What's Cookin' - Baked Falafel

Even though my first attempt at making falafel -- a wonderful Middle Eastern (not Greek, as I once erroneously thought) dish of fried spiced chickpeas -- two or three months ago was pretty much an unmitigated disaster in terms of presentation, the mixture of herbs and spices was so delicious that I've been craving it ever since. Unfortunately, my sesame allergy prevents me from procuring falafel at food establishments like most other people. (Much to my boyfriend's dismay, I attempted to get falafel at a restaurant once after making sure there was no sesame in the falafel itself ... but I forgot about the tahnini.) Tonight, I can resist the call of the falafel no longer and am going to give it another go.

Homemade falafels take #1, though yummy tasting, completely fell apart in the frying pan until it became a mess of brownish green slop nowhere close to even resembling the delicious falafel it aspired to be -- more fal-awful than falafel if you ask me (hardy har har). I attribute the disaster primarily to the use of canned versus dried then soaked chickpeas. I tried to remedy this deficiency for future falafel frying at my local Trader Joe's, but they only carry the canned type. (On a somewhat related note, they also don't carry arborio rice, which surprised me, TJ's being the precisely the type of place where yuppie, arborio-cooking types such as myself wouuld shop.) Not wanting to brave the alleged general unpleasantness of Berkeley Bowl (seriously, read the reviews on Yelp, it sounds like an acute version of foodie hell) or the prices at Whole Foods, I'm going to have to stick with the canned chickpeas. In order to avoid the previous sopping disaster, for homemade falafels take #2, I'm going to try baking them instead. I'll be using this recipe gleaned from the interwebs and will let you know how it goes and maybe even provide pictures. We'll see.