Beet-pink Tropical cookies. With Rice Crisp cereal. Otherwise known as the PPK Vegan Chopped dessert challenge.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is a brilliant lady. Which she already knows. Anyways, she and a few others set up this Vegan!Chopped series and this round is the dessert. (I didn't participate in the entree round-I wasn't sure what to do and I was also away most of the weekend)

But dessert? Dessert is totally my thing. I mean.. I made up brownies but screwed up and it somehow became a delicious cake. Still not sure how I managed that. But I can do dessert. At least on the baked good side. Ask me about pudding or parfaits or I dunno, something else like that, you're going to get a blank look. I can do cake. I can do cookies, I can do brownies.

Especially cookies.

So! On to the ingredients! The four needed ingredients are:

Beets
Crisped Rice cereal
Fresh mango
and unsweetened flaked coconut.

I made, well, I don't have a name for them, but I suppose you could come up with one. Let it not be Beet-Coconut-Mango-Rice Cookies. That'd be booring.

But really kind of what I did. I got a 'banana mango' according to the little sticker on it from Market basket and it was actually ripe. Which I was really glad about because I didn't really have time tomorrow to do this. I peeled it with my potato peeler cut all the ripe bits up and tossed them in the blender. I blenderized for a minute or two until was basically mango puree. Smooth, delicious sweet mango puree. I mean. Uh.. I totally didn't sneak tastes of it. Not at all!  

I had two rather old tiny soft beets in the fridge. I think they were ok. I'll let you know if I get sick or something. Anyways, I used the finest grater I had and grated them up until I had about two tablespoons full of shredded beet, tossed them in a bowl, added about a quarter cup of melted earth balance, a quarter cup of applesauce and a quarter cup of unsweetened almond milk, stirred it all up until it looked like this:

I added brown sugar, cane sugar and a little over a cup of crispy rice cereal, stirred it up (If I were doing it differently, I might add the crispy rice cereal at the end instead) and then added the dry ingredients-king arthur white flour (approximately 2.5 cups), baking powder (probably could have added another half teaspoon) and salt, as well as about 2 tablespoons of crunched up coconut flakes (unsweetened of course). When the mix was the right ish consistency for cookies, I rolled/dropped them onto my cookie sheet. They looked like this: 

While they baked, I made the frosting with about 2 tablespoons melted earth balance, a whole lot of confectioner's sugar and another quarter cup of the mango puree. Nom. I made it rather thick and then let it sit while the cookies finished baking and cooling. Then I moved over to the table so that I could frost the cookies with the mango frosting and dust them with the unsweetened coconut. 

I frosted and then pressed the frosted cookie into the coconut and out they came. Beautiful. Here's some food porn shots of them:

I have had two so far and I find that they are quite delicious. I think they're a little on the tough side, though I'm not quite positive about how to fix that. I might leave a little of the flour out and a little less crispy rice (as well as add it at the end rather than the middle). I was a little worried before they baked that they'd be *too* sweet, but the cookie itself was sweet, but not overly so and the frosting and coconut really complimented the flavors. I don't the beet flavor really shone through and it'd be neat to more prominently favor that flavor, though, again, I'm not quite sure how. The crispy rice definitely made the cookie a little bit more interesting (good interesting, as in multiple) texture wise, although I think it would've gone better if I'd added them at the end so they didn't sog up and break down as much. The things we learn on the first time 'round. Anyways! I hope you enjoyed my photo tour of my attempt at combining these ingredients!