Tahina Maple Oatmeal Chip Cookies

These cookies are gluten free (provided, of course, that you use rolled oats that are certified gluten free). You can leave out the rolled oats (old fashioned oats) if you prefer or replace them with chopped walnuts.

The inspiration for these cookies was stuff I had left in my pantry before Passover that needed using up. I had finally used up all my flour and then realized that I had meant to use up my tahina in a cookie recipe. All I had left was a small amount of old fashioned oats.

My tahina cookies would have to be flourless, I realized. The classic flourless peanut butter cookie recipe was the perfect template for my flourless tahina cookies. Instead of sugar, I decided to use up some maple syrup. I added in the oats and the remains of  an open bag of mocha chips.

I spooned the cookies on a lined baking sheet, baked them at 350 degrees and hoped for the best.  I pulled them out from the oven, let them cool and then tasted one. They came out! They were good! That was a relief.

The cookies taste like a cross between peanut butter cookies and halvah. I you like halvah, you will love these cookies.

 

Raisin Bran Muffin Top Cookies

I needed to use up some silan (date syrup), dates, raisins, bran and whole wheat flour before Passover. The obvious choice was bran muffins.

My original idea was to replace the brown sugar in my favorite bran muffin with the silan. Googling for a rule of thumb on converting from brown sugar to silan, I came across a recipe on imamother.com for chocolate chip bran cookies. I came up with my own recipe for raisin bran muffin top cookies by combining the muffin recipe with the cookie recipe and then kind of winging it based on whatever I needed to use up in my pantry.

I was a little worried how my experiment would come out, but the cookies tasted deliciously like raisin bran cereal and had the texture and appearance of bran muffin tops.

A bonus: these cookies are high in fiber and have no refined sugar. In addition to having been a great way to use up pantry items before Pesach, these are also a great way to cleanse the body after Pesach.

 

Lemon Parfaits

My family loves meringue cookies, but making meringues leaves me with lots of leftover egg yolks.  What to do with the leftover yolks? Lemon curd!

It so happens that lemon curd is delicious spread on meringue cookies, but it is also very useful in other refreshing lemon desserts. One of my favorite lemon desserts is lemon angel pie, and the lemon mousse from that recipe is also very nice layered as a parfait.

Here is how I made my lemon parfaits for Passover. I bought small dessert cups known as “tasting cups” and filled them with layers of the lemon mousse, plain whipped topping, small dabs of lemon curd and Passover lady fingers.

You don’t have to use lady fingers for this recipe; cubed sponge cake will work just as well. In fact, if you have leftover bits of stale sponge cake, making parfaits is a great way to use them up. If you don’t want to make lemon curd, you can make raspberry mousse by mixing raspberry jam (to taste) with whipped topping. Or you can make chocolate mousse by whipping cocoa powder and sugar into whipped topping. You could layer leftover bits of brownies with cocoa mousse, whipped topping and chocolate syrup.

Chocolate Quinoa Cupcakes

Chocolate cupcakes made with quinoa? Yes. They are really good: moist, fluffy and intensely chocolate.

This is an adaption of a recipe from a 2009 cookbook called Quinoa 365, by Patrica Green and Carolyn Hemming. It also appears on the authors’ website, Patricia & Carolyn. This recipe has been making the rounds on the internet, appearing on quite a number of food blogs, all with rave reviews.

Cake on the Brain had the idea of making the batter into cupcakes to make the cake more sturdy and less squidgy. I thought this was an excellent idea and copied it. I don’t have the jumbo muffin pan that Cake on the Brain apparently possesses, so instead of getting 12 large cupcakes, I got 15 normal cupcakes.

I made very few changes to the original recipe. To make the recipe pareve, I replaced the butter with oil and the milk with coffee.

The recipe calls for either 2 cups of cooked quinoa or 2/3 cup dry quinoa cooked with 1 1/3 cups water. If you are making quinoa pilaf or salad, just make extra quinoa. I made a whole 12 ounce bag of quinoa (2 cups dried), which, when cooked, was enough for a quinoa salad plus this recipe.

Bonus: Patricia & Carolyn also have a recipe for Quinoa Lasagna that looks fantastic and would be great for Pesach.

Coconut Macaroon Tuiles

Imagine a cookie with the flavor of a coconut macaroon, with a undertone of salted caramel. Sort of like the flavor of Girl Scout Samoa/Caramel deLite cookies. Now imagine that this cookie has the crisp texture of a potato chip. That is what these tuiles taste like.

The original recipe comes from a Seattle-based pastry chef, Laurie Pfalzer. When she baked for the bistro at the Salish Lodge and Spa, she used the tuiles as a garnish for creme brulee and layered them with strawberries and whipped mascarpone.

I haven’t decided what to do with these cookies yet. Layer them with lemon curd/whipped cream/strawberries? Drizzle them with chocolate or sandwich them with chocolate (like Brussels cookies or lace cookies)?

The batter is extremely easy to mix up. The tricky part is shaping. The sticky batter must be patted out into thin rounds. This is fiddly work.

The original recipe called for baking the tuiles at 350 for 8-10 minutes, but my tuiles did not bake evenly that way. I had better luck baking them at 250 for a half hour.