Vegan Gingerbread Christmas Tree

For Christmas I thought I should make some kind of contribution towards the spread and, finding a set of star cookie cutters in graduating sizes, decided to take an edible Christmas tree. 

 

I wanted to go with the festive flavours of ginger, cloves, and cinnamon and found a gingerbread recipe from theppk.com. 

I followed the recipe almost to the letter.  I was a little concerned about using black molasses as I thought the taste might come out too strong, so for half the molassess I substituted golden syrup,

I spent ages trying to get enough starts cut out.  Initially the dough was too sticky and kept breaking when I tried to move my cut-out shapes onto the baking sheets, so I worked in some more flour.

I decorated them with a simple icing made of icing sugar mixed with a couple of teaspoons of cool water to produce a thick fluid that could be piped from a bag.

Result: pretty good cookies.  For my own taste, they could have done with more spice so next time I'll put another teaspoon of ginger in and maybe some more cinnamon.  I'll probabably be brave with the molasses next time too.

Carrot Cake

I decided to use up the carrots I'd had sitting in my salad drawer for some time, and what better way than to make cupcakes?


I used the Carrot Cake recipe from VCTOTW with no substitutions.  


This recipe also has raisins and walnuts, and is flavoured with cinnamon, so isn't quite what I'd call a carrot cake.   It's more of a spice, fruit and nut cake.  They turned out tasty but slightly confusing texture-wise.  I might omit the walnuts next time.







I was recently given a flower nail and a rose petal nozzle as an early Christmas gift by Sour Cherry , so I excitedly tried making flowers using orange butter cream.  However, I again failed to make icing of the right consistency for piping so my flowers quickly sank.  One day I will get this licked.  It may take me several more batches of cupcakes to get there...

Gingerbread Cupcakes

I decided to go home early yesterday, and what better to do with the extra time than bake cupcakes?  I wanted to try a different recipe from VCTOTW, and it was a toss-up between carrot or ginger cakes.   I imagine you've already guessed the outcome of that quandry.

I followed the recipe almost to the letter, the only slight problem was I only had half a lemon, so trying to source enough zest was a problem.  Oh, and I didn't have light molasses so swapped it for golden syrup which I presume is similar.  I also added a tiny bit of black molasses for flavour.

As I had no neutral-tasting cream cheese to make cream cheese frosting with, I went with the lemony buttercream option.  I wanted to practise my piping, and after last time's was too soft, decided to put the icing in the fridge until it was needed.  As a result I ended up trying to pipe really cold, unpliable icing, so the decoration wasn't the best.  I tried to cover this up with strategically-placed pieces of crystallised ginger.

Outcome: these tasted way better than they looked after my bodged decoration attempts!  They have a really delicious caramel/ginger flavour, and a very soft and light texture.  The lemon frosting went beautifully,  My only negative observation is that before cool the cakes seemed slightly greasy.

I'm not sure whether or not to be annoyed that people are constantly surprised that my food isn't disgusting.  These cakes prompted the question "how can these be so delicious when there's none of the good stuff in them?".

Butternut Rancheros

Tried out this recipe from theppk.com.  Very easy and really tasty.

Sunflower, Sesame and Flax Seed Loaf

Thought I'd bake something that wasn't cake for once.  Followed this recipe. Lovely texture though slightly yeasty probably as I added extra yeast as the first lot of water didn't seem to be frothing very well...

Vegan Chelsea Buns

I decided to make some Chelsea buns.   So I looked round the net at a number of different recipes, did some jiggery-pokery and came up with the one below.  Instead of just using currants for the filling, I thought I'd make things a bit more colourful and used a mixture of yellow and black raisins, and chopped dried dates,cranberries, cherries and blueberries.

Vegan Chelsea Buns - makes about 14 smallish ones, or 9 larger ones.

Dough
120ml lukewarm soya milk
1 & 1/2 tsp dried yeast
50g caster sugar
250g strong bread flour

1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp mixed spice or pinch each of cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, ginger
25g vegan margarine

Filling

20g vegan margarine, melted
50g brown sugar
1 tsp mixed spice (as above)
100g dried fruit (sultanas, or whatever you want)

Glaze:

2 tablespoons (30ml) caster sugar

1 tablespoon (15ml) soya milk
1/4 tsp Cinnamon

Method
 

Put the yeast and 1 tsp of the sugar into the warm milk, stir and leave somewhere warm for 10 minutes until frothy.  Sift the flour, the rest of the sugar, salt and spices into a large bowl and rub in the margarine with your fingers.  Make a well in the centre, add the yeasty milk and mix to form a soft dough.  Add a small amount of extra flour if it seems too wet.  

