Village Photos

If you are reading through my blog and pictures are missing they should be back eventually. Village Photos has been down now for about 4 months I think. I am so upset because I have been paying for a service that I am not receiving. I am assuming they will see some lawsuits at the end of this. You can't have people pay for a service that does not exist. First their site was just down. I only got information from other people complaining on an ebay message board. Now I see a notice when I go to their page. They have made up a lot of excuses but it's come down to them moving their facility to a new location. The problem is their site has said they hope to be up in a week for a month now. I am beginning to lose hope. I have linked my pictures to my blog through them for a very long time now. Hopefully there won't be too many dead links. Just know that they should be back up. I just do not know for sure when.

Dairy Free Chocolate Chip Cookies. Seriously!

Since Gabbi has had this allergy to milk I have had to be quite creative. I have made her wacky cake which is dairy free. If you don't know what that is, you need to google it or go to allrecipes.com. There are many variations but I have my favorite. I have always wished Gabbi could have a freshly made chocolate chip cookie. That seemed like an impossible thing to whip up since it requires butter and chocolate chips. I managed to find the way to do it today! Here is my "secret".

First look for this at your local grocery store:

 The above is milk free. It does contain soy. The chips are made from chocolate liquor and cocoa butter which is vegan. It DOES say to add butter, however I substituted 1 cup Crisco plus 2 tbsp of water for the butter. The back of the container of Crisco says that this is the substitution for 1 cup of butter which is what these cookies require.

This is my happy little camper tearing into her cookies :)

And this is the actual cookie. They turned out nice golden brown. The texture is a little more gritty than a regular chocolate chip but great regardless. I thought they were wonderful and a great substitution for the milky alternative. :)