Author: PatagoniaLlami

The struggle is real when it comes to finding delicious desserts that I can eat.  Not only am I pretty strictly gluten free, I have also cut back on eating sweets as of late.  You see, I have a bit of a sweet tooth and fall into the bad habit of consuming excess amounts of cookies and candy during the holiday season.  This past year was no exception and with everything going on in my body right now I made the decision to cut out unnecessary desserts.  Smart plan, right?  Sure, until I’m hit with a major craving and give in to it.

Knowing that I would inevitably cave to the urge to eat sugar at some point, I began searching for ways to satisfy my cravings in a healthier way.  I initially tried replacing cookies with fruit but that didn’t quite do the trick.  Enter chickpea blondies.  Yes, you read that right.  Chickpea blondies.

I know the concept of a dessert made from chickpeas sounds far fetched, but I promise you that the addition of peanut butter, maple syrup, vanilla, and chocolate cancels out the majority of the taste of beans.  You’re left with a slightly sweet and spongy cake-like dessert that satisfies your sweet tooth and is chock-full of health benefits.

The powerful little chickpeas provide important daily doses of fiber and protein and even aid in lowering blood pressure when consumed on a regular basis.  Yep, you heard it here first…eating these chickpea based blondies on a daily basis actually qualifies as good for you.  Who knew?

Confession time…when I first tried the recipe I’m sharing with you today I was NOT a fan.  I think I actually said, “bleh!” and proclaimed that I would never eat such a thing, let alone put it on my blog. Then a funny thing happened after the blondies set overnight; they became edible.  Not only did they become edible, they became really GOOD!  Rich, moist, buttery…you’d never know the primary ingredient was beans.

This delicious “dessert” is definitely going to become a staple in my house.  Not only do these blondies keep my sugar cravings at bay, they also provide me with crucial health benefits and actually aid my body in healing!

Vegan Cutting Chai is a tasty way to enjoy the flavor of Bombay in the comfort of your own home. This sweet, spicy beverage defies all common sense about how to make tea, but it’s the most delicious drink ever.

You might also enjoy these recipes for masala chai and vegan cardamom iced tea.

Cutting Chai is an integral chapter in the story of Bombay street food — the drink you use to wash down those hot, spicy, deep-fried street snacks like vada pav, or pav bhaji, or samosas. This is not a Chai Latte or whatever wimpy version of tea flavored with spices you might be used to here in the West. Cutting Chai is as badass as it gets. It’s a thick, milky, too sweet, too hot, gorgeous mess that could not have originated anywhere but within the belly of this thick, too hot, too noisy, and gorgeous city.

For decades, chai has been sold by vendors who line Bombay’s sidewalks, usually in busy working or shopping areas, to keep the city buzzing and ticking. It’s the drink you catch up with old friends over, the drink you share with your smoking buddy to tamp down the first, acrid puff of a cigarette, the drink you glug down before an important test or in the middle of a busy work day to keep your brain working at top speed.

To understand what cutting chai is, or where it gets its strange name, you have to imagine the street lingo of Bombay: a bastardization of Marathi, the language spoken by the city’s natives, Hindi, the language that binds together people from around India who make Bombay their home, and English, a language most of middle class India conducts official business in. If you’ve watched a Bollywood movie with an unshaven “hero” who’s followed everywhere by a couple of unshaven lackeys, you’ve probably heard it, even if you couldn’t tell the difference.

The word “cutting” comes, of course, from English, and the source of its use here goes to the essentially frugal nature of Indians. If you are not Indian and don’t already know this, we Indians (and Indian-born) are naturally excellent at stretching a rupee or a dollar, no matter the hardships we have to endure in the process.

Picture two Indians at a tea stall (why go to a restaurant and pay ten times more for two cups of chai, just because they put in a door and an air-conditioner unit?). They’d likely stand or sit on one of the rickety wooden benches right by the dust-smothered road, car horns blaring in their ears, pedestrians almost knocking them over, sweat running down their faces in little rivulets, all the time keeping up a fluid, animated conversation. When the waiter, a young boy who also serves as an assistant and gofer for the adult who’s actually making the tea, wanders by, one or both would yell at him: “Ek cutting chai laa re!” (Hey, one cutting chai!).

Niceties like “thank you” and “please” are never uttered — nor expected — in Bombay, especially on the streets.

The boy will return with the tea in one small, ribbed glass tumbler with another small, ribbed glass tumbler turned upside down to cover it. He will deftly divide the tea, “cutting” one glass into two half portions for each person. It’s the perfect amount to get your brain buzzing again, you pay for just one glass of tea, and who needs the AC?

The popularity of chai in Bombay might make you wonder why the people of a city, where temperatures regularly swim upwards of a hundred degrees, would be addicted to a beverage that requires an asbestos tongue to drink. And yes, it sounds counterintuitive and rather silly. But science shows that drinking hot beverages in hot weather actually cools you off, because when your tongue’s receptors sense the heat, your brain asks your body to sweat more, which in turn cools you down. See? The chaiwallas and chai drinkers of India have known that for decades, way before the researchers did.

If you are a tea drinker looking to brew yourself some cutting chai this summer, you first have to set aside everything you know about how to make tea. There are no cute li’l teapots here, or kettles, or whatever it is you use to make your fancy-pants tea and then sip it daintily out of a tea cup.

You’re not supposed to let tea leaves ever boil in the water, right? Wrong. You have to let the tea boil away like crazy. Along with the milk and the sugar. And there are no tea bags, mind you. You just dunk the tea leaves into the water in heaping spoonfuls, and it doesn’t have to be an elegant tea with a pedigree from the slopes of Darjeeling. In fact, the legend goes that chai is made so sweet and so milky to mask the rather inferior quality of the tea, but who cares when it all tastes so good at the end. Besides, yaar, it’s street food — it’s meant to be chaalu.

If you’re someone who likes to drink your tea black or if you like your milk, dairy or not, on the side, you’ve got it all wrong. Milk is not optional here, and neither is the sugar. You need both, and tons of it. Remember, if it’s not too sweet, too milky and too hot, it just isn’t chai.

The color of the resulting brew is somewhat like the muddy water that pools on Bombay’s streets during the monsoons. If you are on the streets of Bombay (lucky you), the glasses have probably been washed by getting dunked into the same bucket of water that has already been dunked with 100 other dirty glasses today. But the tea is delicious. Oh, so delicious.

There are a few other things to remember when you make or order a cutting chai. Grab the glass by the rim or else your fingers will burn to a stub. Drink the tea while it’s as hot as you can handle it because there’s nothing as pathetic as a glass of cold chai. And whatever you do, don’t call this a “chai tea”. Chai is tea in Hindi, so that is like calling a potato a “potato potato”. Cute when a three-year-old says it, but silly when an adult does, see? And I don’t care if Starbucks thinks it’s right. It just isn’t.

I haven’t had cutting chai on the streets of Bombay in 20 years because nursing a Delhi belly during our usually hectic travel schedule when we visit India is not an option (Desi got a nasty bout of gastroenteritis once after drinking chai at a railway tea stall), and, of course, the chai made by India’s street vendors is also not vegan. But making a vegan version of a Cutting Chai at home is not difficult at all.

You do need a thick milk for this, so most nut milks will not work. I like using vanilla soymilk which is thick enough for a decent cup of Cutting Chai, although you cannot let the milk come to a rolling boil the way you would if using dairy milk because the soy milk will separate. If you can’t use soy for any reason, you could try a coconut creamer — some brands I’ve tried do not have a pronounced coconut flavor, and that’s important because coconut and chai will not mix.

You do need to serve cutting chai in little glass tumblers, or it’s not the same. These cute little ribbed glasses, so like the ones chaiwallahs in Bombay use, are from Ikea and they look pretty authentic although they were probably made in China. But hey, maybe the Indian ones are too. Serve some quintessentially Indian snacks, like vegan nankhatai, samosas or vegetable pakora, with the tea.

So get some water boiling, and bring out the tea leaves. If your days are anywhere near as hot as these pre-summer days we’ve been bearing with in the Washington area, you need that cup of vegan Cutting Chai to cool you off.

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by Kathy Patalsky · updated: Mar 30, 2020 · published: Mar 24, 2011 · About 3 minutes to read this article. Leave a Comment

These Easy Awesome Chocolate-Covered Animal Cookies are just that. Easy and awesome. This is a fun kitchen project filled with sprinkles, cute animal shapes, melted silky chocolate and parchment paper fun. No oven required. No ingredients to measure. Three ingredients! Try these cuties today!..

Vegan Animal Crackers/Cookies. I spotted a giant tub of *vegan* animal cookies at Trader Joe’s – so I had to grab them. These cute little cookies were what inspired me to make this recipe.

I loved those pink and white creamy bite frosted animal cookies as a kid. I liked the white ones better than the pink ones. But alas, these frosted animal crackers are not vegan. And since I knew my husband would go gaga for dark chocolate animal cookies – that’s what I did.

Chocolate. I wanted a super bold, not too sweet coating for my cookies. So I grabbed some easy melt baking circles from TJ’s as well. They are pretty much 100% cocoa mass. However, after taste-testing the cookies I thought they were a tad too bold. So I did another round with basic vegan chocolate chips. I liked these better, but the chocolate was a bit thicker to work with. Funny enough, my dark chocolate loving husband loved the straight up baking chocolate cookies. The darker the better I guess. The cookies do have a subtle sweetness which enhances the bold chocolate.

