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!

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 :-)