The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

First things first - what is suet? It is the hard but flaky fat found on the inside of a cow or sheep around the kidneys and that area of the body.

Okay, suet is an ingredient that is just tooooo daring for me! I’m sorry, but how a person could seek out this ingredient, bake with it, and knowingly eat it is more than I can comprehend. Needless to say, Smart Balance was my healthy vegan substitute.

Another thing I don’t understand is why one would boil or steam a cake for hours when one could bake it in the oven in 20 minutes. But such was the challenge and I made a version of Spotted Dick, a boiled pudding, using chocolate chips instead of currants.

I made a single serving recipe, which may be the reason my batter was rather wet. But I was able to dust it with a little flour and roll it easily in parchment paper.

I didn’t have a traditional pudding cloth (why would I?) to wrap and boil the pudding in, so I wrapped it loosely in a double layer of foil.

I placed it in a pot of gently boiling water and let it cook for about an hour.

I unrolled it, let it cool, then cut it in two. The cake was firm with a moist crumb.

Yum, fresh strawberries to enjoy with my pudding.

Other than a slightly boiled flavor, it was a good dessert - 3 out of 5 stars.

Daring Bakers Challenge - Tiramisu

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

I have never eaten tiramisu. It must be because I’m not a fan of cheese, and tiramisu is all about the cream cheese. It’s also not the least bit healthy nor vegan friendly, and if you avoid soy as I do, it’s even more unfriendly. Nonetheless, I love these challenges and every month they are indeed a challenge!

Another major component of tiramisu is the ladyfinger cookies. Even though I didn’t use the vegan friendly recipe provided in my version of tiramisu, I did make these cookies. I used applesauce instead of margarine to keep them low fat, and although they were not the melt-in-your-mouth ladyfingers of my memory, they did make a tasty cookie.

My healthy tiramisu was quick and easy – half a banana cut in half, layered with almond cream, and topped with cacao nibs.

This is a delicious dessert I can enjoy and never feel guilty eating!

Here’s the recipe for ladyfingers if you’d like to try a vegan or dairyfree version.

EGGLESS LADYFINGERS

(Source: Adapted from Recipezaar.

This recipe makes about 4 long biscuits (3" long and 3/4" wide).

(I made a half batch and got 3 cookies.)

Ingredients:

4 tablespoons/ 55gms sugar

1 teaspoon/ 5ml vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups/ 340gms unsalted butter (I used unsweetened applesauce)

2 cups/ 250gms all purpose flour

1/2 cup/ 40gms coarsely ground almonds

powdered sugar

Method:
Blend all the ingredients well and adding the coarsely ground nuts last. Scrape the batter into a piping bag with a ¾-inch plain tip and pipe into fingers about 3 inches long at 1-inch intervals onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake them in a 300 degree F (150 C) oven for 30 to 45 minutes till they start turning slightly brown at the edges.

Take them out of the oven and cool on tray for about 5 minutes and then move the biscuits to a cooling rack. When slightly cool, roll them in powdered sugar. Store in an airtight container till required.

Vegan Dinner Party!

Hi, everyone! I’m back from my wonderful week of vacation at my sister’s home in Alabama. The highlight of the trip was hosting a vegan dinner party. We spent the whole day cooking and had a blast. Thanks to all of you who offered recipe suggestions. We decided on a Mexican theme because we love it, and frankly, good Mexican food is hard to come by in Alabama. Your hosts/chefs:

For our entrée, we chose the oh-so delicious Bean & Corn Tortilla Lasagna with Avocado from Eat Drink & Be Vegan.

For our sides we made Messy Rice from Vcon and added in fresh cilantro for a Mexican flair, and a tossed green salad. We plated for our guests and the plates were beautiful.

Here’s our table. You can tell which is my seat by the bowl of broccoli.

Yes, those are margaritas next to some of the plates. The meal was fabulous and our guests loved their dinners.

They also loved the TWO desserts we made. I selected recipes from Vcon which I had made before and knew would be a hit. One was my favorite, Apple Peanut Caramel Bars.

The other was my sister’s favorite, Banana Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding.

Needless to say, the desserts received rave reviews. After dinner the ladies asked for recipes, looked through the cookbooks I had brought with me, and asked me lots of questions about my diet. They said I inspired them to eat healthier, so I’m hopeful I truly did.

My sister had recently bought a Blendtec blender and received a set of All Clad cookware for Christmas. We cooked and ate a LOT and had so much fun together in the kitchen. And my little nephews are enjoying green smoothies every day! During the week I also made Hide the Lentils Spaghetti Sauce from ED&BV (forgot to take a picture) which everyone liked. And we made two soups. Boy, that Blendtec really makes some creamy soup. One was a butternut squash (not vegan because it was made with chicken broth).

The other was Potato Leek Soup from Urban Vegan. (Sorry for the steamy picture.)

Now I need to get off the sweets and back on my diet… again!

Happy New Year! Time to Detox

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays as much as I did. After finally finding some time to sit at my computer, I need to catch you up on my holiday eats, so here goes.

Christmas Eve Chili with beans, butternut squash, carrots, corn, peppers. So good we even served leftovers for Christmas dinner.



Christmas dinner contributions – mashed potatoes

Shredded Brussels sprouts with cranberries and pecans (Alton Brown recipe)

Tuscan Braised Beans from Urban Vegan (completely awesome)

And treats – gingerbread men (from leftover house dough)

Cherry and Pecan loaf

Mint chip cookies (obviously not vegan)

Banana Oat Bundles (from Vive), half with dried cranberries, half with mini chocolate chips

And my New Year’s Day dinner – blackeyed peas with brown rice, bok choy for greens, and broccoli because I always eat broccoli for dinner.

I enjoyed way too many treats during the holidays and found myself in serious need of a sugar detox. So I signed on for a Seven Day Detox with The Raw Divas. I began Saturday and feel so much better – yay! I’m eating only raw fruits and veggies. It’s not difficult, but I do miss cooking. I moved my mixer off the counter and replaced it with the blender to make green smoothies. Oh, and salt. I do miss a sprinkling of flavored sea salt on my veggies. I mentioned on my last post that I got a new camera for Christmas. Now even my boring salads can look yummy.

Or a handful of almonds.

See you next time with lots of salads….

Christmas Treats

I’ve been doing lots of Christmas baking lately and want to share a couple of recipes. The first recipe is for some most excellent Ginger Cookies. The recipe I found was almost vegan, except for the eggs, so it was easily adaptable. The recipe includes a little cocoa powder, and the method is different from any other cookies I’ve made in the past. They are rolled in coarse sugar, so they turn it out crispy on the outside and remain chewy in the middle. They are spiced just right. I think they’re the best I’ve ever made.



Ginger Cookies
(adapted from Once Upon a Tart)

Yield: 5 dozen cookies

Ingredients:
2 cups sugar
2 eggs (I used EnerG egg replacer)
½ cup molasses
1-1/2 cups vegetable shortening, melted and cooled to room temperature
4 cups AP flour
1 T. cocoa powder
2 t. ground ginger
1 t. cinnamon
½ t. cloves
½ t. allspice
2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
coarse sugar for rolling

Directions:
Heat oven to 350º and position rack in center of oven. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the sugar and eggs together, using the whisk attachment of an electric mixer on high speed until light and well incorporated. Turn mixer to low, beat in the molasses, then the shortening.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, spices, baking soda, and salt. Gradually add to wet ingredients using the paddle attachment of your mixer on low speed until no flour is visible. (My mixture needed about 3 T. of water at this point to get the dough to come together. If you make the nonvegan version with 2 eggs, this won’t be necessary.)

Pour a handful of coarse sugar onto a plate. Scoop up heaping teaspoons of dough and roll between your hands to form cookie balls (about 1-1/2 inches in diameter). Roll each cookie ball into the sugar, then place onto the baking sheet. (No need to flatten.) Bake for about 11 minutes or until almost set.

Cool the cookies on a wire rack briefly, then transfer off the baking sheet to cool completely.


The next recipe is Cherry Pecan Bread. It’s my favorite bread to bake for Christmas because it’s pink! It’s really a cake baked in a loaf pan. It’s soft and light and perfect for Christmas morning. I made mini loaves to give as gifts (and had one left over for me!).

Cherry Pecan Bread

Ingredients:
2 cups AP flour
2 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
¼ cup margarine, softened
¾ cup sugar
1 egg replacer
1 t. vanilla
1-1/4 cup cherry juice + nondairy milk
1 8-ounce jar maraschino cherries, juice drained and reserved
½ cup chopped pecans, preferably toasted

Directions:
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9 x 5 loaf pan.

Drain the cherry juice into a 2-cup measure, then add enough milk to make 1-1/4 cups. Coarsely chop the cherries.

Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, beat the margarine, sugar, egg replacer, and vanilla until light and well incorporated. Stir in dry ingredients alternately with cherry juice mixture, stirring just until combined after each addition. Stir in cherries and pecans.

Pour into prepared pan and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until tester comes out clean. (Bake mini loaves for about 35 minutes.) Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then remove to wire rack to cool completely.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Look Closely

I’ve been eating very simply lately, so this post is brought to you by my very talented and creative aunt. I believe she made these tricky treats for Halloween.

TV Dinner for Two?




These mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, and fried chicken are really cupcakes! Aren’t they the cutest things ever?!! The mashed potato cupcakes are topped with yellow starburst candy and caramel, the peas and carrots are m&m’s and starburst, and the fried chicken breading is crushed cornflakes. I think they are quite impressive. Her inspiration came from this recipe.

Anyone motivated to make a cupcake Thanksgiving buffet?

Treats!

Happy Halloween everyone!

I have two treats for you today, both recipes from Celine at Have Cake Will Travel.

Pumpkin Whole Wheat Bread – a yeast bread that is one of my family’s favorite sandwich breads.



Apple Pie in Pecan Crust

What I love about this pie, aside from its fantastic flavor, is that the crust is made with no oil, no margarine, just pecans ground into butter. How clever is that!

Absolutely fantastic served slightly warm.

If you’re celebrating tonight, be safe and have fun!

Daring Bakers Challenge - French Macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

This challenge was not a vegan friendly one. In fact, the hostess pretty much said, Vegans, I don’t know what to tell you. Unlike American macaroons, French macarons are basically meringue sandwich cookies. Now I did previously have success making egg replacer meringue, but that was folded into a cake batter. This time I would need to fold almond flour into the meringue and bake it. Instead of agonizing over forming a perfect replica in vegan form, I decided to just have fun with my vegan interpretation.

I made meringue and tinted it orange. These will be Halloween cookies.

It freaks me out to use too much food coloring, so my orange is rather pale.

Rather than grind a whole cup of expensive raw almonds into flour, I used 1/3 cup ground almonds, 1/3 cup ground peanuts, and 1/3 cup ground….

Banana chips!

I folded the flour mixture into the meringue and piped the batter onto baking sheets and baked as directed. I have never eaten macarons so I’m not sure these are the proper texture. I can tell you that I ended up calling them *pillows* because they were super fluffy and soft with a slightly crisp edge.

I made a chunky peanut butter filling. Before I show you my final product, this is what real macarons look like:

Photo from davidlebovitz.com

Knowing I could not create anything remotely equal to those gorgeous cookies, I grabbed a few chocolate chips and created these little monster treats.

They are gluten free, tasted good, and were fun to bake, and they're spooky, right? So I count this challenge as a success. Also, please see Hannah’s perfectly successful vegan macarons – amazing!

Vive le Vegan with Some Twists

I love Dreena Burton’s recipes and all three of her cookbooks. I love them because they are healthy, low fat, low sugar, and many are gluten free – just my style when it comes to good food. Main dish recipes use ingredients I always have on hand and they are written flawlessly. Her treats are small in quantity and never sickeningly sweet or full of margarine. And her recipes ALWAYS turn out perfectly. I revisited Vive le Vegan! on Sunday to make some of my favorite recipes for dinner.

Let me preface by saying that I was hoping Chase would come over for dinner, but I ended up taking dinner to him, so the pictures are rather boring.

Dreena’s recipes are also easily adapted. Sunflower Lentil Pie is one of my favorites. Say you get distracted and burn your pot of the last of the lentils in your pantry (oops!). Luckily I had a fresh pot of homemade pinto beans, so I decided to make the pie with pintos instead of lentils. I gave it a Mexican twist by seasoning it with cumin, red pepper flakes, and cilantro. The Mexican twist was easily inspired by wanting the cool Avocado Sauce from Vive to accompany the pie, and just plain loving all foods Mexican.

Here’s my Mexican Sunflower Pinto Pie.




And here’s the Avocado Sauce. I added cilantro to it.

Please imagine a perfect slice of spicy pie drizzled with the creamy dreamy Avocado Sauce. Doesn’t that look good?!!!! Even though I didn’t cut the pie and have a piece when it was done, I can tell you that the “batter” was fabulous. And of course Chase will tell you he ate nearly half of it for dinner.

I also made some colorful veggies – sauteed purple cabbage, with many onions and colored peppers from the farm box. I kept seasoning it and trying to spice it just how I wanted but couldn’t get it quite to my liking. I finally decided to stir in some bottled Italian Dressing and then I was happy.

Chase was very impressed with his veggies and loved them just as much as the pie. So again, imagine a pretty purple mound of cabbage next to that slice of pie on a plate.

For treats I made my all time favorite easy Vive recipe that always hits the spot, and is not too sweet yet full of flavor – Banana Oat Bundles. My usual twist to this recipe is to add chocolate chips. This time I added chocolate chips AND cacao nibs and they were heavenly.

So ends my ode to Dreena. I know there are many fabulous new vegan cookbooks out now, which I look forward to purchasing and cooking from soon, but it’s nice to have the good ol’ standbys to fall back on anytime. Thank you, Dreena, for providing me with so many “go to” recipes!

Raw for Dessert

I would say my diet is about 50 percent raw, and during the summer it was quite a bit higher than that. I thought maybe I was enjoying more raw foods because I was tired of cooking, but thankfully that’s not the case. Actually, raw food is just good food. Fresh, unprocessed, naturally delicious food.

I was delighted to be asked to review Jennifer Cornbleet’s newest cookbook, Raw for Dessert. As much as I would have loved to have made any of the delicious looking pies or ice creams, I was limited to desserts that didn’t require the use of a blender. (By the way, I appreciate all of your input regarding my broken blender. I finally decided to contact KitchenAid, and it turns out the part that needs replacing only costs $6. It just arrived in the mail today!)

While browsing through the Raw for Dessert recipes, I noticed that several of them used maple syrup and agave nectar as ingredients. We all know that both of these products are processed, and I think it’s generally thought that even agave nectar labeled as raw cannot truly be regarded as raw. Raw for Dessert addresses the use of maple syrup in the introduction, and I also asked the chef at my favorite raw food café, Beets, for her take on the use of these ingredients, as I remembered eating a delicious maple ice cream on my first visit to the cafe. I flat out asked the chef if she considered maple syrup and agave nectar as raw and she answered No. I asked her for her philosophy on using these ingredients and her answer delighted me: If you’re going to indulge in a decadent dessert, a bit of something not 100% raw is okay to be part of the indulgence. For those of you 100% raw, I would say most of the recipes in Raw for Dessert would satisfy you.

So… I made my very first raw cookies! I chose Lemon Cranberry Pistachio Cookies. The recipe was quick and easy to make in the food processor. I let the cookies set up in the fridge for a while.



The cookies are beautiful and so delicious.

I also made my very first raw Brownies. Oh… my… goodness. These are heavenly. Good for me for making a half batch because this chocolate fiend could eat a whole big bunch of these! The recipe called for dried cherries, but since my lemon cookies had dried cranberries, I left them out of the brownies. I used the optional cacao nibs to maximize the chocolate experience. My brownies were not too sweet and bursting with chocolate flavor – just like I like them. This was also a very quick and easy recipe to make in the food processor.

Both of these recipes use dates as the sweetener. The verdict - a big thumbs up so far for Raw for Dessert.

Daring Bakers Challenge - Dobos Torte

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

A Dobos Torte is a six-layer cake with a caramelized layer of cake for the topping. It is quite rich with chocolate buttercream between the thin layers of sponge cake. As you can see, it is beautiful. I had visions of beautiful finishing touches for my cake, but kept it simple on my smaller, six-inch version. The cake was quite time-consuming. I would say from prep to cleanup was a good six hours. I baked the cake layers one day, and finished the next.

The original recipe is heavy on eggs and butter, so for my vegan version I used Bryanna Clark Grogan’s sponge cake recipe, and VCTOTW chocolate buttercream. I normally loath and despise buttercream, but I actually liked my recipe using Smart Balance instead of EB, and my favorite Scharffen Berger cocoa. I also made it mocha flavored by using strong coffee instead of milk. The sponge cake was fun to make since I got to make vegan egg whites. It really worked!

This was the first time I made cake layers without a cake pan. I drew 7-inch circles on parchment paper and spread the batter onto baking sheets.

This is how my kitchen looked when I was making the cake layers.

As I said, I finished up the next day and the cake turned out just lovely.

I took it to my mom’s (I try not to keep such decadent desserts at my house!) and nervously plated a slice.

Rich and delicious. I’m always amazed when I complete a vegan version of these fabulous challenges.

You can read the full recipe here.

If you have several hours to spare, make yourself a vegan or nonvegan Dobos Torte and I’m sure you will enjoy it.