Soph’s raising money for Epilepsy Research UK by running the Royal Park Half Marathon. She’s also doing some bake sales at her work to help raise more money, so each week we’ll be baking for that.

This week I’m doing my chocolate tahini cookies, but I’m doing a vegan variant using vegetable fat (shortening), as it’s always good to have a variety of dietary preferences catered for at bake sales.

Well supposedly vegan. The sodding cocoa powder says ‘may contain milk’…

I cooked for 16 minutes and took them out… but they were very soft, hand’t craked like before, and didn’t harden during cooling, so I popped them back in for another eight minutes, and it didn’t seem any better. Apparently veg shortening behaves differently to butter…

So I made way for Soph to make carrot & seed flapjacks. She was considering going vegan too, using coconut oil rather than butter, but we decided we didn’t know if it would set properly for flapjacks, so it’s just regular butter flapjacks. Which is probably a good idea after the issues with the tahini cookies!

After Soph’s flapjacks were done I popped my cookies back in for another 10 minutes, this time at 180C fan rather than 160C fan. They’re just about holding together… we we’ll see what they’re like in the morning.

I was planning on doing them again for the Macmillan Coffee Morning‎ on Friday at work. I think I’ll revert to using butter!