my baking cabinet. I spent a few hours (just kidding...) researching vegan recipes, as I figured these were more likely to call for "healthy" things like agave and flax. Unfortunately, most of the recipes I perused required even more ingredients new to my bake-cabulary (xantham gum? really?). Feeling unready to branch quite this far out, I decided to try my luck with flaxseed. A google search of "flaxseed baking" lead me to none other than flaxmatters.com (yes.). Fascinated, I clicked on a few recipes on the site. Overall underwhelmed, I found that one recipe stood out; it was for Farmland Flax Cookies (yes.). The recipe made 108 cookies, and the proportions were not easily halved (3 eggs, 1 1/3 cups of butter, etc.). I entertained the idea of dividing the recipe into 1/3, when a final desperate search led me to this magical online haven: www.canadianliving.com

This site provided me with the same recipe, but 1/3 the size of the original, and without a freezing-the-dough-and-waiting component (one which tends to put me off a recipe). Anyway, I adjusted slightly, adding some whole wheat flour (if you're making a "healthy" cookie, you might as well go all out), and, in the final batch, throwing in some chopped chocolate covered cherries (ha, you thought I was serious about being healthy). Lastly, I'm pretty sure the original recipe wanted whole flaxseeds. Since all I had was ground ones and my disdain for actually following recipes as written (never failed me yet!) is substantial, I didn't stress about this detail.

Far from the Farmland Flax Cookies, eh?

* 1/2 cup brown sugar

* 1/2 cup butter, room temp

* 1/3 cup granulated sugar

* 1 egg

* 1/2 tsp vanilla

* 1/2 cup all purpose flour

* 1/2 cup whole wheat flour

* 3/4 cup quick cooking rolled oats

* 2/3 cup ground flaxseeds

* 1 tsp baking soda

*optional: 1/2 cup chopped chocolate covered dried fruit, or chocolate chips, or anything delicious

Preheat oven to 350˚.

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla (feel free to pour) and mix well. Pour the flours, flaxseed, oats and baking soda on top and combine well. If adding any additional ingredients do so now.

For the first round of baking, I used two cookie sheets, and placed each on a separate rack. Usually this works ok, even without switching the sheets halfway through. The baking is slightly uneven, but for the most part I have not found this method to be catastrophic. This time, though, I observed what the original recipe recommended and switched the two sheets after 6 minutes. As it were, this might have been a minute too late. Although the cookies took about 11 minutes total to bake, the batch that started out on the bottom rack ended up mildly burned underneath. Nothing severe, but if there is one thing I pride myself on, it is my compulsive underbaking, which generally helps me avoid burning (pineapple upside down cake aside...). The moral is: probably just do one batch at a time, or make sure the lower rack is as high as possible in the oven, and that you switch the baking sheets early enough. For the record, the other sheet that went in at the same time came out perfectly.

Ending note for Dani: I was not planning on sampling these cookies until after supper. Upon seeing them piled on a plate, though, golden brown and glimmering with butter, I could not resist. I tried half of a cherry-filled one, and promptly polished off the other half without any further adieu. In other words, these cookies are stellar. Maybe farms in Canada DO have something to offer the world...