Shimmy Shimmy Coconut

So I’m back, somewhat. My laptop is getting fixed as we speak. I, ahem, found my camera on monday in a really obvious place, weeks after I was convinced it had been stolen (I probably should clean my dorm room more frequently - yeah?). Mention of my PhD is best left in that corner of my mind where I allow myself to freak out.

So, while I haven’t had time (or groceries) to make anything new (or repeat with photos some of the rather wonderful things I mentioned in my last post) since finding my camera, I did find some older photos on my camera that I hadn’t blogged about before.

Late last year I found The Joy of Vegan Baking cookbook in my local bookstore. It was quite a surprise, considering we usually have about three copies of Vegan Cooking for One (probably the saddest vegan cookbook there is) and that’s about it! So, while reading through the many recipes and salivating over the gorgeous glossy images, I found a recipe for Lemon Bars. I most definitely have a deep love of all citrus, with perhaps the most special place reserved for lemons. Sadly, I had no lemons in the house just then, but I did have several limes I had bought at the market for cheap-cheap. So Lime bars were made:

Its too long ago to remember the exact number of limes I used or the precise taste of the bars. I do remember that while the recipe was a little fiddly, they turned out pretty good. Still. Lemon bars would be better.

Thanks for the comments from the last post! New recipes coming soon!

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.

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.