baking

Some of my favorite childhood Christmas memories are of the holiday cookies. Each member of my dad's side of the family would make one or two types of cookies each year and bring them to my grandmother's house. In the basement were two long folding tables with endless tins of cookies of all types. After dinner, my grandmother would let us go downstairs and pick whatever Christmas cookies we wanted.

We also got to participate in making some of the cookies. As children, that usually meant roll-out sugar cookies that we got to decorate.

Tender cinnamon-caramel apples paired with a sweet and crunchy oat streusel topping create the best apple crisp ever! It's 100% vegan, and can be made gluten-free with one substitution.

Apple crisp is the dessert I find myself making all fall and winter long. It has all the flavors I love in apple pie, but is so much easier to prepare! Plus, it's great for sharing and bringing along to holiday parties and gatherings.

I made eight versions of this apple crisp before I got it just right. I've tested it with multiple methods and ingredients, so I'm 100% sure that any apple crisp fan is going to absolutely love this recipe. No one will ever know it's vegan if you don't tell them!

Many years ago, I had a small baking business selling cupcakes at pop-up markets. I was obsessed with creating the perfect cupcake recipes, and I was known to most people as "the cupcake lady."

Now that I'm vegan, I can't use those recipes anymore. But lucky for you, I've been in the kitchen working hard at making vegan versions of some of those recipes! Chocolate is always my first choice of flavor for any sweet food, so the first recipe I've veganized is, of course, my famous chocolate cupcake recipe. I made these over and over, tweaking amounts and ingredients until I had them just right. I knew I finally had a winner when I almost made myself sick from eating so many of them.

A few weeks ago, I woke up with three words in my head: cookie butter frosting. I'm not saying that God herself tasked me with making a vegan recipe for cake frosting for you. But I'm also not saying that she didn't.

For those of you who don't know, I used to sell cupcakes many years ago. So veganizing my cupcake recipes has been on my to-do list for a while. But cookie butter frosting wasn't ever on my radar. I've seen some recipes for traditional (non-vegan) cookie butter frosting, but so far I haven't seen any vegan ones!

As a vegan, I have been chocolate brownie-deprived for a very long time. I've tried many vegan brownie recipes, and none quite stacked up to the brownies I made from a box as a child, with the chewy edges and fudgy middle. Until now.

These are hands-down the best vegan brownies I've ever had. With a rich chocolate flavor, these fudgy brownies are not only the best vegan brownies I've had, they may be the best brownies period.