Sunday, August 19, 2012
Quinoa Snack Bites
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!
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Independence Day!
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!?!
Friday, May 25, 2012
Shorty Makes Shortbread
Monday, May 14, 2012
Mama You're the Queen of My Heart
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Bread and Chocolate
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Halfmoon Handiwork
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
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.

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!
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Vegan Police Please Don't Read
Does anyone remember when we used to go to frat parties in college and they would ask if you were “party patrol?” Well if you are a member of the vegan police, I am imploring you to stop reading now! I don’t want to lose my semi-vegan license (or whatever the equivalent of losing your frat privileges is) because this weekend I baked two recipes both of which were NEARLY vegan!
It was my roommate’s birth-weekend and of course this called for a birthday cake! Now this blog does not feature a lot of cakes and here’s why—I suck at stacking and decorating cakes. I can make awesome cake and frosting but that’s about it. Every attempt I have ever made to layer a cake has resulted in a lot of cussing, a pile of frosting covered crumbs, and an apology from me to the birthday person about the cake disaster. Let me be clear, I will bake you a birthday cake, it will just likely come in a 9X13 pan (frosting and all) with some very shaky and squished happy birthday message on it. But not this time!

The final product...HAPPY BIRTHDAY CELESTE!!
I decided this was the weekend to challenge myself! My roommate really liked the chocolate and peanut butter pillows I made last weekend so I decided to go with a similar cake. I used this modification of a Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (VCTOTW) cupcake and frosting recipe. The cake was incredibly easy to make!
Once the cakes were cooled, I followed a YouTube tutorial on how to stack a two-layered cake. The girl in the tutorial ripped one of her layers in half when she tried to stack it, which made me feel worse about following her tutorial but moderately better about myself! I used a serrated bread knife to cut off the top hump part (yes that’s the official term) of each 9 inch round cake so they were as flat as I could get them. I eyeballed it because I was trying not to be myself and overanalyze it to the point where there was no cake left!
I frosted the bottom layer with peanut butter frosting (just the top) and added in some chopped up miniature peanut butter cups for good measure (why the vegan police shouldn’t be reading this). Then I stacked the second layer on top and realized I did not have enough peanut butter frosting. This required a harried second batch of PB frosting.
I quickly realized the cake was very crumbly (my mom suggested this was due to the whole wheat flour and I think she might be right) and therefore you could see some of the brown crumbles in the light tan icing, but again I was going against my instincts and not being anal about this! With the frosting completed, I decorated with mini peanut butter cups and Reese’s Pieces and wrote a moderately squished birthday message!

Now as a second baking adventure this weekend I decided to make my own granola bars. Yes I am a hippie, get over it! I modified a weight watchers recipe and mixed it with an Alton Brown recipe my Aunt gave me. The bars were super easy to make, but I put honey in them (again not vegan)! I used old-fashioned rolled oats (3 cups), dried apricots (1 cup), dried blueberries (1 cup), salt (1 tsp), and cinnamon (1 tsp). You coat this mixture with a combination of honey (1/4 cup), maple syrup (1/4 cup), a little brown sugar (1 tbsp), and water (1/4 cup) that you boil, remove from the heat, and pour over the oats mixture. The hardest part was actually shaping the bars because they didn’t stick together very well (more honey next time maybe?). They are very yummy though! If you try it let me know how it works out! And if you read this and you are the vegan police, please don’t report me :-)

Monday, February 27, 2012
Baking Bonanza
On Friday, it was rainy and gross, so I was left with no choice but to make raspberry truffle brownies from my favorite vegan baking site Post Punk Kitchen! These brownies are supposed to be healthier and relatively speaking they are—one brownie only has five weight watchers points. The recipe calls for whole wheat flour, maple syrup, and apple sauce, making them “healthier.” They don’t taste chocolatey, which was a little disappointing, but expected because you use unsweetened chocolate. I also have trouble baking with whole wheat flour because I find it gives baked goods a grainy texture. I am considering using some other, healthier, flour substitutes to see if I can find one I like better!

Saturday brought sunshine and a ton of wind. I decided that a cold blustery day like that called for even more chocolate and this time I wasn’t messing around with anything healthy! I made peanut butter chocolate pillows from the Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar book. Now these cookies went against all my instincts, because the outside is supposed to be a little crispy (and I HATE crispy cookies…I’m a chewy cookie girl), but I let them crisp and it was perfect. The crunchier chocolate outside contrasted perfectly with the gooey peanut butter center and made the perfect bite! Of course these were bad for you and everyone really enjoyed them (doesn't it always work that way)!

Did I mention that my Aunt and I had made plans to make cookies on Sunday? That’s right folks, day three of my three-day weekend brought more cookies! We decided on the Oo La La's from the Vegan Cookies book because 1) the name is awesome and sounds delicious and 2) we weren’t trying to go the healthy route. We didn’t have all the vegany ingredients so we substituted with some of the real stuff. Oh sweet butter how wonderful you are! These cookies were cakey outside and had the perfect creamy center of an Oreo without all the processed plasticy taste! The wonderfully staged photos are courtesy of my Aunt and the little hand belongs to the Peanut himself (my Aunt is much more creative with the photos than I am).

Man I am exhausted just writing about all this baking. I may or may not be shooting myself in the foot with this whole training for a ten-miler thing because I am using it as an excuse to carb load on baked goods! Don’t judge me :)
Monday, February 20, 2012
Zesty-licious!
Sorry, but this post will not be honoring our Presidents in anyway… I wish I were creative enough to come up with Washington Cherry Tree Cupcakes or something, but I’m not! For me, this long weekend was the perfect opportunity to use my new zester!!! My lovely mom and source of all my kitchen supplies (see the previous post featuring my KitchenAid mixer) bought me a zester from Pottery Barn. I was of course ecstatic because any baker worth their cupcakes knows how hard it is to zest a citrus fruit without one. I was also on a quest to bake something for my blog that wasn’t brown and chocolatey. Last week’s post was a little more colorful and I decided to continue with that theme. I love bright colors, which is why you will see me walking down the street in a cornucopia of brightly colored coats (orange, blue, etc.). This post features Citrus Glitters! And my version really does glitter because I used yellow sprinkles instead of the boring brown demerara* stuff!!
I broke down this weekend and bought the cookbook Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I read the authors’ blog Post Punk Kitchen almost every day on my lunch hour and every recipe I have made from the site is delicious. I say “broke down” because I’ve been trying to save money, but I realized I would have access to a plethora of vegan cookie recipes and vegan baking secrets if I forked over the 15 or so bucks for the cookbook. I was tempted to order it on my kindle, but I have the original kindle, which means no pretty pictures come through and in my opinion that is the best part of a cookbook…seeing how the things you make should look!
The Citrus Glitters were incredibly easy to make (here is a variation of the recipe posted on someone’s blog). Overall the making of the dough only took about 20 minutes and requires only one bowl, which is my idea of baking (less cleaning up!). I bought the ingredients from memory (this is why you should go to the grocery store with a complete list) and bought double the citrus fruit I needed, which was the perfect excuse to make two batches—an orange and a lemon batch. These cookies are delicious—they are so light and the shortbread taste with the citrus tang is the perfect combination. They would taste really good with tea or coffee. In the second batch, I squeezed some extra lemon juice in, which really gave them a lemony kick. Of course, I underbaked them (one minute less than recommended in the book) because I like my cookies soft and chewy.


These cookies were the perfect carb-loading cookie (in addition to my all-day Sunday eating binge at various restaurants in Virginia) because I started my training for the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler this weekend. Anyone else training for it? Anyone want to run together once in awhile? I am missing my running buddies from training for the Pig last year!

Saturday, February 11, 2012
Contaminated Cookies*
* This blog post involves a contagious disease…if you don’t want to catch it, don’t read this!
So I have been looking forward to this weekend for a while because it was my little peanut’s birthday! Those of you who have the pleasure of talking to me all the time, know that 99% of my conversation centers around how adorable/wonderful/fun/smart my baby cousin Andrew is! I was so excited to attend his 2nd birthday party and see him play and have fun with all of his guests, but unfortunately life got in the way, and I got sick…with something contagious! So as to avoid the bad karma of getting 10 little kids sick (thank you to my lovely co-worker who came to work sick), I opted out of the party and laid in bed all day (which if you know me, you know what a challenge that is for me). As my mom pointed out: “Wow you can’t even bake, what are you going to do!?!”
Well I had already gotten my baking fix the night before. I had decided I would make sugar cookies in the shape of airplanes (that was the theme of his party) and the letter A (for Andrew of course) with royal icing decoration long before I got sick. I didn’t notice any symptoms last night and went about the process of baking and decorating the cookies. I used my family’s sugar cookie recipe, which reminds me of leaving cookies out for Santa! I bake them for less than the 12-15 minutes the recipe suggests because I like chewy cookies not crispy cookies, but it’s your preference. I used this illustrated royal icing recipe for two reasons: 1) it had a fairy and suggested it was magical and 2) it had cartoon pictures, which appealed to me! Now you will notice none of this is vegan. I wanted to try the non-vegan way first, because I was unsure in terms of actually decorating the cookies without the stiffening element of the meringue powder. Maybe next time I will try it vegan!


Top Picture: Naked sugar cookies
Bottom Picture: Royal icing whipping away!
The hardest part for me was flooding the cookies with royal icing. You have to water down the icing and it’s hard to get the right consistency. I felt like the blue royal icing was not quite watered down enough. The green royal icing for the A cookies came out much better because I had learned from the blue, a clear sign that cookie decorating can only get easier with practice.

I let the cookies sit over night and then decorated them in the morning with the remaining royal icing and some colored icing I bought at the store. I didn’t do my own decorative colored icing because I could not achieve the colors I wanted with normal food coloring…it was coming out too pastel! I think I will try coloring gels next time. After all this work, I realized I was too sick to go to the party and had most likely contaminated the cookies as well, so I missed the peanut's party and threw 20 painstakingly decorated sugar cookies in the trash!

My favorite decorated cookie! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDREW!
BUT I did learn something about decorating cookies and I am looking forward to improving my decorating skills (and increasing my patience) the next time around!
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Shamed by Donte the concierge...

My second baking adventure this weekend was an oatmeal peanut butter cookie recipe. I wanted to use up the quick oats I had leftover from Christmas cookie baking and use the silken tofu I bought last week. Yes tofu in cookies—everyone STOP cringing—they are delicious! I added in semi-sweet chocolate chips because I can’t bake without chocolate, it’s like Pat Sajak hosting Wheel of Fortune without six margaritas (you all know you read People too). The recipe calls for molasses and next time I might substitute honey (there is a debate on whether or not honey is vegan, and I’m still not sure what side I’m on) for all or part of it, because I feel like the molasses definitely comes through in the cookies and overshadows the peanut butter a little. This recipe makes approximately 50 million cookies, so you may want to be smart and halve it. I will be giving them away to the highest bidder, since even after distributing them to friends, family, and of course Donte* I think I will still have some leftover!
*Check back next week for Donte’s feedback!
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Not So Salted Caramel Brownies
So what did I land on you ask (hint: it’s in the title)? Vegan salted caramel brownies! My lovely friend Emily (HEY EM!) sent me a recipe for salted caramel brownies and I decided to try and “veganize” it. Now I could have used the eggs because eggs don’t = tummy trouble for me, but I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge (remember that whole Peace Corps thing!?!). I combined two recipes. One for vegan and gluten-free brownies and the one from the recipe Emily sent me for salted caramel sauce (I had to “veganize” this one).
Sorry to disappoint folks, but it was somewhat of a fail. The hardest part was “veganizing” the salted caramel sauce. I searched and searched (again with the time wasting…) for a vegan salted caramel recipe and couldn’t find one. I used Earth Balance instead of butter, which seemed to be an adequate substitute, although I don’t think Earth Balance tastes quite the same as butter. I subbed in soy creamer for the heavy cream and this is where I think the problem really was. Soy creamer is very watery and I think this resulted in a watery caramel sauce. Not to mention I had to make the salted caramel sauce twice because I let the sugar get too hot and burned the first batch. Apparently my definition of the “dark amber” color the sugar should be (as indicated in the recipe) was a little off!
The brownie recipe used one of my absolute favorite things, Bisquick! I know it seems strange, but the gluten-free Bisquick is the perfect flour blend for vegan brownies, plus it reminds me of weekend mornings when my mom would make us pancakes in the shape of bunnies (my favorite animal)! The recipe called for jam, which is what I think made these brownies delicious! I used organic strawberry jam. I was shocked with the final product, because you can’t taste the jam at all but the brownies are really fudgy (yup I accomplished the fudgy part) but not necessarily gooey.*

I added the water-logged salted caramel to my brownie batter, following the recipe instructions, but was more than a little panicked when I saw how watery it looked in the pan. I figured I had nothing to lose and would just bake them anyway! Ultimately, you can’t taste the salted caramel sauce at all and if I hadn’t put it in, I wouldn’t know it was there. The brownies are still delicious though and I actually covered them to stop myself from eating the whole plate!

* I will NEVER use the word moist on this site. Honestly I just cringed typing it; I hate it for some unexplained reason! But if you are a fan of the “word I will not say/write” feel free to substitute it for other similar words I might use!
Sunday, January 22, 2012
“Are you sure these are vegan?”
I have been a vegetarian for almost 14 years. I don’t eat any meat or fish and limit the animal products, although I still eat eggs and dairy. Recently I began considering giving up dairy—I will spare you the gruesome details—and realized that this threw a wrench in a lot of my baking plans. Those peppermint bark dark chocolate brownies I made for my work holiday party were off limits and my favorite thing to bake thus far—cupcakes –were more difficult to get right, since the one time I tried to make vegan cupcakes they turned out like raspberry flavored bricks! Now I will not completely stop making stuff with eggs and dairy because 1) it’s delicious and 2) some things are just better with butter.*
Now here is a twist, I have lost 40 pounds since last January by following Weight Watchers (WW) online (no this is not WW endorsed). I am sharing this not to brag, but because combining partial veganism with WW has been a little tricky, so I was very excited to find many vegan recipes on the site. My lovely Aunt from Texas is visiting this weekend and she joined WW too (look for us as the next family endorsing WW on TV Jennifer Hudson style!) and decided to make me dinner using one of their vegetarian recipes. So I decided to contribute dessert and found a yummy WW approved vegan chocolate cookie recipe.

The only thing I didn’t have for these cookies was the unsweetened coconut, which was very easy to find. Fun fact, cocoa does not have milk (you probably already knew this but I didn’t when I first went dairy-free). The recipe was fairly easy to make minus the almost boiling water part, which always makes me nervous. I am also lucky enough to have a beautiful, bright orange, Kitchen Aid mixer (thanks mom!) so it was easy to combine all the ingredients. The recipe does not make 50 cookies, which was a total relief to me since I didn’t know who I was going to give them to! It made about 36 cookies following the serving guidelines of a scant tablespoon full.

*In light of the recent Paula Deen controversy, I hereby promise that now that I have endorsed butter I will not once I get rich and famous endorse some kind of diabetes drug.