Carob Chip Cookies

Another weekend, another failed bid on a house, another baked good. What else is new? This Saturday we looked at a cute little house in Mount Washington. Then we picked up paninis from the local cafe to eat in a park while watching an adorable toddler playing with a stick. Next we walked through the neighborhood, enjoying the 74-degree sunshine and the vistas all along Grandview Avenue overlooking the Monongahela River, the Point, downtown Pittsburgh, and the Ohio River. We even got to experience a classic set of Pittsburgh steps (left); this is "Well Street." Below is the mural at the cafe of a stork delivering baskets of coffee beans from different countries.

In the late afternoon, I pulled up David Attenborough's A Life on This Planet while baking carob chip cookies. Funnily enough, just that morning I had read an article shared by a friend on Facebook about "how carob traumatized a generation" of children in the 1970s, when their parents jumped on the health-food bandwagon: "Poor carob ... [i]t never wanted to be chocolate in the first place." Dear Husband had purchased the imitation chips because he gets migraine headaches with even a little exposure to caffeine, so this was an experiment to let him enjoy a classic treat without suffering for it later. 

I decided to use the recipe on bag instead of the usual Toll House one. Interestingly, although it claimed to be "allergy friendly," it still called for milk and an egg. I substituted an equivalent amount of applesauce for the milk but left in the egg and used brown sugar instead of date sugar. After saving a couple spoonfuls of dough for DH so he could have the privilege of risking Salmonella poisoning, I chilled the dough balls on the cookie sheets for a few minutes in the freezer. Maybe I should have pulled the cookies out a few minutes sooner so the edges didn't get a crispy, but all in all, a passable substitute for chocolate chip cookies.