Christmas Cookies!

A local cat shelter makes up trays of Christmas goodies to give to a few vet clinics around town that help them out throughout the year. This year they asked if I would be willing to donate some goodies. Since I had my brand new copy of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar in my hot little hands I jumped at the chance.

First up, the Lazy Samoas. I’ve never had a Samoa before, but I really liked these. I’m not even a huge coconut fan and I thought they were pretty good. My dough was a little dry though which made making the hole in the middle a tad problematic. I ended up just making a tiny indent in some of them, not the finger-sized hole that the recipe recommends.

I also made the Nutty Wedding Cookies. These are really good if you are looking for a cookie that is not sweet. I think my Grandma would like them for that very reason so I set aside a few to freeze for her tin of baking I make her every year. Like the recipe says, they are messy though. It’s difficult to eat them without getting powdered sugar everywhere.

I also made the Chocolate Dipped Macaroons. Would you believe I’ve never had a proper macaroon cookie before? I liked these a lot…they reminded me of those Ruffle cookies my Mom used to buy. I tried to find a picture of the cookies but my Google skillz apparently aren’t working today. Anyhoo, once again, these are not very sweet. Which led me to set aside some for my Grandma.

I also made some fudge. I made that recipe last year and I love how simple it is…no candy thermometer needed. It’s quite rich, but that’s the way good fudge should be.

vegan mofo: Halloween cookies!

When I moved here to start graduate school 5 years ago (yikes, where has time gone??) I left behind two very wonderful friends. Unfortunately I only see them about twice a year now, but thanks to the wonder that is the internet, we still keep in touch. In fact, they were my bridesmaids in my wedding this past summer. I wanted to make them a special treat for Halloween and I thought that cutely decorated cookies were just the ticket.

We have bats:
Cute little ghosts:

And tombstones:

Not pictured are cats and witches. Clearly my piping skills need a little work but ah well.

vegan mofo: first paid baking gig!

So today I baked things for my first real paid baking job! I was asked to make an Oreo cake (based on the cookies and cream cupcake recipe from VCTOTW), cinnamon buns (from Vegan Brunch) and chocolate truffles (Eat, Drink & Be Vegan). Unfortunately I didn’t get pics of the truffles, but here is the cake with ganache dripping down the sides:

And here are the cinnnamon buns, freshly glazed:

vegan mofo: chocolate mousse torte!

This is what I made for dessert for Thanksgiving last weekend….a chocolate mousse torte. You know how every cafe/bakery/restaurant has a dessert that they call “death by chocolate?” This is that dessert. So chocolatey. So decadent. So rich.

Chocolate Mousse Torte

Brownie Crust:
1 1/2 c. sugar
1/4 c. canola oil
2 tbsp water
2 tsp ground flax
1/2 c. water
2 tsp vanilla
1 1/3 c. flour
3/4 c. cocoa
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Chocolate Mousse Filling:
1/2 c. soy milk
9 oz. vegan chocolate chips
12 oz. extra-firm silken tofu
1/4 c. coffee
1/4 tsp vanilla

Ganache Topping:
8 oz. vegan chocolate chips
1 c. soy milk

Crust:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease 11″ springform pan. Mix together sugar, oil, and 2 tbsp water. In separate bowl, mix flax and 1/2 c. water. Add to oil mixture along with vanilla. In a third bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt. Add to oil mixture. Stir to combine. Pour into pan and bake 26 min. (or until toothpick inserted into middle comes out clean). Cool completely.

Mousse:
Bring soy milk to gentle simmer. Remove from heat. Melt chocolate chips in double boiler. Remove from heat. Combine chocolate, soy milk, and tofu in food processor. Process until smooth. Add coffee and vanilla. Process some more. Spread filling evenly over brownie crust.

Topping:
Bring soy milk to gentle simmer. Remove from heat and pour over chocolate chips. Mix until smooth. Spread this evenly over mousse.

Chill for at least 2 hours.

apologies for abseenteeism…as well as more Vegan Brunch

Wow, I haven’t been posting much. Wedding insanity has taken over my life…18 more days. It seems every day we have a meeting with somebody about something wedding-related…at this point I am just looking for the planning to FINALLY be over and to just enjoy the day. We’re keeping it pretty low-key but it seems there are still 1001 decisions to be made that everyone wants your input on. *sigh*

I haven’t been cooking all that much, but here a few things that have made appearances in my kitchen. First up is the puttanesca scramble from Vegan Brunch. If you like olives and capers you will probably like this. The only negative thing I can say is that I accidentally bought unpitted kalamatas so those were a pain to chop up. Oh well.

