The Morning After

What do you do after you've spent days in the kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner for your whole family? If you're me, you get up early (relatively) and make brunch.

Back when I first learned to cook (and had stopped eating all animal products, though I still thought of myself as a vegetarian, not vegan) and my family was still eating turkey during Thanksgiving dinner, we came up with Flesh Free Friday: the day after Thanksgiving, I make brunch and dinner and the whole family goes vegan for the day. This year, the main attraction was the Coconut Orange Dessert Pancakes with Candied Spiced Coconut and chocolate ganche from Vegan in the Sun:

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Happy Birthday, Grandma!

My grandmother turned 82 on Wednesday. Here's her birthday cake:



Unfortunately, with all the food I made in the last few days, that's the only picture I was able to take outside. The rest were taken at the dinner table (and some things weren't photographed at all), so take a good look at that picture. The rest are going to be crap.



See?

The cake is just the Apricot Glazed Almond Cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World made into a cake, decorated with marzipan letters and dried appricots dipped in chocolate and almonds. It is tasty and moist and not too sweet, and the preserves inside make your mouth say "Why hello there!" and it's pretty damn near perfect. My whole family loved it, especially my grandmother, who normally takes two bites of cake and says she's had enough but actually ate a whole piece of this thing (and took some home with her; she normally hates leftovers. This is historic).

Now that we have the important stuff out of the way, it's story time. Because if I've made a cake, you can be pretty sure there's a story involved. Probably one involving some kind of destruction.

Once upon a time (AKA last Wednesday, AKA Grandma's birthday, AKA day before Thanksgiving), I took the day off to cook. As an added bonus, in order to keep myself (and my friends) entertained (and distracted), I set up a webcam in my kitchen and broadcast my wacky shenanigans live to the whole Internet.

This cake was the very first thing I made, bright and early Wednesday morning. Everything went fine until it was time to decorate. I toasted and chopped my almonds, melted my chocolate, dipped my apricots and everything was fine. Then I popped the top of my can of marzipan to discover it was...Chocolate Schmear. What the crap is Chocolate Schmear? I didn't know, didn't want to know and just wanted it the fuck out of my kitchen. There was much swearing and stomping around, until I remembered I keep an emergency tube of marzipan on hand (when the world comes to an end, I'll be ready to bake. Will you?), grabbed it and made with the decorating. The marzipan letters were great in theory. In practice...not so much. I couldn't get the marzipan out of the damn cookie cutters without poking it with something, which is why all the letters are nicked and strange.

But let's be honest. That's hardly up to my usual standard of cake tragedy. Something else had to go wrong, right? Much to the amusement of my friends quietly watching from their offices, it did.

When the cake was done, I got out my Official Food Photography Table and showed it to whoever was still watching, before taking it outside to take pictures. Somehow, the table slipped out of my hands and INTO THE CAKE. Suddenly, my beautiful cake said "HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRAND*CRATER*"! After the obligatory freakout, I picked the crushed letters out of the cake, moved the rest of them over, made a new "MA", picked one of the apricots off the side of the cake, used it to cover the crater, then redistributed the apricots so it wouldn't be so obvious one was missing. Viola!

In retrospect, I'm pretty pissed at myself for not taking a picture of the cake with the visible crater. I need to get better at documenting my failures.

I usually share the story of how my cakes go wrong while we're eating them, but I didn't this time. Now the whole Internet knows what happened to the cake, but my family is none the wiser. Let's try to keep this between the 7382193719037812738 of us, OK?

And we'll all live happily ever after, the end.


PS: Chocolate Schmear tastes like ass.

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.

Im a Hero!

Either I'm an ordinary person with an extraordinary ability, or I finally started playing with my Giftmas present from the awesome Paula Dines: How to Garnish by Chef Harvey. You be the judge.



I'm a huge dork, so the first thing I had to try when I got this garnishing book was the tomato rose. It got a lot easier when I used a sharper knife. It'd probably look even nicer if I'd broken out my good knives, but I didn't want to spend that much time on cleanup. It's a good thing to know for my next (first) fancy dinner party, though.

Next, I tried to make cucumber crabs. These didn't go so well. I don't know if I didn't cut the legs thin enough or didn't leave them soaking long enough, but they all snapped when I tried to bend them. Oh well. Another time.

The cucumber shark and zucchini whale were great fun and don't look half bad for my first try. They're sort of smiley, like Disney sea life. At my friend Lauren's suggestion, I had to float them out in a quinoa ocean. Good times.

Tonight's dinner will be the most oddly-shaped salad ever. Which is a far better way to end a long weekend than with a mountain of baked goods, really.