Ingredient Adventuring

I love cooking with new
ingredients.  Especially when they’re silly foodie ingredients that most people have probably never heard of.

So, even though I have very little time left at home, I caved and bought myself a new ingredient to cook with – coconut flour!

the spoils. not sure what that almond meal is doing in there, though...

In doing my obligatory recipe search, I stumbled on this great recipe for coconut flour chocolate chip cookies, which was exactly what I wanted to make.  However, I was not in the mood for banana-y cookies, and I wanted to experiment a little more.

using a new toy! one of the greatest inventions ever - the cookie scoop.

aren't they cute?

I found this recipe that I pretty much decided to roll with – they’re practically paleo cookies!

golden brown, oven fresh

I ended up making more than the original recipe since I took most of them to work with me to give to my co-workers.

Coco-nutty Chocolate Chip Cookies (gf)

makes about 30 two-bite cookies

• 1.5 cups coconut flour
• 3/4 cup sucanat (or granulated sugar of choice, but I love the flavor from the sucanat)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 pinches of salt
• 3/4 cup melted coconut oil or vegan butter substitute
• 1 cup non-dairy milk (use coconut for complete-ness)
• 5 large eggs – beaten
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 3/4 cup chocolate chips (or more =D)

Directions: pre heat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit – do NOT exceed this temperature if using coconut oil, it will smoke at a higher temperature and your cookies will be sad.

Combine all dry ingredients, making sure there are no lumps in the mixture.  Combine wet ingredients, using only half the milk. Add the wet to the dry and once you have a dough-y mixture, add more milk until it reaches a slightly sticky state.

Spoon onto a parchment lined baking sheet, form the dough into balls and flatten until they are about about 1.5cm thick.  Bake for 20 mins, then transfer to a cooling rack, and dig in!

bad lighting, delicious cookie.

Enter experiment number two: can I vegan-ize a recipe like this one? that is so egg-heavy?  I can try!

In that same recipe-search extravaganza, I found another fantastic coconut flour recipe from ChocolateAndCarrots.com – Coconut Flour Paleo Bread!

I’m not going to post a full recipe, as I only made one little substitution – I decided to use silken tofu as my egg substitute. My exact changes were:

• 1.5 cups of whipped or blended silken tofu instead of 6 eggs
• used agave to sweeten, but a little less than 2T
• baked for about 50-55 minutes

it came out misshapen - exactly how I formed it in the pan. Next time i'll make it prettier!

The taste is absolutely fantastic!  It is really dense, though, which is often the result of using silken tofu as an egg substitute.

and kind of fell apart as well - also should have left it in the pan to cool a little longer.

I guess it’s not really a ‘bread’ so much as a high-protein & high-fiber cake? One major plus side – this is actually really filling.  I was seriously surprised at how satisfied I was after one little slice of this guy.

crumblyum. a new word.

I like it, but it is very crumbly. **UPDATED: note, do NOT leave this sitting out for longer than a day, it starts to get bitter and spoil.**

With these I managed to use up the coconut oil, but I still have a bit of coconut flour left. Hm, what to do…

What’s your favorite way to use coconut flour? Share recipes please, I want to use up my last little bit!

Do you like buying new ingredients then finding recipes for them?

What are some favorite weird-foodie ingredient that you like to cook with?

**Update! check out my guest post over at spoonfulofsugarfree.com! Another recipe for ya **

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