I've been on the road for two weeks...

My first night in Seattle, I was going to make cookies but a friend of the friend I was staying with is allergic to gluten (flour, oats), dairy (semisweet chips), soy (Earth Balance), peanuts, corn, practically everything.  After consulting with Aurora, I made her mother's chocolate cake:

3 eggs

1 cup coconut milk (instead of buttermilk)

long squirt of honey

1-3/4 cup (gluten-free) flour

1-1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup cocoa

2 tsp baking soda

dash of salt

The recipe calls for a cup of coffee, which provides most of the cake's flavor, but I didn't have time for it, and the end result was bland but happily devoured with a Dagoba Lavender bar. Despite my precautions, the allergic friend had migraines for the rest of my stay in Seattle and is maybe still having them.

My only other (not quite) cookie experience before leaving the rainy city was a delicious cone of bourgeois cookies and cream ice cream from Molly Moon's -- peppermint ice cream with Girl Scout thin mint cookies -- mmm!

 

Then I headed south to San Francisco, where I set up a mobile cookie unit, carrying all the ingredients for the Chocolate Salty Oat knock-offs around with me in my backpack (except the eggs and butter which I left in the knowing hands of Providence to make available to me).  I made them three times, first for friends at UCSF, then for a dinner party in Berkeley and last for my family in Sonoma on the night before Thanksgiving, when we celebrate Hanukkah (we also got a mint chocolate chip and oreo cookie ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins decorated with a menorah).  The only change worth noting was in the batch for my family, I used a Trader Joe's Pound Plus dark chocolate bar chopped into chunks instead of chips.  The next day, my cousins chatted me up about the idea to start a cookie business, maybe out of a truck in New York -- I tried to explain to them that the secret ingredient to any successful cookie venture is Stewart's charm and good looks.

I brought the mobile cookie unit with me on the plane to Arizona, smuggling the 4 oz. bottle of vanilla in my back pocket through the security check.  They searched my backpack, feeling my flour for anything I might have hidden in there but without opening my Quaker Oats tube, where I hid my chips and baking powder.  I was nervous and talked a mile a minute about how a friend and I are looking for a space to open a bakery in New York.  Nothing was confiscated.

My family had many opinions on how to improve the recipe, some methodological, others about ingredients and proportions.  On Sunday in Flagstaff, where I am now, I made the recipe again with an extra 1/4 cup of butter.  They came out better but still too crumbly.  Next, I'm going to try replacing coconut flakes with coconut milk and/or try using melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder.