Arrowroot and Rosewater

I've had a number of vegan baking adventures since I last posted: lemon bars, chocolate chip cookies, pistachio rosewater cookies, applesauce oat bran muffins, and almond quinoa muffins. The lemon bars were the most difficult recipe (due to all that agar boiling) but yielded the best results. Interestingly, the filling called for arrowroot powder, which is an easily digestible starch extracted from the root of a plant. Like corn starch and tapioca flour, its purpose is to thicken sauces and fillings. I had a small packet of arrowroot in my cupboard due to curiosity, but it turned out that the name is more exciting than the actual product, as arrowroot is a white, odorless, tasteless powder. The crust for the lemon bars used a hefty amount of Earth Balance margarine and resulted in a mess of crumbs, which surprisingly formed a crust right in the pan when I pushed down on them. Again, the agar caused the bars to congeal into wonderfully discreet entities; there was no filling oozing out into the pan. Despite a few agar-related gelatinous blobs in the filling, the confectioner's sugar-dusted lemon bars were delicious and impressed people at the potluck, and I would have had no idea that they were vegan.

The pistachio rosewater cookies were a middle-eastern treat that I baked for dessert following a pistachio apricot couscous dish (for which I used middle-eastern couscous, which is a larger and chewier grain than the kind generally available in a box). Oddly enough, the rosewater was only around three bucks at Whole Foods and came in a nondescript bottle with a few French words and no ingredients listed on the label. An internet search revealed that rosewater is a byproduct of the rose oil extraction process, and really is just as it sounds: roses and water. The result was delicious, very mildly perfumey-smelling cookies, and the nearly unidentifiable taste that wasn't the pistachios or lime zest was the rosewater.