Quinoa Snack Bites

A long time between posts <insert same old excuses here> but I baked something that I want to share! I made quinoa "cookies." I saw this recipe on a blog I love and decided to test it out.  I veganized it of course and replaced the egg with a flax "egg."

Now I am just letting you know that I pretend to like quinoa but I'm not 100% there.  I like it in theory because it's good for you and it's a good grain substitute and all that stuff, but I never really enjoy eating it.  I thought maybe if it came in cookie form it might get me to the point of enjoying quinoa because I love sweets.  I used natural peanut butter (just the straight peanut stuff) and I think that if I had used a natural peanut butter with a little bit of sugar it would have been better and made it taste more like dessert.  I think my expectation that it would be a cookie was a little deceiving to my taste buds.  So I think I might rename them quinoa snack bites! They are great as a morning or afternoon snack, which is the way I am currently enjoying them.

Such a simple recipe with the great added texture of the quinoa! And pretty good for you too!

Independence Day!

Better late than never....seems to be the mantra of my life lately! I have completely neglected this blog because I have been traveling and working like crazy! But I have still been baking when I can.  For awhile, I have wanted to try out making pizza crust and I have a mild obsession with dessert pizza because I completely fell in love with it when I was younger (of course this was the whipped cream very dairy version) so our 4th of July get together seemed like the perfect opportunity!

I used this recipe from one of my favorite blogs.  Instead of the dairy topping, this blogger came up with a yummy avocado whip, that looks like guacamole but tastes like whipped cream (those eating just had to get past the initial sensory conflict...eyes vs. taste buds).  I thought it was great although the leftover pieces were not as good so it may be an eat the day of treat! My only issue was chopping up all the fruit, since I realized I am allergic to Kiwi and my hands were itching like crazy :-)

Can't wait to try out some other pizza crust recipes....sourdough pizza crust perhaps!?!

Shorty Makes Shortbread

I have talked ad nauseam on this vanity project about my love of chocolate.  Generally, I prefer brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and any other baked good where the flour, tofu egg substitute, and sugar are simply a platform for chocolate, which is why I had yet to make shortbread before last weekend. I was the kid that begged my mom to forget about ordering a box of each Girl Scout cookie and skip the shortbread cookies for an extra box of thin mints!

But last weekend I decided I needed to bite the bullet and try the whole shortbread thing…it really helped that this shortbread cookie recipe called for an overflowing teaspoon of chocolate ganache in the middle.  This is another Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar recipe and per usual it was delicious! I brought these as a snack for poker night—I mean what poker night is complete without a little shortbread and ganache—wait, what? You don’t get it? You must not play poker the classy way like we do! The cookies were a hit and I have yet to hear from Grandma Min that they are a “little rich” so that means the shortbread did its job in balancing out the rich chocolate ganache!

I also made my second attempt at sourdough bread last weekend and it turned out much better than the first.  I used this recipe and followed my Aunt’s advice of scoring the top of the bread and baking it with a pan of water on the bottom rack of the oven.  The bread was much more bread-like this time—light and fluffy in the middle with a crunchy crust!

In other news, I found dairy-free mini chocolate chips at the grocery store and it’s a four day weekend so you all will have another blog post to look forward to very soon (wow my life is exciting)!

Mama You're the Queen of My Heart

Has anyone else thought about how strange that Boyz II Men song is?  I never thought about it until right now (that it's stuck in my head)! But it came into my head because yesterday was Mother’s Day and I love my Mama!! My Mom is the best (and yes you have read this on fifty other blogs in the past two days…but really she is the best)!  She has always been there for me and I feel so lucky to have her as a mother. I am so blessed to have a lot of moms in my life—one mom, one step-mom, two grandmas, and wonderful aunts! I am so thankful to have these great women in my life and the way that they all mother inspires me to want to be like them in the future!

Speaking of imaginary future children (who needs a husband!??!), I will be “the BEST mom ever” (this should be said like Monica from Friends when she wants Phoebe’s grandmother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe) because I will make my kids some rockin’ baked goods! As a present to my Mom, who always says something nice about my baked goods and inflates my ego, I decided to make vanilla bean cupcakes with chocolate ganache, and get this…they were heart-shaped (another inspiration for the title of this post).

I bought a cast-iron heart shaped muffin pan at a rummage sale for $3 and was a little disappointed that I would have no real reason to use it until Valentine’s Day and then Mother’s Day came along! These cupcakes looked like the perfect recipe to make into little hearts and the ganache was thin enough that it didn’t take away from the cute heart shape like a big layer of icing might.  The cupcakes were adorable (and all vegan)! Why is it that when something is this cute, you just want to eat more of it? Is that just me?

Bread and Chocolate

I’m trying to challenge myself, since I have been feeling a little boring lately. So, I took on two baking challenges this weekend—1) I “veganized” a recipe on my own and 2) I baked bread for the first time.

I started with a foray into “veganizing” recipes.  I saw this post on banana-chocolate-peanut butter cookies and was instantly in need of fifty of them.  This is fast becoming one of my favorite flavor combinations (I know I’m a little late to the party, but for years I hated bananas).  I decided this recipe would be a good start to experimenting with veganization (also a challenge, coming up with as many derivatives of veganize as possible) because it only required a few replacements. 