Lightly flour a clean surface and knead the dough til smooth and elastic.  Place the dough in a lightly oiled or dusted bowl and leave somewhere warm to rise, for about an hour or until doubled in size.

Grease a baking sheet, and in a small bowl mix together sugar, spice and dried fruit,for the filling.  Knock down the dough and roll out into a rectangle.  For smaller buns, make your rectangle approximately 20cm by 40cm.   For larger ones, try 30cm by 30cm.  Brush the dough with the melted margarine and sprinkle over the fruit and sugar mix. 








Roll up your dough,  starting from the longest edge (or either way if it's square).  





Stick down the edge with some soya milk or water.  Cut into 4cm wedges and place these into your greased baking sheet, leaving plenty of space between them.  Leave to rise for 20 mins.  Meanwhile, preheat oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6.






Bake the buns in the warm oven for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.  Once the buns are out of the oven, make the glaze by heating the milk, adding the sugar and stirring until dissolved.  Before the buns are cool, transfer them to a wire rack and brush them with the glaze.

Verdict: I'm really pleased with how they turned out; everyone who tried one loved them.  However, I'm not sure putting in all that different fruit was really worth the expense; due to the spice flavouring, individual fruit flavours were not really discernible.  I'll definitely make these again, but will probably stick to sultanas next time.  I used a lot of cinnamon - probably more than my recipe stated- and my buns slightly resembled a cinnamon swirl.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but less could be used for a less strong-tasting bun.  Also I rolled out my dough to 20cm by 40cm, which made lots of smallish buns.  I'll try 30 by 30 next time, which reckon should give each bun another circle of dough, and would probably produce about 8-10 buns.

Chana Towers

Living in Brighton, I'm almost spoilt for choice when it comes to finding a vegan meal out.   For special occasions, however, Terre-a-Terre is usually the destination, due to its beautiful presentation and wonderful pairings of flavours.  So when I saw their cookbook was out, I excitedly ordered a copy.  Unfortunately, as I suspected, making their food is not easy.  Every recipe involves about 5 different elements, all requiring about 8 ingredients each, to be cooked separately then assembled at the end.  So, instead of attempting any of their recipes I thought I'd try and come up with a simpler version of their Chana Chat, which might not be as impressive, but would (hopefully) be tasty and would at least be something I can actually attempt without devoting a whole week of my life to the sourcing, preparation, cooking, and presentation of the meal.

So this is what I did:

Chana Towers

Spice Mix
1/2 tsp each cumin, mustard, coriander, fenugreek and fennel seeds
1/2 tsp each salt, amchoor (dried mango powder) and paprika
pinch chilli powder


Chana Masala

2 tbsp oil
1tsp cumin seeds
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 inch piece ginger, finely chopped/grated
1tsp crushed green chilli
1 tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 medium potato, chopped into 1cm cubes
1/2 tin tomatoes, chopped
tablespoon tomato puree
Juice 1/4 lemon
1tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp spice mix


Discs:

100g plain flour
50g gram (chick pea) flour
1/3 tsp cumin seeds, toasted and ground
pinch salt
50ml water
25g soya margarine, melted
sunflower oil for deep frying
coriander


Method
 
Start by making your spice mix: toast the whole spices in a frying pan until they begin to brown and smell great.  Pour into a spice grinder along with the salt, amchoor, paprika and chilli, and blitz til fine.

Once this is done you can start on the discs: in a medium-sized mixing bowl, sift together flours, then add cumin and salt. Gradually pour in the water, mixing all the time, until you have a smooth paste.  Add the marg and mix to form a soft dough.  Stick in the fridge for half an hour.
Once chilled, roll out onto floured surface until very thin (approx 1mm thick).  Then use a large cookie cutter to cut out circles.  (Or, if you realise, as I did, that all of your cookie cutters are shaped like either bats, teapots, or dinosaurs, you could always resort to using the rim of a cup measure).  Place on a lightly floured plate and stick back in the fridge for another half hour.