Secondly, here are the cinnamon buns from Vegan Brunch. I made these with the understanding that they would be taken out of my home immediately. I have a wedding dress to fit into and I don’t need a dozen cinnamon buns hanging around! But I did sneak a bun before they were gone and they are heavenly! Really gooey, which I like. I’d probably put way more cinnamon in the filling next time, but that’s just me.

Finally, I revisited a classic…the snobby joe from Veganomicon:

A belated Happy New Year!

Well, we made it back last Saturday…and returned to a foot of snow that had to be shoveled. Ugh. But the vacation was great. I hung out at my parents’ house for two weeks and pretty much did nothing. I ate, I slept, and watched TV. Basically I enjoyed doing nothing dissertation-related for the entire time. Nice.

I don’t have a lot of food pictures, but here are a few that I managed to take. First up, agave nectar cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World. For the icing, I melted unsweetened chocolate and added some vanilla and agave and played around with it until it tasted good. Then I topped those with walnuts. My Dad has Type II diabetes so he was allowed one of these for dessert for Christmas. The cupcakes are incredibly moist…I couldn’t believe it. A bit pricey to make, with the agave nectar and all, but they are worth it for a splurge.

For Christmas dinner I also made the infamous smlove pie from Veganomicon. Oh..my..God….this is my idea of heaven. HEAVEN. I used a chocolate cookie crumb crust instead of a graham cracker one and all the chocolaty nutty goodness was so amazing.

New Years Day my Grandma came out with my aunt and uncle and cousins for her birthday dinner. I wanted to make her a birthday cake, so I made a vanilla cake (from VCTOTW again) with vanilla icing, and coated it in toasted coconut. I’m not a huge coconut fan, but she is, and hey, it was her birthday afterall. She seemed to like it. The icing wasn’t the best, but that was my own fault.

Now, after all of those pictures of sweet goodies, on to my goal for the coming months: my official wedding nutrition/exercise regime. I have gained a few pounds over the past few months. Not a lot, but enough that my pants are a wee bit tight and I just don’t feel comfortable in my clothes. That and my wedding is quickly (eek!) approaching…only 7 months to go, which is terrifying as I look at the huge to-do list. Anyway, my plan is pretty simple:

• Write down EVERYTHING I eat
• Unlimited raw veggies
• Limit intake of white flour, sugar, coffee, and alcohol
• Cardio 4x/week, strength training 3x/week, stretching 7x/week
• Stop boredom eating!!

So we will see how that goes. Wish me luck! I’m not looking to lose a whole lot of weight, ideally I would like to lose about 10-15 lbs as well as get into shape.

Christmas Baking Overload

Note: I will be away Dec. 20th – Jan. 3rd with limited Internet. So I apologize in advance for not checking your blogs. Hope everyone has a great holiday!

For Christmas I typically give out boxes or tins of homemade goodies. So that’s what I’ve been up to the past few weeks. Here’s what made it into the gifts this year:

Pumpkin biscotti, a recipe from Katie up on Everyday Dish. I omitted the nuts and then coated 2/3 of each biscotti in more chocolate. Because you can never have enough chocolate. Why hasn’t anyone told me before how well pumpkin and chocolate go together?

Sparkled ginger cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance. I see now why these get such rave reviews…they are extremely addictive…

Gingerbread men from the Post Punk Kitchen. I really like this recipe for cut outs, it rolls out thin and is crisp, not cakey like some gingerbread recipes I’ve tried.

Sugar cookies decorated with a simple royal icing I made out of powdered sugar, vanilla, and soymilk. I wasn’t sure what to expect with that recipe as it has powdered sugar in it, but I think this is my “go to” recipe from now on. They are nice and thin and crisp, which I like. The cookies do spread a bit though when baking, so watch out for that.

Chocolate fudge. I used plain soymilk and added a bit more vanilla to compensate and it’s divine. It’s perfect at room temperature as well, so it’s great for presents. Unlike my previous attempt…

Walnut-caramel-chocolate thingies from Mihl. These things are amazing. Amazing.

Snickerdoodles by Lolo. These are pretty good. Mine didn’t turn out as pretty looking as her’s, but they taste good and that’s what really counts, right?

Last but certainly not least, caramel corn. I made a version with peanuts and a version without. It reminds me of Crunch’n'Munch…I used to love that stuff. Yes it has corn syrup, so if you avoid corn syrup you may want to avoid this recipe. The way I look at it, I hadn’t touched my bottle of corn syrup since last Christmas so I don’t really feel too bad about it.

Vegan Caramel Corn:
-7 qts. plain popped popcorn
-2 c. peanuts (optional)
-2 c. brown sugar
-1/2 c. light corn syrup
-1 tsp. salt
-1 c. Earth Balance
-1/2 tsp. baking soda
-1 tsp. vanilla extract

1. Place popcorn and peanuts on two shallow, greased baking pans. Set aside.

2. Preheat the oven to 250 F. Combine brown sugar, corn syrup, Earth Balance, and salt in a medium saucepan. Bring mixture to a boil over medium heat, stirring often. Once it begins to boil, boil for 5 minutes. Stir constantly.

3. Remove saucepan from heat and add baking soda and vanilla. Pour this mixture over the popcorn and peanuts in the pans and stir to coat. It probably won’t coat all of the popcorn at this point but don’t worry about that.

4. Bake for 1 hour. Every 15 min., remove pans from oven and stir. This will make sure all of the popcorn is coated. After 1 hour, dump the corn onto waxed paper and let cool. Store in an airtight container.

**This recipe makes quite a bit. It halves great though.

Oreo Cake!

First of all, I apologize for not updating in awhile. Truth is I haven’t been cooking much. I’ve been so busy that dinner is usually leftovers pulled out of the freezer. Which doesn’t make for an interesting blog post. But here is something that is always interesting: birthday cake.

It was the bf’s birthday a few days ago and I waned to make him a cake. He simply adores the cookies and cream cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes take over the World, so I knew I wanted to transform that into a cake. What resulted was a ridiculously delicious, and deadly rich, Oreo cake. I doubled the cupcake recipe to make two 9″ layers. I made a double batch of the vanilla buttercream frosting. I poured a chocolate ganache over the frosting and topped it all off with crumbled Oreos. In retrospect, it was probably almost TOO much, it was hard to eat more than a little piece. And I love sweets. All in all it was a success, the bf loved his cake and everyone kept telling me how great it looked.

Trying out Happy Herbivore’s New Cookbook

Lindsay over at Happy Herbivore recently released a new e-cookbook, Pudge-Free Holidays which has tons of yummy recipes that have no added fat and are quiet healthy. This weekend I had a chance to finally make a few things. First up, the sweet potato muffins. I found a bag of cubed, cooked sweet potato in my freezer I had forgotten about, and so I decided it was a perfect time to try out this muffin recipe. It’s pretty good. I’ve never had a sweet potato muffin before so I have nothing to compare it to, but it tastes a lot like pumpkin muffins to me. I think I would add some raisins next time, but I always add raisins to muffins.

Yes, I did get around to building a lightbox like I previously posted about, hence the background in the muffin picture. However, the box I used it too small for my dinner plates and I still need to get a daylight lightbulb, the one I have is really yellow and my camera sucks and does not have a way to adjust the white balance. *sigh* One more reason to hate winter…it interferes with food blogging.

Anyhoo, I also tried out the pumpkin loaf with maple icing. I probably should have baked it a bit longer, I thought it was done but the middle is still a bit gummy. I like gummy bread though, so it’s no big deal. Check it out smothered with the icing…mmmmm:

MoFo Wrap-Up (and Halloween cake)

Wow…I really dropped the ball on the last week of MoFo. My only excuse is that I had a very important committee meeting for my Ph.D. dissertation this week and that ate up a LOT of my time. But I don’t feel all that badly because I reached my goal of 20 posts. All of you other MoFo-ers, I really enjoyed reading your blogs and congrats on a job well done!

Anyhoo, so yesterday was Halloween. And so I made cake. I usually don’t make cake since it’s just the two of and half of it gets wasted, but I wanted to use my new orange and black coloring gels (no, they’re not at all natural, they’re chemical, for shame..).

I was going for a scary melty-cake kind of look. I think it worked. At first the bf just thought I was horrible at cake decorating…I had to explain that I was trying to make it look that way. Sheesh.

It was my first time actually writing on a cake. Clearly I need more practice.

Oh, and check out the lovely job on our pumpkin that the bf did: