Last night I baked a couple of the dumpling squash that we grew in the garden this summer. As eating squash they have a dry and meaty flesh which works beautifully with spicy dishes and a nice fluffy rice pilaf. Oh, and they also taste like candy: incredibly, almost cloyingly, sweet; so much so that the leftovers had to be showcased in a dessert-designated treat. This recipe, therefore, is a crunchified-remake of the pumpkin oatmeal cookies from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s first book, Vegan with a Vengeance. They’re nice to nosh on alongside a cup of hot tea mid-afternoon. Or to feed a toddler at breakfast without too much guilt.
Yield: 4 dozen cookies
What you need:
- 2 cups whole spelt or whole wheat flour
- 1 1/3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground mace
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/3 cup sunflower oil
- 2 tablespoons blackstrap molasses (if you go organic on nothing else in the recipe, at least try and do so here)
- 1 cup puréed squash (dumpling or kabocha works best; you may need to add some water to the cooked squash and then blender it all together if the flesh is too dry, you need a thick and creamy purée here. If using pumpkin or a squash that isn’t very sweet rather than those suggested, you may want to add an extra 1/4 cup of Sucanat or coconut sugar to the batter)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
- 1-1/2 tablespoons ground flaxseeds
- 1 cup chopped walnuts (or other nut, pecans are particularly decadent)
- 1/2 cup raisins (oh, and insert that same note about the organic from the blackstrap molasses here)
What you do:
- Preheat the oven to 350F.
- In a large bowl, mi the flour, oats, soda, salt, cinnamon and mace.
- In a smaller bowl, whisk together all the ingredients except for the walnuts and raisins.
- Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix. Fold the raisins and walnuts in.
- Drop by the tablespoonful onto parchment or sil-pat lined pans. Flatten them a little as necessary to get a spiffy-looking cookie.
- Bake for 12 minutes, rotating pans half-way if baking more than one (and multi-level) at a time.
- Let cool in the pan a wee bit and then transfer to wire racks.