Now start the chana masala: heat the oil in a saucepan, add the cumin seeds and fry for 20 seconds.  Add onion and fry until softened.  Add garlic, chilli and ginger.  Fry for a couple more minutes.  Add the tomato puree, tomatoes, lemon juice, turmeric, spice mix, chilli, salt, potato and chickpeas.  Leave to simmer on a low heat, stirring occasionally, til potatoes are soft.

When your chana are ready, deep fry your discs at 170 degrees centigrade, until golden brown.  Remove and place on kitchen paper to soak up excess grease.  Sprinkle on some of the spice.

To serve, put a disc on each plate, spoon on some chana, stick on an extra disc, and repeat, until you have a triple (or , if you are confident in your balancing skills, or hungry, quadruple) -decker chana sandwich.  Garnish with coriander


Eat with some rice and soy yoghurt.  Or whatever you want.

Outcome: pretty tasty.  Chana a little dry as it turned out I'd no tomato puree, which would have helped stick everything together.  I also used brown chick peas which are a little harder and drier than white ones, which didn't help matters.  The discs were fab!

Chocolate Cupcakes with Mocha Frosting

Having spent a large proportion of my Sunday looking online at bakery porn, when I got home I just had to do some cakes, with the aim of practising doing some piping with a new nozzle I recently purchased.  I chose the basic chocolate cupcakes out of my favourite vegan cake book, VCTOTW - as I had no soya milk I had to substitute oat milk.  This came out ok but didn't curdle in the same way the soy does.

But it seems to have done the trick -the cupcakes came out beautifully soft and light.

Unfortunately I hadn't the proper ingredients for the book's  vegan buttercream recipe as I had no vegetable shortening, and it wasn't available at the only shop open at 9pm on a Sunday.  I made my own mocha buttercream out of margarine, cocoa, espresso powder, and icing sugar.
The icing tasted really good. However without the shortening the icing was just too soft and didn't hold its shape well enough - the first couple of cakes came out ok but as the icing warmed up the piping lost its shape and the results were disappointing.



Conclusion: more cupcakes to be baked next weekend to ensure a proper piping session.

Mocha Muffins

I have been meaning to make these since I found this recipe a couple of weeks ago.

I followed the recipe pretty much as given. I had to smash up some dark chocolate as I couldn't find dark choc chips in the supermarket, but this was the only substitution.  At one point I did consider replacing half of the soya milk with some Kahlua for a kick, but was dissuaded of this idea by Thom who looked aghast at the idea.  

The recipe states that it makes 12 muffins, so, intending to take some into work, I doubled the recipe.  I'm glad I did, as my batch made only 15 muffins.  I therefore think it unlikely the original amounts would  have stretched to even 10 muffins.

 

The result - the muffins rose nicely, and have a lovely moist texture.  I was expecting them to be sweeter, and initially suspected I'd made an error measuring out the sugar. I'm still undecided on that one. The dark chocolate I used certainly is more bitter, and doesn't sweeten them up in the way that chocolate chips would have done.

Having said this, once I got used to the less sweet flavour I really liked it and the bitter chocolate gave them a lovely dark flavour.   In an effort to save my waistline I took some to work and they received numerous compliments..

I will certainly be making these again...and I am still tempted by the Kahlua idea...

Banana Bread

Satveer turned up today demanding banana bread.  Far be it from me to disappoint such a deserving lady, so banana cake it was. 

We pulled up our all-time favourite banana bread recipe from theppk.com.  To the basic recipe we made a couple of adaptations:

1) After putting half the batter in to the loaf tin, we put a whole banana on top, running the length of the tin, then covered it with the other half of the batter.   This brilliant idea was initially suggested by Sour Cherry at one of our baking days, and creates a delicious, moist centre to the loaf.

2) I sprinkled a mixture of cinnmon and brown sugar on the top of the batter to create a really tasty crunchy caramelised top to the cake.


As always this recipe turned out a really delicious, moist cake which remains a firm favourite.

Moussaka

I was recommended this recipe for moussaka by a vegan friend.  I didn't have any lentils so I swapped for soya  mince.  Outcome- very creamy and pleasant dish, although the oil content might put me off making it very often.

Q: What the hell do you put on a vegan pizza? A: Anything the hell you want.

First off, pizza hasn't always been all about the cheese.  It originated in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean countries, where it took the form of a flat bread, sometimes topped with oil and herbs.  Later on, when buffalo and tomatoes became available, people started adding more topping.