The first replacement was easy; I substituted earth balance for the butter.  Replacing the egg was a little more complicated.  I decided to try using silken tofu for one reason—I had some left over from the brownies I made last weekend.  I used the Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar replacement guide and blended the tofu with a tablespoon of cornstarch and the melted butter.  I was concerned the cookies would be hard and hockey puck-esque, but luckily the substitution worked! These cookies are gooey and light (is it possible to be both at the same time?? Yes, yes it is) and they taste like banana bread with a hint of peanut butter and yummy chocolate.

My second challenge was making bread.  I’ve never made bread before, but as I mentioned in my previous post, my Aunt gave me part of her sourdough starter last week.  I fed the starter (who I named Edgar in case you’re curious…I prefer all inanimate objects have old man names) five days after she gave it to me and all seemed to be going according to plan.  I decided to make whole wheat sourdough bread and followed a recipe I found online.  The process was long because you still have to wait for the bread to rise (twice).  I think I needed more liquid with this bread, because I used whole-wheat flour and it seems a little flaky to me.  Honestly, I think the whole-wheat flour taste overpowers the sourdough taste, which I find a little disappointing.  Next time I will probably try making regular sourdough bread and skip the healthy whole-wheat substitution.  

Overall it was a good baking weekend.  I feel like I accomplished something and I will certainly have plenty to eat for the rest of the week (well maybe not in terms of cookies since there are only three left)!

Halfmoon Handiwork

I’m back! Although I’ve been baking I haven’t been blogging lately.  Well I cannot NOT share the cookies I made this weekend (how’s that for grammar???). When I was little my family and I would go back to Utica and Rome, New York where my Grandma Min and Pa (my mom’s parents) are from.  Every time we went we were guaranteed three things—1) to see a lot of family, 2) to gain at least five pounds from eating spinach and cheese fatayers (Lebanese spinach and cheese pies), and 3) to eat delicious halfmoon cookies.  Halfmoon cookies are black and white cookies for those of you who are unfamiliar with the upstate NY vernacular! These are some of my favorite cookies in the world (and that’s saying something). 

I saw the recipe in Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar and instantly knew I had to make them.  My friend Karla is moving to Madison, Wisconsin and she is a fellow baker so I figured I would dazzle her with homemade goodbye halfmoon cookies!

These cookies are extremely easy to make, which was the opposite of what I thought since I have this thing where I think everything that looks pretty must be complicated to make! The cookie part was quick—it was the waiting that was killer! Waiting for the cookies to cool, waiting for the white icing to dry, and then waiting for the chocolate icing to set.  I am not a patient person. 

Overall these cookies turned out beautifully! The only criticism on taste I have is the white icing—it was way too sweet for me.  I always have a problem when making royal icing, because the confectioners’ sugar/water balance is difficult to strike and you can end up with cloyingly sweet icing.  Although I tried to make it balanced, to get it thick enough to spread required more confectioners’ sugar than I prefer.  Next time I would definitely add in more vanilla extract to cut the sweetness. 

I know I enjoyed them and these cookies were a good reminder that food can really bring you back to certain moments in time.  Not to get too sappy, but I have really been missing my Pa lately, and these cookies brought me back to the comfort, excitement, and feeling of satisfaction I always felt on those trips to upstate NY!

On a more upbeat note, my Aunt gave me a sourdough bread starter today, looking forward to experimenting with sourdough bread next (I’ve never even made real bread before, so this should be interesting)!

My New Jam!!!

So I have been pretty bad about posting for the past two weeks…meaning I haven’t posted at all! That’s not to say I haven’t been baking, because I made chocolate chip cookies and tahini and lime cookies (not to be called hummus cookies Emily) two weekends ago. This past weekend I was traveling so I had no real time to bake, so it was only fitting I bake during the week!

I have become a bit of a psycho when it comes to ingredients—see making my own granola bars—so I wanted to make my own vegan biscuits since I have been craving biscuits lately. I am also trying to make my baking a little healthier—again see making my own granola bars—as it pertains to things I will be eating every day. Since I joined Weight Watchers, I have become a boring breakfast eater. I tend to have a rotation of bagels and vegan cream cheese and oatmeal and I have been so sick of it, so vegan biscuits seemed like the perfect break.

I found a vegan biscuit recipe online and modified it to make it a little healthier by substituting whole wheat flour for all purpose flour. This recipe makes about 12 biscuits—by the way does it bug anyone else when they don’t include the number of servings a recipe makes!! I put it in this nutrition calculator for recipes and entered it into WW and each biscuit is only three points…yummy and not so terrible for the diet! The biscuits are light and I don’t even notice the whole wheat flour, which I normally do in baked goods.

Now let’s get to the really good stuff. I love Nutella! But it has dairy in it, and I have been searching for a suitable substitute. Further proving I am not a good vegan, I don’t like almond butter because the texture just isn’t right to me. I have been reading on a lot of baking blogs (I have too much time on my hands) about a spread called Biscoff. It’s a spread of the Biscoff cookies they sell in Europe. I have been keeping an eye out for it and I finally bought it tonight at the grocery store, because I figured it would be the perfect thing to jazz up my whole wheat healthy breakfast biscuits.

This is my new jam people! It is so delicious! At first I thought I would have too many biscuits, but I will be eating these babies for breakfast and dessert every day from now until they are gone! Seriously try it out and come jam with me, you will not regret it!