Almond Cookies

Today I decided to make some cookies and, finding sliced almonds in my cupboard, realised I could at last make the Almond Cookies in Veganomicon. 

It took less than 10 minutes to put together the dough and after 15 minutes in the oven I have far more delicious, caramel-almond flavoured cookies than I can eat.  Maybe...

Perhaps a tweak could be to add some cherry pieces to the dough before baking, so they can count as one of my five a day.

Coconut-Lemon Bundt Cake

Hot on the heels of yesterday's Lower Fat Deep Chocolate Bundt Cake, I decided to try the neighbouring recipe from Veganomicon: Coconut-Lemon Bundt Cake.  I don't think I've ever made a coconut cake before and rarely make anything lemony so this is a departure from the norm.

Having poured a whole can of coconut milk as well as 2/3 cup of oil into the recipe, along with a whole load of sugar, I am feeling today's cake might be somewhat less virtuous than yesterday's.  Definitely need to take it all to work tomorrow and hope it's a hit.

On taking it out of the oven it smells very sweet but ever so slightly like Thai curry, I guess due to the coconut plus citrus flavours.  Looked lovely and golden and seems to have risen well, if not too well - 10 minutes worth of praying it didn't sink before I could turn it out.

Alas! Due to the cake rising well, the top surface was not flat, so when I turned it over onto the flat wire rack, some of the cake split from the rest.  Looks very moist inside though.

Briefly considered making a lemon glaze before remembering it already has enough calories to feed the 5,000, so decided to follow the cookbook's suggestion of a small dusting of icing sugar.

Update!  I completely failed to say how completely delicious this cake was.  Beautiful light texture, really moist from the coconut milk, lovely taste, neither the lemon nor the coconut overpowering.  Rated by my boss as 'one of your best'. Definitely recommended and I will make again when feeling skinny (maybe another trip to Morocco is in order).

Lower Fat Vegan Chocolate Bundt Cake

I thought I'd get my money's worth from my bundt cake tin, which has only ever been used for the Apple Cider cake (see below), and decided to make the Lower Fat Chocolate Cake from Veganomicon.  It only uses 1/3 cup of oil and instead has some apple sauce (which you can buy ready made from the supermarket) to make up for it.  The cake uses freshly brewed coffee and cocoa plus some vanilla and almond extract for flavour.

Result: the cake had a lovely light texture. It wasn't dry at all however did have the tendency to stick to the top of your mouth, so definitely one for eating with a cuppa. Couldn't taste the coffee at all, which is probably due to my not having any proper coffee and substituting espresso powder instead, which may have been less strong in flavour.  Due to the almond extract, if you don't like marzipan you probably won't like this - the almond taste is quite overpowering.  I'd consider swapping it for more vanilla next time to ensure the chocolate flavour can come through. Probably it could do with some kind of icing to make things more interesting - just some melted chocolate drizzled over the top would be good.

Chocolate and Date Brownies

Lazy Sunday means baking.  But what to make? I have a huge packet of dates that I bought on offer in Holland and Barrett some time ago, so my first thought was sticky toffee pudding.  However, I would have had to eat it all as Thom doesn't really have a sweet tooth, and they're not really portable to work.
My second thought was some brownies, as I've never made them before.   But what to do about the dates?  I decided to try and incorporate them into the brownies, as I thought they'd add a fudgy texture.  I looked at a few recipes online but as nothing was quite right I made up my own.


Ingredients:
180g margarine
120g dates, chopped
250g demerara sugar
1tsp vanilla extract
250ml soya milk or water
250g flour
1 tsp baking powder
70g cocoa powder
1/2 tsp salt


Method:
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees celsius/350 degrees Fahrenheit, or gas mark 4.
Put the margarine in a small pan on a low heat.  Once it's melted, add the chopped dates and sugar.  Mix well and set aside.

Sift the flour, baking powder, cocoa and salt into a large bowl.

Add the soya milk (or water) to the wet mixture, and combine thoroughly.  Then add the wet ingredients to the dry, bit by bit, mixing well until you have a smooth batter (apart from the dates).

Pour into a greased pan and bake for 25-30 minutes.  

The earlier you take it out, the gooier it will be.

Once cool, cut into cuboids.

Result: I took my brownies out at about 25 minutes or so, and the texture was reasonably chewy/gooey, which apparently is how brownies are supposed to be.  They were good, chocolatey, and very sweet.  I reckon the sugar content could be reduced, and a greater quantity of dates could be used.  They add a sticky texture and a treacly flavour which makes the brownies less homogeneous and more interesting.  I am thinking next time I may try making mocha brownies.

Home-made Blackberry and Apple Jam

Last weekend I went cycling with a friend of mine along the coast to Shoreham and then along a riverbank.  On the way there were loads of brambles and we bemoaned our lack of any collection equipment.

On the way home from work yesterday I stopped off at a farm shop to check out what vegetables they had, coming home with some fresh beetroot, rainbow chard (for which I shall have to look up some recipes), leeks, mangetout, courgette, and a couple of bramley apples.

I got back in the car and was thinking of what I could make with the apples, deciding on a pie.  However, I also remembered all the blackberries that were ripe and for the taking along that riverbank.  As the riverbank was handily on my way home I decided to stop and take a walk.

I ended up with way too many berries for a pie and decided to make jam.  I've not done this since I was about 10, supervised by my mum.  I was worried that it wouldn't set.  Luckily it turns out it's really easy and I am now thinking of branching out into other types of preserve...

Raspberry Swirl Marble Cake

Following the chocolate/vanilla marble cake I decided to pursue the idea of a raspberry marble cake, using fresh raspberries ,which are currently in season in the UK.

I adapted a recipe from VCTOTW: here's what I did:

Ingredients:

1tsp  apple cider vinegar
1 cup soy milk
1/2 cup margarine
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 tbsp cornflour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp fine salt
80g raspberries
1/2 tsp raspberry flavouring
1/2 tsp pink food colouring (optional)

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit, and put 12 pretty cupcake liners into a tin.  I prefer to use a muffin tin rather than the shallower cupcake trays, as that way the cakes don't splay out at all.

Mix the soy milk and vinegar together in a bowl or jug and leave to one side to curdle.
Next, sift the flour and baking powder together into a bowl and mix thoroughly.
In a larger bowl, cream the margarine and sugar until light and fluffy.  It's easiest to use an electric hand whisk here.  Once well-beaten, add the vanilla and almond flavouring, and the cornflour.  Once these are fully mixed in, you need to add the flour and milk.  I did this by first putting a bit of the milk in, mixing, then adding a bit of the flour, mixing, before repeating until all the flour and milk was used up.  This way I minimised the amount of flour and batter that got sprayed around my kitchen.

When everything is fully combined you need to put half of the mixture into a separate bowl so you can make it into raspberry batter.

Press the raspberries into a fine sieve, to get rid of juice (you can drink this later) and stop the batter from becoming too runny.  Once you've pressed as much liquid out as you can, put the seeds and pulp into one half of your batter, along with the raspberry flavourings and colourings.  Mix well to create a baby-pink goo.

Now to fill the liners.  It's best if you have a friend or willing accomplice to help you here.  You need to try and put the vanilla and raspberry mixtures into the liners at the same time, vanilla on one side and raspberry on the other, half and half.

  
Once you've filled the liners, use a skewer or cocktail stick to create a marble effect.  The best way to do this is to insert your skewer towards the edge and then move it clockwise in decreasing circles until you have a nice swirl.

Once you're happy that they're pretty enough, put them in the oven for approximately 24 minutes.

Verdict:  much lighter than the chocolate version - really tasty and possibly one of your five-a-day?

Marble Cake

I have been both lazy and busy of late and have not done any cooking to speak of.  Dinners round ours are too often of the premade variety.  However, a recent expedition to Morocco and a 5-day hospital stay there resulted in my losing some weight. There was only one thing for it: cake.

So I decided to try a new recipe from the VCTOTW book: Marble cakes.  The recipe calls for you to make some vanilla batter, then add some cocoa to half of it.  You then have to spoon both chocolate and vanilla batter into the cupcake cases in the same time, half and half.  Luckily I recruited a cake-eating friend to help with this bit.  You then use a cocktail stick to swirl the batters together a bit.

Result:  pretty cakes.  The vanilla component had a delicious flavour and a light fluffy texture.  However, the chocolate bits were weighed down by the cocoa and were too dense for my liking.







They were still damn tasty and disappeared very quickly....  

...and as a result I've gained back a couple of those pounds...

I am now thinking about coming up with a raspberry swirl variety....watch this space.

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.