Shimmy Shimmy Coconut

Several months ago, in a post punk kitchen thread barely acknowledged, an idea was suggested about putting frozen cookie dough balls into cupcake batter and as the cupcake bakes, the cookie dough thaws creating a soft cookie dough filled cupcake. It was an intriguing enough idea and so I made these:

White choc macadamia cookie dough centred chocolate cupcakes with white chocolate ganachey icing. They were, ofcourse, quite a hit with the work colleagues.

I recently received the third season of US version of The Office from a friend of mine and returned the favour by making a new batch of these cupcakes. I have no white choc chips anymore, so instead I made some baci flavoured cookies (based loosely on the Veganomicon choc chip cookie recipe). I rolled small amounts of cookie dough into 40 balls and froze them on a tray*. Once they were pretty cold I put them in a ziplock bag and stored them in the freezer. The cupcake recipe I used was the hazelnut cupcakes from VCTOTW. I aliquoted half of the cupcake batter into the prepared cupcake tray, but realised it wouldn’t be enough to cover the cookie dough balls** so simply distributed the batter evenly then pushed the cookie balls into the batter so that the balls were sticking out. They baked away for 20mins. Once they were cool I simply made a quick chocolate icing with melted chocolate, margarine, icing sugar and a dash of frangellico. It was a little runny but thickened up when I added some soy milk powder.

The result:

Sprinkled with hazelnut meal, they are reminiscent of ferrero rocher cupcakes. Another winning cookie dough cupcake.

* Frozen cookie dough balls are also a pretty great after dinner treat on its own!

**Next time, I reckon 1 and a half batched of this cupcake would be a better amount if you want a cookie dough center.

Slowly, my meat-eating friends are starting to integrate vegan foods into their lives. It helps that I force feed them vegan baked goods whenever I get the chance. One restaurant that has made it particularly easy to get my friends to eat tofu is ‘Dumpling Inn’ at Jamison shops. Since one fateful night late last year, we have been going to this restaurant at least once a month ( and more like once a week) and we pretty much order the same things:

Sizzling bean curd - the sauce is either a plum or sweet and sour sauce as far as we can discern, and is thick and perfectly balanced in flavour. I dream about this dish (not really, but it is good enough that I could dream about it) and pretty much crave it most days.

Bean curd with hot rock salt - oh the garlic and salty goodness of this dish! Very few restaurants have made this as well as Dumpling Inn.

Four season beans with mince pork (minus the minced pork, of course) - a recent addition to our order. Frankly, it doesn’t compare to the tofu dishes, but it is quite nice in its own right.

One of my friends (a seasoned Chinese restaurant frequenter) suggested getting the shallot cakes (which I will likely blog about my attempt to make these soon enough) as an entree and I thank her for that as they were so delicious. The picture is blurry and doesn’t do them justice - tastewise:

One of my friends is very anti-tofu and he seems to have no trouble eating his fair share of these dishes (the truth is, I wish he didn’t like them at all - more for me that way)!

All in all Dumpling Inn is a cheap, really tasty dining experience with friendly service that makes it well worth the very frequent visits.

My work place has quite a few catered functions, with the food usually supplied by the only cafe in the building. At such occasions, the only vegan fare is some of the alcohol and other beverages which is mostly fine by me. That said, sometimes a vegan can get hungry and it is really bad to see a wide array of non-vegan food and know that I’m getting nothing! One thing that has particularly hurt is watching people rave about the zucchini puffs. Vegetarians and meat-eaters alike make noises of pleasure whilst eating these little balls of fatty goodness and I have developed an ever-growing envy of them and their stupid puffs! Looking at numerous cheese and egg-rich recipes made me decide that it would probably not be too hard to veganise. As I had nothing to base the taste on, I was putting ingredients in a little blindly. I won’t put the recipe yet, as it didn’t turn out as nice as I would have hoped - they were quite bland and I shallow fried them so they were still not quite cooked in the middle. Once I perfect the taste I will post the recipe.

But here are a couple of pictures of this first attempt:

By the time I finished making these, I was in a hurry to get to a netball game so I scrapped my intention to make a lemon flavoured aioli and went with some tomato sauce instead.

I think the next attempt will involve baking them in the hopes they cook through and remain crunchy.

The smell of homemade freshly baked bread has got to be right up there as one of the best smells ever. It totally makes the time consuming side of baking well worth the effort. Late last year I bought this book. Before it I had attempted a ‘La Dolce Vegan’
bread recipe once and got put off by the extent at which my fingers were covered in sticky dough (a rookie mistake to use both hands to knead dough!). But last year I was flipping through the pages of this bread book and got inspired. I’ve tried a few recipes (the bagel recipe is truly wonderful that I’m in the process of optimising), but did not have the foresight to takes some pictures until now. As soon as I saw the Victorian (soy) Milk Bread I was salivating. I made a double batch which required 750mL of milk! The time needed to rise was one hour then another hour to prove. The book mentions it has a soft crust and crumb, but I over baked the first loaf and it ended up being a crunchy crust instead. In hind sight it was stupid to make a double batch as my oven is ridiculously small and as such, the 2nd loaf was left to prove for about 2 and a half hours, resulting in a very dense, flat loaf. Nevertheless, the first loaf was so delicious fresh out of the over:

There’s nothing better than hot bread smeared with margarine and a thin layer of vegemite!

I’m not sure about outside the vegan blogosphere, but it appears that everyone blogs about similar things at the same time. Maybe it’s similar to PMSing together, I’m not sure. However, we really can’t rule out mind control by those more prominent members of the community. Probably no topic has been more extensively explored than vegan cupcakes, which have taken ascendancy since Isa Chandra Moscowitz and Terry Hope Romero published ‘Vegan cupcakes take over the world‘. One day in the not too distant past,  I found a seriously gorgeous FlickR collection of vegan cupcakes  in a post-drinking haze that I’ve yet to find again, simply due to the sheer volume of material there is to search through (and also a seriously low attention span!). Anyways,  I’ve made quite a few of the cupcakes from VCTOTW and one that I keep coming back to is the Agave Nectar cupcake. The picture below was a from a test batch I made to display the pipe-ability of the butter cream frosting (from that same book) for a friend that was catering a wedding.

So very sexy. If there is a single vegan out there who hasn’t bought this book (or borrowed it to death from the library), do so now!

If there was one cookie recipe that universally pleases, it would be this one. Adapted from Dreena Burton’s famous homestyle choc chip cookie recipe by Nicole Weston (recipe found here). I have made these supremely tasty cookies time and time again and usually substitute the maple syrup for agave nectar, which gives them a slightly buttery honey-ish taste.