Sprinkles. Vegan sprinkles are out there. True, most mainstream baking sprinkles are made from vegan ingredients (sugar, chemicals, artificial stuff etc) – the only thing you may be skeptical of is the food dye sources – which you can’t really confirm from a package sometimes. To be safe, go with the vegan-certified sprinkles available at Whole Foods or online. I had some basic sprinkles in my pantry – so I used those. But I made half my batch “non-sprinkled” for me since I’m not a fan of non-vegan food coloring. I use my India Tree and plant-based sources every chance I get.

OK, enough of the technical stuff. Here’s the fun part..

Easy Awesome Chocolate-Covered Animal Cookies


vegan, makes 2 cups of cookies

1 ¾ cups vegan animal cookies


medium bowl of melted chocolate – about ⅔ cup – (baking, dark, semisweet all optional)


round sprinkles – or your fave variety

parchment paper-lined baking sheets (so the sprinkles don’t roll onto the floor!)

Directions:

1. In a double broiler, start melting your chocolate via steam. Do not burn it.

2. Line a few baking sheets with parchment paper.

3. About 3 cookies at a time – drop them into the melted chocolate and remove with a fork. Place the coated cookies directly on the parchment paper. Then grab your sprinkles and dash a few on top of the still-soft chocolate coating.

4. Repeat with all your cookies.

5. Place your cookies in the fridge or freezer to harden. I like to store mine in the freezer – they keep longer that way – and it’s easy to grab a few for a treat.

Enjoy!!

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure.

These Spider Web Halloween Cookies are easy and festive. Perfect for kids to create, a Halloween party, or for school treats. 

Spider Web Halloween Cookies

Now that it’s officially fall, I am fully in the Halloween spirit! I hope y’all love all the spooky treats I’m cooking up this year. These spider web Halloween cookies are so hauntingly delicious and so simple to make. I am ecstatic with how elegant they turned out.

Halloween Cookies without Cookie Cutters

My kids love helping me in the kitchen, especially when it involves chocolate. The cookies are very forgiving and even if your chocolate technique isn’t perfect, you can turn any mistake into another spider. You could easily serve this at a party or make them for a fun treat. Either way, all the ghosts and ghouls will be clamoring for these festive spider web Halloween cookies.

None of my Halloween cookies need cookie cutters. I save my cookie cutters for Christmas cookie making. I try to make each holiday special by doing different things for each one. You’ll see my list of Halloween cookies and treats below (right above the recipe) that don’t need any cookie cutters! 

How to Make Halloween Cookie Icing

Depending on the type of cookies you are making there are different types of icings needed. For these cookies, I simply used melted chocolate and white chocolate with a little shortening. It will harden as it cools so you have time to drizzle the white chocolate and spread it with a toothpick to make it look like a spider’s web.

However, if you want to make detailed halloween cookies with a hard icing, try my easy royal icing recipe. It’s fantastic for cookies and even for building gingerbread houses (I know, I know…wrong holiday, but still…it’s great). And it has no eggs!

The Best Sugar Cookies

I might be a little biased, but I love this sugar cookie recipe. It has instructions for regular sugar cookies, but it has instructions for gluten free and/or dairy free cookies. The best part is that the dough can be made in advance and frozen for months. Just pull out what you need, thaw, and bake! DELISH! 

How to Make Homemade Halloween Cookies

Homemade Halloween cookies are so much fun to make because they can be creepy and not perfect.

Aren’t the little eyeball cookies cute, too? My son loved holding the finished cookies up to his own eyes, so don’t be surprised if you see these sweet treats staring back at you! In addition to these Spider Web cookies, here are the cookies in this picture:

Boo Brownies


Witches Brooms


Eyeball Cookies


Halloween Sandwich Cookies

About Vaishali

Hi! I’m Vaishali, a journalist turned food blogger. At Holy Cow Vegan I share easy, tasty recipes made with clean, wholesome ingredients that the entire family can enjoy.

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1. Line a 9-inch baking pan with foil; spray foil with cooking spray.

2. In large saucepan, mix powdered sugar, cocoa, and salt. Add almondmilk and buttery sticks. Cook over medium-low heat until buttery sticks melt and mixture is all moistened, stirring frequently. Cook and stir until mixture is smooth.

3. Remove from heat. Beat with spoon until mixture loses its shine, about 5 minutes. Stir in almond flavor and almonds.

4. Spread in pan. Cool completely, about 2 hours.

Tips

Nutritional Analysis per piece: Calories 160, Calories from Fat 45, Total Fat 5g (8% DV), Saturated Fat 1.5g (8% DV), Trans Fat 1g, Cholesterol 0mg (0% DV), Sodium 75mg (3% DV), Carbohydrates 29g (10% DV), Dietary Fiber 1g (4% DV), Sugars 26g, Protein 1g, Vitamin A 0%, Vitamin C 0%, Calcium 2%, Iron 2%.

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Nutritional Facts:

Calories
130

Fat
9 g

Saturated Fat
5 g

Sodium
50 mg

Carbs
12 g

Fiber
0 g

Protein
1 g