Anyway, it's really easy to create one at home - making pizza base dough is dead simple.  Just ensure you make it an hour or two in advance, then you can leave it to rise while you go and do something else, like bake cupcakes, for example.

I used this recipe by Jamie Oliver simply as it was the first one that came up when I googled 'pizza dough'.  However I've used loads of different ones over the years and never had a problem.  Trick is to roll it out as thin as possible, then pick it up and flip it about a bit to help stretch it out even more.  Don't bother about making it round.  Mine didn't work out too thin this time as my dough was a bit too dry.  Keep it was wet as possible without it becoming too sticky.

Once you're done with your base, you're ready to load it up.  First thing is your tomato base.  Make sure you don't just put tomato puree on, as your pizza will be tasteless.  Instead you could buy a jar of pasta sauce of your choice, or just cook up some passata or chopped tomatoes with some garlic and herbs (oregano, thyme), salt and pepper, and boil until you have a paste-like consistency.  Spread a thin layer on your base, then shove on whatever you want.  I put on some onions, capers, sultanas etc in an attempt to create something like the Pizzza Express Venezia, but was unable to resist also piling on a ton of other stuff like mushrooms, sundried tomatoes.  With some olive oil drizzled on top this would have made for a mighty tasty dinner.

However, this time I did go down the fake-cheese route, and grated on some (shitloads of) Cheezly mozzarella style cheese and also some 'Vegerella' which I found in Infininty Foods the other day and thought I'd give a try.  Vegerella has a very odd texture, really rubbery - I wouldn't eat in a sandwich, which I occasionally do with Cheezly, but it worked out ok melted on the pizza. 

After cooking (and taking the photo) I also added some rocket.  Tastiest pizza I've had in a while.

Triple Apple Cider Bundt Cake

A while back I found an amazing recipe for Apple Cider Bundt Cake on the facebook page of one of my favourite sites,  www.theppk.com.   A good excuse to buy a cake ring pan, and also to pretend that a slice of cake is one of your 5-a-day.

Bodge 1: Not realising that when Americans say 'apple cider' they mean cloudy apple juice, I went to the co-op and bought a bottle of alcoholic cider.  When I got home I realised my mistake but was damned if I was going back for apple juice, so went ahead anyway.  A bit scared of creating an alco-cake, I boiled some of the cider before adding to the recipe to try and reduce its alcohol content.  

Bodge 2: I had a slight problem when it came to the flaxseeds as I didn't have any ground ones.  Tried my blender which just moved them round a whole lot, then tried using pestle and mortar, which after about half an hour's physical exertion yielded about half a tablespoon.  So I shoved that in, plus some ground almonds, as that was the nearest thing available in my cupboard...

Anyway I'm pleased to report the cake tasted really good and went down really well with my omni friends.  All loving the stuffing in the middle.  I reckon baking the cake for an hour gets rid of most of the alcohol, and the flavour from using cider is a much better option than just using apple juice.  Next time, won't bother boiling the cider for the batter, and will ensure have the ground flaxseed, as my cake didn't rise perfectly and that may well be why.  An excuse to buy a spice grinder, anyway...

Strawberry Cheesecake

Since a Banana Flan disaster in year 9 Food Economics (in which, as a vegan, I was definitely not the teacher's pet), I have not attempted a tofu-based dessert.  Given that this was 14 years ago and I have since been fed a decent vegan cheesecake, I decided it was time to  give tofu another chance for sweets, and attempt a strawberry cheesecake.

I tried out an online recipe for a plain cheesecake, however to the blender I added about 10 strawberries to make the topping taste of strawberry and look pink rather than white.  As this would increase the water content I missed out the soya milk to make sure it didn't come out too sloppy.  For the base I used 250g co-op digestives and some melted vitalite.  Shoved the base in the oven for a few minutes before adding the topping and cooking for about 45mins.  Recipe came out pretty good - I'd cook the base for a bit longer next time to make sure it was nice and crunchy.

Granola

Super-tasty granola recipe from BBC Good Food.

For the fruit I used sultanas and some dried cranberries which gave a beautiful colour.  Dried cherries would be great.

Swap out the honey for golden syrup or more maple syrup or whatever's your bag.

Only problem is it's too moreish.