Stewart is spending four weeks in Spain. Just before he left, he and I made a triple half batch of chocolate chocolate chunk cookies for his elementary school class's second annual reunion get-together. Working with a tough oven and small baking trays, I burned my finger and not a few of the cookies, but the responsible substance using former classmates munched them happily through the foosball tournament, even with compliments and offers of financing for a bakery down the road -- one of Stewart's semi-former admirers asked us for a business plan, and so we are composing a poem. We added a Starburst candy to the center of one cookie, which we marked with an X and intended for David to eat, but to our dismay it circulated through the party and was picked up by an innocent bystander (sorry Anthony).

Five days later I was in Providence for New Years Eve, where I made vegan chocolate chip cookies with walnuts for the assembled revelers. I started with two sticks of Earth Balance. Earlier, at Whole Foods, I asked my friend if she had brown sugar and she said she uses molasses and sugar (her girlfriend refuted this claim but supported experimentation), so in the place of 1 cup of brown sugar I used 3/4 cup vegan white sugar and 1/4 cup blackstrap molasses (blackstrap, according to the baking science textbook I got for Christmas, is "inedible" but we beg to differ) -- I am convinced that this is a breakthrough, I would use maybe a different kind of molasses and less, but I have long been suspicious of brown sugar and hope that greater control and independence will result from the change. The dough turned dark brown and had a definite molasses flavor but after baking mellowed (in taste, not color, they were almost as dark as chocolate cookies). To replace the egg, I made an applesauce of five Golden Delicious, five Granny Smith, two Honeycrisp and two Bartlett pears -- the cookies had nice bits of peel showing and held together perfectly. And they were a hit. It was a good night for baking overall, including pistachio-fennel-apricot bread, cornbread, vegan carrot cake cupcakes and whole wheat dough veggie (cheese-less) pizzas.