Educational Cake

While in line to see Iron Man, my friend Shawn said, "I'd want an Indiana Jones birthday cake". I was pretty sure he wasn't hinting, but that didn't stop me from making it anyway. The cake making was complicated by two things:

1. Shawn is a very picky eater.
2. I didn't remember anything about Indiana Jones.

But I tried my best and it turned out semi-decent. More importantly, I learned a lot.

Many thanks to our friend Adrienne who was kind enough to take the pictures below.



When I think of Indiana Jones, the first thing I think of is brown. The second thing is that scene where the guy rips the other guy's heart out and it beats in his hand. I don't have the skills to make a beating heart cake topper (but hope to add it to my repertoire by Valentine's Day!), so I decided to make the cake brown using the Chocolate Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The cake itself was a double recipe of the Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes from the same book. I topped the cake with a "whip" made of marzipan and wrote Happy Birthday Shawn in the closest I could get to the Indiana Jones font.

I used the Crimson Velveteen Cupcake recipe, not a regular cake recipe, because I already knew the birthday boy liked it. Oddly, I was short a tabelspoon of food coloring, but was still able to taste it in the cake. I've made this recipe as cupcakes many times and never experienced that before. It was really weird. Because it wasn't a cake recipe, the cakes turned out a little larger than they should have and the tops rounded. I was dumb and it didn't occur to me to trim them until the next day, so as you can see here, the cake was very lopsided and has a noticeable seam:



My first idea was to make a fedora (or heart full of cherry pie filling) out of home made chocolate clay, but after discussing it with Adrienne, I decided to stick with marzipan because I already knew Shawn liked it and a whip because it should be relatively easy. I used Wilton's coloring paste on it and it ended up the exact same color as the frosting. That wasn't good, so I added some black. Then it was 3 AM and I decided the color was good enough, so I worked on the shape, modeled after this picture.

For the writing, I printed out the Happy Birthday and tried to trace it onto cardboard using a Xacto knife. Unfortunately, I don't have any hand-eye coordination, so Adrienne had to trace out the stencil for me instead. I thought that if I frosted the whole cake, then put the stencil on top of it, I'd ruin the frosting, so I left a blank area for the stencil, which I filled in using a pastry bag and some light yellow royal icing. I then went over it with some orange food coloring on my finger, then red over that. I intended on using a small knife to frost between the letters, but once I was done, I knew that'd never work and ended up with a naked stripe across the cake. Next time, I'll definitely frost the whole thing, do the stencil, then just smooth the defects in the frosting as best as I can.

As you can see, it totally needed more filling:



The final thing I learned making this cake: brown marzipan looks like a turd. D'oh!

Thankfully, that was my last cake for June. As far as I know, July will be a month of rest. Then I hope to bake for two or three people in August, depending on who lets me honor their birthday in pastry fashion.

Bittersweet

Last Sunday was bittersweet. My friends and I got together, which is always fun. It was a happy time because it was a birthday. It was a sad time because the birthday girl is moving home (Barbados) next week and will be missed.

For dinner, I brought the Fresh Mango Summer Rolls from Vegan With a Vengeance. For dessert, I brought a big fruit tart. She loves them, but they can make her sick because she's lactose intolerant, so she asked me to veganize them. I did:



First, I made Betty Crocker's Baked Pie Crust and sealed it with an apricot preserves glaze. I filled that with the pastry creme filling of the Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (yes, the stuff with the amazing, non-dissolving agar flakes. This time, I doubled the recipe and got the flakes dissolved in about an hour. That's comparatively no time) and topped that with kiwi, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries and more glaze. Viola!

I was lazy about skinning the kiwi, so I just cut the sides off, not realizing it would leave me with rectangular kiwi slices. I felt really stupid, but put them on the tart anyway. My brother thought it was an intentional design and he liked it, so I played along.

No one brought candles, so here's everyone getting ready for the birthday girl to blow out the matches on her cake (store bought, non-vegan, red velvet) and tart:



The Fresh Mango Summer Rolls are very nice, but the Thai Peanut Sauce is really what makes them pop. I had to omit the cilantro, which undoubtedly left them a little less flavorful (and colorful) than they should have been, but they were still very nice. And I want to put the accompanying sauce (which is incredibly fast and easy to make) on everything.

Things Fall Apart

The centre cannot hold.

Especially when said centre is made of crepes and pastry cream. Behold! The crepe cake!



Doesn't that look lovely(ish)? It's rather a pity that that's not how it looked when it got to the table. This is:



Back in January, my friend challenged me to veganize this cake. It looked complicated, so I decided to wait a while, until I was a bit more comfortable in the kitchen. A while turned into months and then her birthday was coming, so I decided to figure it out and make it her birthday cake. I really wanted to get it right, so I started working on it over a month in advance because the filling kind of freaked me out. This wasn't merely a case of substituting margarine for butter and a little bit of soy yogurt for an egg and I didn't know what to do, so I took it to The PPK. As always, they were very helpful and directed me toward the pastry cream filling of the Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I decided layering that with a few batches of the sweet crepes from Veganomicon would do the trick and set to work.

Here's my first attempt:





Failure. The crepes were too thick and not browned enough and the pastry cream was too loose. The reason? I couldn't get my agar flakes to dissolve. I officially hate agar flakes.

A few days later, I tried again:



Per the suggestions of the lovely people on The PPK, I reduced the crepe batter from 1/2 cup to 1/3 per crepe and dissolved the agar flakes in the microwave (which still took HOURS). The crepes still weren't brown enough, but it was only a test, so I was going for speed (as you can see by my ever-so-smooth filling job). It looked good enough to me. The cream was thick and the crepes were thin, so the cream was able to support the crepes, instead of the other way around. With eight crepes, I called it success. But the recipe called for 25 crepes and it never occurred to me that the number would cause a problem.

Though it looked good, I found the taste slightly lacking. It tasted good and it was nice and sweet, but it didn't taste like anything. Just sweet. I wanted to layer in some thinly sliced strawberries, but I thought that would be too much of a variation (read: cheat) from the original recipe, so I decided to substitute chocolate extract for vanilla in the final cake, top it with powdered sugar and write on it in melted chocolate (at first, I wasn't going to write on it at all, then I was thinking of using royal icing or something similarly generic).

The birthday dinner was on Wednesday, so I planned my week accordingly. Monday night, I went home early and made the crepe batter (four times the written recipe) and the pastry cream (six times the written recipe). I knew I'd have the agar issue, so I did that first, working on the batter while the agar sat in the warm/hot soy milk slowly dissolving, then whisking it for five minutes at a time. For hours. My right arm is currently on strike.

This is a lot of crepe batter:



Please notice the box of soy milk in the background. It's right side up, but I'm pretty sure the text on the back is upside down.

More pastry cream than I ever want to see again:



Tuesday night, I went to see The Futureheads do their first US show in two years (which was superawesome. Expect a fall tour. Run, don't walk for tickets!), then went home and made the crepes and put it all together.

Thirty crepes:



I only needed 25, so I put aside the uglier crepes and the best one (for the top) on a cutting board as I worked. I got to 18, paused to wash my hands, looked over at the cake and it looked like a landslide. As I stood there, the crepes were sliding off of the cake, onto the table, then almost onto the floor! I ran over and caught them (part of them were already hanging off the table), then grabbed up the whole cake and dropped it down on the cutting board. Right on top of the nicest crepe. Crap.

Once I got the pastry cream of of myself (and the table) and convinced myself I was neither going to cry nor throw the crepes around the room, I started reassembling the cake crepe by crepe, using my hands to smooth the filling, instead of my spatula. Since half the filling ended up on the table, cutting board and me, I thought the cake might hold together better with the thinner layers of filling. Since it was already covered with pastry cream, I included the "best crepe" in the cake and topped it off with a clean one, so the cake ended up being twenty crepes instead of 25. That was good enough for me, so I dusted it with powdered sugar and wrote on it with the melted chocolate.





That's how it looked when I put it away. This is how it looked when I woke up:



Appetizing, isn't it? (No)

I IMed the birthday girl when I got to work and basically apologized for completely ruining her birthday (because that's how it felt to me) and tried to brainstorm how to fix it. A coworker noticed I was upset and when I showed her why, she laughed at me. When she was done laughing, she suggested I just move the top of the cake to the center of the pile and trim it around, so that's what I did.

Here it is, with the trimmings my coworkers and I ate throughout the day:



And here's the finished product:



Obviously, it's not nearly as attractive as it started out, but it was presentable enough. And everyone seemed to enjoy it. Even the wait staff at the restaurant tried some, but they didn't tell me what they thought of it, so maybe that was their polite way of not telling me they hated it.

Wow, this post is sort of epic (read: too damn long). Sorry about that. But if it took you this long to read it, think of what it must have been like to do it!

And if you're reading this, happy birthday, Shar! (that's what the cake says, in case you can't tell)

Catching Up

Last week, I did a whole mess of cooking for the holiday of Shavuot (Jewish people celebrate being given the bible. It's customary not to eat meat because supposedly meat wasn't eaten until after we received the rules for kosherness in said bible). I was also commissioned to make my boss' birthday cake. I don't have any pictures of the holiday food, but here's the cake (frankly the best part anyway):



I tried to convince my family to go vegan for the holiday (it's only fifty hours), but it didn't work so well. One of the few things my mother actually cooks is a cheese dish that she only makes this time of year and she insisted on making it. Also, someone gave her a baked ziti, so she wanted to serve that. However, it turned out to be crap, so they stuck with her dish. I made the rest of the food for the holiday and it was all vegan.

Blintzes are traditional, so I made the Veganomicon crepes and made some of them into Potato-Mushroom Blintzes. My brother hates mushrooms, so I halved them and made plain potato blintzes as well. I also stuffed some with the Tofu Ricotta, also from Veganomicon. I made the Cherry Compote from Yellow Rose Recipes for dipping.

I love the Veganomicon crepes. I'd been nervous about making crepes because everyone always talks about how delicate and easy to ruin they are, but I had been practicing making them for something else and these are really easy. At first, I was annoyed that the batter had to be refrigerated for an hour before using it, but now I love that I can make the batter the night before I want to make the crepes and just get right down to the cooking when I'm eager to get down to the eating. I don't even have a crepe pan. I use a regular little non-stick pan and it works quite well.

The potato-mushroom filling is amazing. Everyone (except my brother) loved the blintzes. And he said his plain potato ones were some of the best he'd ever had. The filling couldn't be more simple, but it's one of those things that come out tasting very restauranty and people are impressed.

The Tofu Ricotta has the ricotta texture, but definitely not the taste. Everyone liked them, with the "This tastes nothing like cheese" caveat. To me, they taste strongly of nutritional yeast, so I was surprised my family liked them as much as they did (they liked them enough to honestly say they're enjoyable - they don't spare my feelings - but not enough to take seconds).

Making the blintzes themselves takes a bit of practice. I couldn't get a nice shape going, even at the end (I made about fifteen), but only one lost structural integrity and fell apart, so that's not too bad.

The Cherry Compote is very nice. My father has been putting it on everything. It's a bit more sour than I expected it to be, so I probably just used too much lemon juice. It went quite well with the cheese blintzes. I think I'll make it again next time I have a container of vegan ice cream in the house.

My mother requested something with eggplant in it, so I made the Eggplant-Potato Moussaka with Pine Nut Cream, also from Veganomicon. Dudes, that pine nut cream is so rich and awesome and...creamy. I'm always amazed by the ability of nuts to act like dairy. It's so weird. This cream is double great because it doesn't require overnight soaking or anything like some of the other nut "dairy" recipes I've seen. If you don't like eggplant and zucchini and whatnot, just make the cream and put it on...everything. I also got many compliments on the sauce. The shallots make it stand out a bit from jarred stuff. And, of course, there's nothing to not like about eggplant, zucchini and potatoes, so this recipe is a total winner.

I also made Potato Spinach Wedges, a test recipe for Isa Chandra Moskowitz's upcoming brunch book. Isa describes them as knishes without the dough, and that's basically what they are. They're tasty and easy. It's great that you can just throw it in a baking dish and be done, instead of making little, individualized items.

Dessert is the most important part of any holiday and I didn't pull any punches. I made Pain Au Chocolat (another brunch tester), Chocolate Almond Cheezecake with Graham Cracker Crust from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and Strawberry-Rhubarb-Peach Pie from Vegan With a Vengeance.

Everyone went nuts for the Pain Au Chocolat. I stuffed them with raspberries, strawberries and blackberries and served them warm. The chocolate oozed all over everyone's faces and made a wonderful mess. This dessert is wonderful and best eaten 1. warm and 2. with other people. Make them with a few different kinds of fruit, share them around and laugh at the chocolate on each other's faces.

The Chocolate Almond Cheezecake was sort of like a really firm chocolate pudding pie. A really good, a really firm chocolate pudding pie. Serving it with cherries somehow enhanced the almond flavor. It would probably go nicely with a vegan whipped cream, but I haven't mastered one of those yet.

The Strawberry-Rhubarb-Peach Pie was amazing. It really hit the spot, serving it on the first hot days of the season. This was my first time having rhubarb and it really heightened all the other flavors. I love this pie. There have been requests to make it again and I will not hesitate to fill them.

Some of you may remember my birthday cake from last month. If you don't, that's OK because my boss and office manager did. It was Blackout the Forest Cake: a cross between blackout cake and black forest cake. To make it, I adapted parts of Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting and Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance. They requested I make the exact same cake for the office celebration of my boss' birthday. Taking advantage of any opportunity to feed people yummy vegan food, I complied. The only change was to the decoration: I halved the cherries and removed the pits so people didn't have to spit while enjoying the cake. I liked how the stems looked like candles on my cake, but I think it was worth sacrificing that for the convenience of a spit-free party. Unfortunately, I made it and carried it to work when the temperature was over eighty degrees. Ganache doesn't like to behave at temperatures like that, so it looked a little funny, but everyone agreed the taste more than made up for it.

All You Need is Brunch

Lately, all I've been eating is brunch. This is for two reasons:

1. It's yummy
2. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm helping test for Isa Chandra Moskowitz's upcoming vegan brunch book, Crack of Noon.

Let's take a little look at what I've been eating lately.



Like I already said, potatoes are the most important thing about brunch. Check these bad boys out:



Individual Baked Hashbrowns. Individual servings make everything cuter. Cute + potatoes = the best thing ever.

My favorite veg/spice combination is cauliflower and curry. My favorite meal is brunch. Guess how I feel about the Curried Cauliflower Frittata. Go ahead. Guess.



I like using purple cauliflower in this so you can actually see it and it doesn't just blend in with the tofu and curry powder.

I was never a big egg eater, even before I went vegetarian, so I never expected to eat an omelet ever again. I was wrong:



That there is an overstuffed Grilled Asparagus Omelet with Miso Tahini Sauce. The omelet is great and the asparagus is AMAZING. It's marinated in (among other things) balsamic vinegar and is damn tasty. The sauce (not visible because it's inside the omelet) is surprisingly good, given that I don't like tahini.

You know what I think I missed most this past Passover? Matzo brei. Well, I don't have to worry about that any longer.*



It seriously tastes just like my mother makes it. I mixed in a bit of raspberry preserves and was in heaven.

Brunch is never complete without muffins. These Toasted Coconut and Mango Muffins are really good (even though I'm still not so good at making muffins and they're not cooked all the way through despite passing the toothpick test):





Let's not forget dessert: a chocolate cherry variation of the East Coast Coffee Cake:





The longer that cake sits, the better it gets. It's even better if it sits out on the counter, instead of in the fridge. The cut piece looks a little flat because I brought it to a party and it got a bit squished along the way. Oops!

That's it for now, but testing is far from over. My belly is looking forward to more brunch.



* That's not 100% true; this recipe uses tofu, which I can't eat on Passover, but it's still totally acceptable the rest of the year.

All is Full of Brunch

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend. Mine was great. I spent most of it cooking, then had a nice brunch picnic with my friends for Memorial Day.

SPOILER WARNING: The following post contains pictures and descriptions of testing recipes from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's upcoming vegan brunch book, Crack of Noon. If you want to be surprised by the book, don't click!



(all outdoor photos below this point were taken by my friend Adrienne)

For me, the most important part of brunch is potatoes. I was tempted to bring three different types, but behaved myself and stuck with two:





First was Red Flannel Hash: a nice, smoky mix of potatoes and beets, sauteed, then baked. I still don't know if I like beets (I have trouble getting past the garden smell), but I've liked them whenever I've used them in one of Isa's recipes and that's good enough for me.

We also had Samosa Mashed Potato Pancakes, which are basically just flat, doughless samosas. All the goodness of the filling, none of the hassle of making dough. Win! They're one of those recipes that I have trouble believing came out of my kitchen because it tastes so professionally restauranty. Technically, the pancakes are fried, but don't let that put you off; look how dry my pan is:



The oil is pretty much a non-issue.

No brunch would be complete without pancakes, so we had Gluten Free Buckwheat Pancakes:



They're thick and hearty and kind of healthy. Lovely topped with agave nectar and fresh berries. As you can see at the link above, you need four different kinds of flour to make them, but don't let it put you off. They're worth it and you never know when you're going to need quinoa flour (seriously).

For protein, we had Spicy Pinto Sausages and Beer Battered Tofu.





The sausages are an adaptation of the Spicy Italian Vegetarian Sausage recipe from Everyday Dish. It's super cool. You make a seitany dough, divide it up, wrap it up in tinfoil so it looks like a bunch of Tootsie Rolls, throw it in a steamer for a while, and viola! Sausages. It couldn't be any easier. And it's even forgiving of the occasional cock up (I was short one half cup vital wheat gluten). The texture is great, and the spices are serious.



The Beer Battered Tofu is a vegan twist on the fish part of fish and chips. Yup, deep frying for brunch. These were great with a bit of malt vinegar (and even without).

For something a bit more like a "normal" breakfast, we had a Mexicana Scramble. It's great, but very vegetabley. I usually think of scrambles as having more tofu than vegetables, but this is so tasty, we'll let it go.*



I felt like we should have one straight vegetable dish, so I made Poblanos Stuffed With Coriander Seed Mushrooms. If you like spicy, you'll like this. Personally, I can only eat them cold, when some of the spice is held at bay.



I also grilled up some tortillas, in case people wanted to make breakfast burritos.

For dessert, we had Pain Au Chocolat and Orange Pecan Crumb Cake.

I'm an idiot and forgot to photograph the Pain Au Chocolat. It's the easiest thing in the world to make, and it's amazingly tasty and elegant looking. It's one of those desserts that's bound to impress if you don't tell people how you did it. I filled ours with berries and I think my face died and went to heaven when I ate it.

I don't like citrusy cakes much, but the pecans and nutmeg in this one balance it out nicely. It's pretty light, so most people were able to eat a piece, even after all that brunch. Now that I'm writing about it, I'm really looking forward to the leftovers when I get home.

I used the wrong sized pan, so the shape is messed up, but you get the idea.





I had some leftover beer batter and vegetables, so I fried up some shiitake mushrooms, cauliflower and broccoli. Yum!




* After eating the Mexicana Scramble and Beer Battered Tofu, people commented that I got the texture of the tofu really firm and nice. Slimy tofu is the worst feeling in the world. The secret: if a recipe calls for either firm or extra firm tofu, go with extra firm. And if it tells you to press the tofu, press the crap out of it. Seriously. For at least an hour. If you don't have to press it, just shake it out lightly and squeeze it between your hands a bit to get out as much of the moisture as you can.

Happy Mothers Day!

Happy belated Mother's Day to all the mothers reading this. And all the wannabe mothers. And all the people who have mothers. And everyone who likes mothers. Basically, I hope everyone had a nice Sunday.

My mother's birthday was also this weekend. As I mentioned in my birthday post, she loved my birthday cake (a little too much), so I made Blackout the Forest Cupcakes for her and my grandmother for Mother's Day/her birthday.

(Note: the post behind the cut is pretty image heavy; I was finally able to take some photos in daylight and may have gotten a little carried away.)



I started out with the same recipes I used for the cake, Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting and Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance, halving them and substituting cherries for raspberries. This yielded ten cupcakes. One could probably get eleven out of it, but I tend to overfill.

The cross-hatching on some of the cupcakes is neither functional nor decorative. I just dropped them upside down on the cooling rack.



Next, I cut a cone out of the center of each cupcake, trying to keep the removed part as tidy as possible, so it could be replaced neatly:



Then I filled the hole partway with the cherry layer:



Topped that with ganache:



Topped that with the bits of the cupcakes I'd cut out earlier (trimmed down for a neater fit - and so I had something to snack on):



Then the cupcakes went in the fridge until the ganache hardened and I could be pretty certain nothing would fall off when I turned the cupcakes upside down. Once they were cooled, I covered them with cherry preserves. I covered the full size cake with more of the cherry layer I made, but I didn't think the cupcakes would be able to accommodate the lumpiness of the cherries and still look nice:



I dipped each cupcake in the still warm ganache:



Then the cupcakes went back in the fridge, joined by the ganache, so it could harden. When it was firm, I used the icing to pipe ganache-y os on the cupcakes:



That was topped with chocolate covered cherries, and when I ran out of cherries, a truffle made from leftover ganache:



The money shot:




Loads of extra pictures:

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yesterday was my birthday, and in honor of that most auspicious of occasions, I baked a cake and brought it to work for my office birthday party on Thursday. I call it Blackout the Forest Cake because it's sort of like a cross between blackout cake and black forest cake. To make it, I adapted parts of Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting and Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance.



I started out making the Raspberry Blackout Cake, substituting cherry preserves for raspberry:



Instead of topping it with more cherry preserves, I made the raspberry layer from the Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars, substituting frozen cherries for raspberries:



All that was topped with ganache:



Then another cake and more cherries. When I moved the second cake from the cooling rack to the cake, it ripped about halfway down and I nearly shit my pants. Thankfully, all the toppings covered it up quite nicely and no one could tell:



Then, the whole thing was frosted with ganache and refrigerated along with the remaining topping to firm it up to a spreadable and pipeable consistency:



I also dipped some fresh cherries in the ganache for decoration. I kept the stems on because I thought they kind of looked like birthday candles, and because it made them easier to dip. To get a good layer of chocolate on them, I dipped them, refrigerated them, dipped them again and put them back in the fridge until it was time to use them:



I'm not so great at frosting cakes yet, so I wasn't able to completely hide the seam between the cakes when I poured on the ganache. I managed to cover the seam with the refrigerated ganache, but it didn't come out as smooth as I'd hoped. I guess I just need practice (the top isn't so smooth either, but that's to be expected with the cherry chunks on it).

The next thing I did was pipe chocolate circles onto the cake wherever I wanted to place the fresh cherries. I think of them as "Ganache-y Os":



Then I pressed the chocolate covered cherries into the ganache-y os:



I probably should have done the cake assembly and decoration on the base of my cake carrier, but I didn't because I'm not so smart. I also made the even less smart move of covering my carrier with parchment paper, so that when I piped around the base of the cake, I wouldn't be doing it directly onto the carrier. Moving the cake from the cutting board to the carrier was a nightmare. I really thought I was going to wreck the whole thing. The sides ripped significantly, but I was able to hide it with icing. Then I piped a border on the top and bottom of the cake:



Thanks to the stupid parchment, the cake slid around the carrier throughout my commute (bus, train and 20-minute walk) and I thought it would certainly be ruined by the time I got to work. As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, it didn't turn out too bad; the trim is just a little flat. Here's a shot of the inside:



The cake went over very well, with two people having seconds and one attempting to steal one of the pieces saved for absentees.

Since I'd never made a cake like this before, I did half a test cake last weekend by baking one cake, cutting it in half and layering the two halves instead of layering two cakes:



Here's a shot of the cherry and chocolate layers:



My family loved the testcake so much I knew it'd be good enough for my coworkers. Actually, my mother loved it a little too much: my father had to make her back away from the table and when no one was looking, she rushed the cake and took a second piece (part of a piece I was saving for a friend). She's been talking about the cake all week, so I'm in the process of turning it into cupcakes for Mother's Day (literally in the process; I'm typing this while the ganache is cooling in the fridge). If the cupcakes turn out half as well as the cake did, it will be a happy Mother's Day indeed.

Truffle Shuffle

Here's that truffle post I mentioned earlier.

I'm sure it's not surprising that I love junk food. I love cake and chocolate and chocolate cake. Sometimes, it doesn't even have to be that great. Like Passover. The cake mixes are...edible, but definitely not great. They're far better than any cake you can buy pre-made in stores, though. Those taste like cardboard topped with sawdust. And in my opinion, making Passover cakes from scratch requires too much effort and thought to be worth it, so mixes it is.

The obvious problem with mixes is that they all need eggs. My mother tried substituting apple sauce for eggs in one cake and it came out...like crap. It was way too sweet and was softer than fudge in consistency. I was the only one that ate it and I only ate it so it wouldn't go to waste (and because it kinda sorta tasted like chocolate. Almost).

I needed a fix, so I made truffles from the Conscious Kitchen's recipe and uploaded pictures of them to my Flickr. One of my coworkers saw them, thought they looked great, and asked me to make a batch for her to take to a family Passover dinner. I would have totally done it for free, but she offered to pay me and I had to pay my taxes last month, so we made a deal. My first sale! I was so proud that I'm sure I was really annoying to talk to for at least a day.



Make sure you check out the pictures on Conscious Kitchen, but do yourself a favor and have a drool rag handy. Don't say I didn't warn you!

I didn't make nearly as many variations as they did because I was limited by what I had in the house for Passover, but I don't think anyone got bored of mine either. For liquid, I used a splash of vanilla extract, mixed with coconut milk to make 1/2 cup total. When I made them for my family, I used cocoa powder, chopped cashews, almonds and craisins and ground walnuts as toppings. For the batch I sold, I used them as fillings as well.

My work station for the second batch:



Toppings, clockwise from the top left, I'm rolling in chopped almonds, cashews ground walnuts, cocoa powder and chopped craisins. I didn't have a food processor so all chopping was done by hand. Ew:



The truffles are incredibly easy to make. Just melt your chocolate in your heated liquid. Pour the whole mess into pan and refrigerate it until it solidifies (which took hours in the small pan I used. If you have room in your fridge, use something large and increase your surface area to cool your chocolate faster). Scoop out the chocolate a bit at a time, roll it into balls, roll the balls in your toppings. Voila! Truffles.

That said, it may take a bit of trial and error to get your aesthetic right. For example, when I tried to top the truffles with chopped craisins, no matter what I did, I ended up with loads of craisins sticking to each other, leaving bald spots in some areas and piles of fruit in others. I thought maybe rolling the truffle in cocoa powder before chopped craisin would help, but then they barely stuck at all. The next try was powder after craisin. That did keep the chocolate off the eater's fingers, but looked like crap, as you can see toward the rear of this picture:



I remedied this in the batch I sold by filling the truffles with craisin instead (I just wrapped the chocolate around a few craisins before rolling it into the ball shape - this also worked with nuts), putting one small piece of craisin on the outside to identify it and rolling the rest in cocoa powder:



Yeah, it sort of looks like a boob. And I don't have the coordination to keep the cocoa powder off the craisin bit completely, but it's still an improvement. These were the ones that went over best. There was almost a fight over them in my office. I'm not even lying.

When my brother first saw this on the kitchen table, he thought they were Dunkin' Donuts Munchkins. Somehow, he completely forgot it was Passover, I'm vegan and Dunkin' Donuts would never put real, unprocessed nuts on anything.



I love this picture. It looks like I'm building a truffle army, but the recipe actually makes about 24 pieces:



Truffles, ready for delivery to my first customer:



I'm definitely going to make these again (I say that about everything, don't I? But I mean it this time because I have a plan!). I want to try using Frangelico as the liquid, and maybe some coffee liquor (separately). I think it'd be a nice touch to roll them in red and green sprinkles and pack them into pretty boxes during the holidays. Mini cupcake cups might be the perfect size to hold them and make them look fancy and professional.

Passover, Post the Second

After I finished making everything I did on Friday, I pretty much fell into a coma and didn't wake up until around 6 PM Saturday and did nothing but eat and read for the rest of the day. Awesome. I got myself all rested up for the cookfest that was Sunday.



The first thing I realized was that I hadn't done anything with all those portobello mushrooms from Thursday night/Friday morning; they were still marinating. I grabbed them from the fridge, and at first I thought they'd frozen because the contents of the container was one solid block. Then I thought they went bad. Turned out the oil I used had solidified in the fridge. Whew! I stirred it all up a bit and it all broke up and was fine. Not realizing the Yellow Rose Recipes recipe makes way more marinade than the Veganomicon one does, I followed the Veganomicon instructions for roasting portobello mushrooms, doubling the cook time because the oven was set to 250 F and I couldn't change it. About halfway through, I realized I was being dumb and that the mushrooms would never really roast while sitting in the soup they were in. Maybe they'd boil, but not roast. So I ladled out about half the marinade, which improved things.

The texture of the mushrooms came out very good, but the taste was a little weird. Kind of sour. I love sour food, so that's fine. My parents tried them and decided to leave it all for me, though.

Next, I made the Broccoli Vinaigrette from The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook. Here's the weird thing about this vinaigrette: there's no vinegar in it. There is, however, plenty of garlic and a huge portion of awesome. This is another one of those did-I-really-need-a-cookbook-to-tell-me-that sort of recipes. Super easy, yet, because it's me, full of fail. I didn't have a steamer basket for Passover, so I decided to try steaming my broccoli in a strainer. A plastic strainer. Well, I hope my mother likes her new abstract strainer sculpture. Even if she doesn't, she liked the broccoli, so that's OK. My father liked it so much he asked for seconds, even though he usually can't stand to look at the stuff. My brother had to be restrained so I'd have some left to photograph. Good stuff.

Here's a mushroom, the broccoli and the Green-Wa. A very nice meal:



I also made the Diner Home Fries from Veganomicon. Those were too good. They didn't even last until I was able to use my camera! The cooked pepper made my grandmother worry about her agita again, but it didn't bother her at all and again, my brother didn't eat around the green bits. The peppers and onions cook just long enough to be tender but still maintain some crunch, which is great when mixed in with the soft potatoes. I'd eat these every day if I wouldn't have to fight my family for them.

I really pulled out all the stops for dessert.

First, there were Tea-Poached Pears in Chocolate Sauce from Veganomicon. This is the perfect dessert to make if you're cooking for someone special and/or are serving a really heavy dinner. Most people I know are impressed by desserts that come with sauce poured on the plate. There's just something classy about it (unless it's a mess). If you have the skills to make designs around the edges, even better (I don't, but when I accidentally dripped, I decided to drip all around to make it look intentional). Also, it's nice and light. It's not really rich, or fudgy or a heavy cake. It's just fruit. Really, really good fruit. It takes a few steps to make, but it's not difficult (though whoever you make it for will probably think it is).



And I made The Conscious Kitchen's truffles. They're going to get another post all to themselves, so for now, just know they're lovely. Delicious, rich, impressive-looking and easy, though time consuming.







Don't worry, I'm not done with Passover yet!

Passover, Post the First

According to Gothamist, hospitals see "an uptick in total patient volume during Passover...[largely due to] Dizziness from [cleaning] fumes, slips from highly buffed floors or wet bathroom tiles...knife wounds from cutting food, burns from stovetops, and even fingers chopped up in blenders." I only have two cuts and a burn, so I consider myself lucky. Doubly lucky since I did most of my cooking while half asleep.

I'm a sabbath observer, so I had to make sure most of my Passover food was ready by Friday night. I took Friday off from work and started my food prep Wednesday night. And, like all responsible people would, went to see Colin Meloy Thursday night at Music Hall of Williamsburg (side note: he is the cutest thing on two feet. I stood there the whole time wishing I'd baked him cookies). Due to transport issues and my inability to shut up and leave when I'm hanging out with friends, I got home at 2 AM. In case that wasn't bad enough, my mother was still in the kitchen, so I wasn't able to get to work until 3. I ended up not sleeping at all until after dinner Friday night. Oy vey!



Almost every recipe I picked for the holiday used vegetable broth or stock, so the first thing I had to do was make the vegetable broth. Naturally, I made the one from Vegan With a Vengeance. It's such a staple in our house that even my mother made a double batch of it to feed the family and to use in all her cooking (Wednesday night was dedicated to chopping vegetables for all the broth). You'd think after making the broth over a dozen times, I'd be able to make it without screwing it up, right? Wrong. Somehow, I'm unable to tell the difference between parsley and cilantro and ended up accidentally substituting the latter for the former. I didn't even realize it until it was time to use the cilantro in another dish and I didn't have any. D'oh! Thankfully, I like cilantro, and I was just using the broth as an ingredient, not eating it straight, so it didn't make a huge difference when combined with the other ingredients in my dishes.

While that was simmering for 90 minutes, I grabbed Tofu Mom's recipe and made matzo balls. Lots of lots of matzo balls.



And started the crust and the filling for my Raw Apple Pie. I don't have a Passover blender or food processor, just a Smart Chopper, and trying to do all those dates in there nearly made me want to stick my head in next. I hate that thing. Definitely getting something better for next year. But I got it done and had plenty of time to let the filling soak and the crust firm up in the fridge. I tried to get all decorative with a flower in the middle and some golden raisins to garnish, but I don't think it worked so well. It didn't really matter since it completely fell apart when we cut into it, but it was still tasty, which is the most important part.



And I prepped my portobello mushrooms, prepared my marinade and put everything together for Yellow Rose Recipes' grilled portobellos. It was so easy to put together that I forgot I don't have a grill pan for Passover. I decided to roast them instead, after they marinated for 24 hours.



While I'm on the subject of Yellow Rose Recipes, I need to talk about the Braised Cauliflower. I know I say this about everything, but it's really the easiest recipe ever. The aroma when the cauliflower was cooking in the margarine was amazing. My mother kept asking what was in the pan and refused to believe it was just cauliflower and margarine. I was almost disappointed when I added the broth and everything started smelling like it instead of yummy, popcorny, cauliflower. As the broth cooked off, the fragrance came back, better than ever, and joy was had. My family really enjoyed this. It's a side dish that's so simple it compliments everything. Even my grandmother ate one floret and deemed it good. She never eats vegetables, so that's high praise indeed.



I wanted to make the Indian variation of the Yellow Rose Recipes Green-Wa, but couldn't find kosher for Passover curry powder. Instead, I found this handy guide to making your own spice blend that could be deemed "close enough" by some people. Those people don't include me. Not because I'm so discerning, but because I only had red pepper flakes and no matter how much grinding I did with my new mortar and pestle, I just couldn't powder them.



I used that "curry powder", substituted the coconut milk for the soy yogurt and was about to start chopping my herbs for the Green-Wa, when lo and behold! I didn't have any cilantro! Oh yeah, it was all in the soup. So I chopped up the parsley and stuck that in the quinoa instead. And I completely forgot to even add the curry powder until the very last step. I made numerous mistakes with this recipe, but it's very forgiving. The current dish is somehow almost bland, in a good way, but still burns my tongue. My brother ate loads of it; he especially liked putting it on chicken. I can't say I love the recipe as I made it, but it gave me an idea of how it would taste if I didn't completely screw it up. Will definitely try again when I'm not completely out of it.



The last thing I made before the sun set on me was Herb Roasted Potatoes from Vegan With a Vengeance. Holy crap, those are good! I took the time to chop my herbs up nice and fine and got them really well done and my family went crazy for them. Even my grandmother ate a significant portion of them, and usually just looking at spices gives her "agita", and my brother didn't even pick out the onions. Victory!



A couple more pictures from Day One:






Stay tuned for Passover Cooking: Day Two!

Easy Peasy Veganeasy*

We've all eaten or seen a dish and thought "Wow, I wish I could make that!" It's even more interesting to see a dish and think "Wow, I wish I could make that vegan!" Then, not only are you making something absolutely tasty, but you're really changing it up and making it your own. Sometimes, this can be a real process that requires work (see Hezbollah Tofu). Other times, it can be ridiculously easy and require no more effort than a bit of punctuation (see this post).

Recently, Paula Dines was kind enough to share her great-great-grandmother's coffee cake recipe with the Internet. I was sweet-toothed enough to steal it, veganize it, bake it and eat it. Before I continue, want to know how to veganize her recipe? Put quotes around the words "milk" and "butter". Viola! You're done! Vegan.



First off, you should know that this cake is the easiest thing to make EVER. No lie. Also, I am willing to bet your favorite TV show takes longer to watch than this cake takes to make. And when you're done with your favorite TV show, you're still cakeless, so turn off the television and make yourself a coffee cake.

The crumb topping is all sorts of cinnamony and awesome. So awesome I doubled the recipe. I really, really like crumb topping. As far as desserts go, it's my reason for living. The cake itself is sweet and nice, with a good bite. No airy fairy wussy cake here. It's dense and you can easily eat it held in your hand, without a fork. Yummy.

Thank you, Paula Dines, for sharing your family's recipe. Your secret is safe with me (and my belly)!



*I apologize for the absolute stupidity of the name of this post.

Lucky, Lucky, Youre So Lucky

OK, I don't actually know if you're lucky or not (though I hope you are!), but some would consider my friend Lauren lucky because I baked Franz Ferdinand (the band, not the archduke) themed Fauxstess cupcakes, from Vegan With a Vengeance, for her birthday.




This was my second time making the Fauxstess cupcakes and I encountered the same problem I did the first time: I can't get the damn royal icing for the squigglies right.

For some reason, the "red" came out great, but the green just wouldn't loosen up. Even though I skipped the soy milk powder this time. I kept adding water and it just went right on being thick. I ended up giving up, picking the icing out of the pastry bag with my fingers, rolling it like clay and pressing it onto the cupcake tops.

Also, the icing that's not green was made using the food coloring called "Red Red". I don't know who those Wilton people think they're fooling, because that's pink pink.

I finally got to taste one of them this time. SO CHOCOLATEY. Needs more filling, though. Next time, I'm going to try making the hole with my thumb instead of my pinky, so there's more room.

There will certainly be a next time.



The restaurant was nice enough to provide a candle:



Mmmm...creamy filling.

Happy Purim!

I'm still not being a good little Blogger-Bee and I'm nowhere near caught up with all I've made lately, but I've decided to Skip to the End (and go back later) because this is time-sensitive.

Purim is tomorrow. If you don't know what that is, and don't feel like clicking the link, it's one of the many Jewish "Hooray! We Weren't Genocided!" holidays. It's customary to eat a metric assload of junk food on Purim, including (but not limited to) hamentashen. Hamentashen are a BFD for me. I look forward to them all year. When I realized they all have egg in them, I wondered if I might actually be tempted to cheat on veganism.

Then I remembered I know how to bake. Behold!



I stole my mother's recipe, looked up egg replacement suggestions in Papa Tofu and got to work. This was my first time veganizing something without asking for help from The PPK and they came out really good, if I may say so myself. Too good. I ate SIX yesterday. Thank goodness I have many friends, coworkers and family members willing to take the rest off my hands. I don't know why, but they taste sort of buttery and the buttery + the preserves = good times.

On to the recipe!

Hamentashen

Makes about 33 3" cookies

Note: This is how my mother wrote up the recipe (except for the eggs). The flour measurement is kind of wrong. By a lot. Unfortunately, I didn't measure how much extra flour I added. You'll know you have enough flour when your dough is firm, dry and easy to pass from hand to hand without sticking. And it shouldn't leave any moisture on your rolling pin. Sorry about that.

Also, be generous with your filling. Don't go crazy with it, but I think it's better to have too much than too little. If you're having trouble closing your hamentashen, just scrape some off. That beats having bald spots. If you use jam/preserves, use the thickest, fruitiest one you can find (I used raspberry and apricot Hero preserves, available at Whole Foods). It will boil during baking and if it's too thin, you'll end up with glaze on the bottom of your cookie instead of filling (underfilling can also lead to a glazey cookie).

Ingredients
3/4 cup canola oil
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup soy yogurt
1 1/2 tsp Ener-G egg replacer dissolved in 2 tbsp warm water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp orange juice
2 1/2+ cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
Fillings of your choice

Preheat oven to 375 F. Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper.

In mixing bowl, blend sugar, yogurt, Enger-G, vanilla and OJ well with fork. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix until it gets doughy, then knead it until all flour is blended and dough is desired consistency (see note above). Split dough into two halves. Roll out one half of the dough until it's a bit more than 1/8" thick. It should be thick enough to be able to support the filling, but thin enough to fold easily. Using a glass or cookie cutter, cut the dough into approximately 3" rounds (I used a plastic mug and the diameter was probably closer to 3.25").



Place a spoonful of filling in the center of each round.



Fold the dough up around the filling and pinch the edges together into a triangle.



Repeat with second half of dough. Place hamentashen on parchment-lined cookie sheet. They don't expand much, so it's OK if they're close (though if some of your hamentashen are overfull, they may ooze over onto their neighbors). Bake for about 25 minutes or until browned to your liking.

The variations for these things are practically endless. Other popular fillings are prune, poppy seed and chocolate. If you want to get creative, dip one corner in some melted chocolate. Make it fancy by dipping the chocolaty end in colored sprinkles, chopped nuts or shredded coconut.

That's it. Try it, you'll like it. Have another, you're too thin!*



*That'd be my Jewish grandmother impression.

I Fail, Sorry

Point the first: Sorry I haven't kept up with this blog much this month. I have been cooking (and I've certainly been eating!), I just wasn't feeling very writey. I hope I'll be better now. All apologies.

Point the second: Thank you to those who contacted me to make sure I'm OK. Don't worry, I haven't fallen too hard off the wagon. I'm not smothered in fried foods or cheese or anything like that.

Point the third: I thought I had something else to say here, but I don't remember what it is. Might as well get straight to the catching up, then.

Point the fourth: Before I start talking about everything I've cooked lately, I'd like to briefly mention to things I didn't. The rest of this post will be my two cents on the restaurants I've been to this month.

4 Course Vegan

The food is great, but the atmosphere really makes it. It's like you're going to a secret, professionally catered, dinner party only about two dozen people know about. The atmosphere is so homey you may forget you have to pay at the end. Especially since there's no cashier. We all just walked up and paid the chef as we left.

Despite the name, we actually received five courses:

Cashew cheese and parsnip ravioli with a sweet potato cake topped with a horseradish sauce
Hot-n-Sour Lemongrass Broth with Kabocha Dumpling and Sweet Pea Greens
Rice Flour Crepe with 5-spice Black Beans and Sesame Chile Oil
Masmun Curry with Garnet Yam, Thai Basil and Toasted Cashews
Chocolate Almond Torte with Blood Orange Syrup and Vanilla Cream

All delicious. The portions were small, because it's "gourmet", but five courses of small portions are really enough to fill you up. The main courses seemed quite light, but the dessert was dense, filling up any left over room we may have had. I ended up staying out until after 5 AM that night and didn't stop for any kind of snack.

Very recommended. Would definitely go again, preferably for some sort of occasion.

The V Spot

I've been here a few times and am always pleased with what I order. One word of caution: they really like to slather on the sauce.

Their nachos are amazing. I had them when I still ate dairy and couldn't care less that I wasn't eating the real thing. The chicken parmesean was great and there was SO much of it. I shared it with everyone at the table and everyone left with sauce on their pants. The BBQ seitan wrap is a real treat, sort of maply and all sorts of delicious, but not for eating on the go. After half, my hands looked like the end of the movie Carrie and I needed a bit of assistance getting to a sink to wash up without making a mess. The meatball parmesean hero was great. It's all flattened out, so it's not difficult to handle (naturally, I ate the neat sandwich sitting there and took the messy wrap to go) and it's very, very tasty. The cheese was borderline melty, too.

Wheeler's Frozen Desserts

They had another NYC event last week. They brought ginger, margarita and what I think was mango ice creams, all of which were delightful. Hannah Kaminsky of My Sweet Vegan brought a crumble, bundt cake, cookies, brownies and I'm not even sure what else. The crumble and bundt cake were divine. I brought an enormous batch 5-Spice Almond Cookies from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan, which seemed to be pretty well received (more on that later because that counts as something I made).

'SNice

If you're in the NYC area, do yourself a favor and visit 'SNice at least once. When I saw the menu, I really wanted to try the Chicken Pot Pie Wrap, but several people suggested the Vegan Panini, so I went with that and was not disappointed. It was heavenly. I don't know who the genius is who thought of smoking the tofu, but I'd like to give him or her a great big kiss. Also, the sandwich is huge. Each half should really be a serving, but I ate the whole thing. And a dessert. I got the Apricot Square and it was all sorts of goodness. It's always exciting to be able to eat sweets I didn't make myself.

Also, I am currently battling an addiction to Caramel Brownie Luna Bars. It's been about a week since my last one. Luna, Lara, Cliff and Odwalla bars are all vegan, but Luna Bars have a crunchy thing going on that I find far too exciting.

Any Excuse to Bake

One of my friends recently moved into his first NYC apartment. This meant a housewarming party. This meant baking. Behold Strawberry-Chocolate Chip Blondie Bars from Veganomicon.



As written, these are supposed to be Raspberry-Chocolate Chip Blondie Bars, but I've been reading articles about raspberry insect infestations and bugs are neither kosher nor vegan, so I went with strawberries instead.

These things are great because even without taking the jam shortcut, they were easy and fast enough to make at midnight after a concert (Ambulance LTD is doing a residency at Union Hall under the name Impervious. Two dates left: 1/31 and 2/7. Be there!). There's no blender, food processor or beaters required either, so they can be made quietly in the middle of the night, too.

These made me kind of nervous because I like everything really well done, so I left them in the oven significantly longer than indicated in the recipe because I wanted them to get brown...even though blondies aren't usually all that brown. Despite that, when I cut them into bars, they were still so gooey I thought they might be underdone. Before bringing them to the party, we had taste tests at home. They definitely didn't taste raw! They tasted like sweet chocolate strawberry goodness. People at the party seemed to like them too, which was cool since it was almost all omnis. I believe we can call these bars a success.

Hooray for yummy baked goods that aren't cupcakes!

Happy Holidays! Kinda.

Like all normal people, my friends and I had our gift-giving-holiday get together on Sunday, January 13. This year, all of my gifts were homemade (baked or knit - I forgot to photograph the knit. I suck). But you can still behold the baked goods in all their questionable glory:



First, I made two dozen Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes