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 :-)

Baking Bonanza

Remember last week when I said I wanted to switch things up and make something that wasn’t chocolate? Well my chocolate addiction wouldn’t allow me to extend the moratorium to this weekend and I may have gone a little overboard. I baked three different chocolate treats of deliciousness this weekend courtesy of my three-day weekend, since I am now working a schedule where I get one day off every other week.

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!

Healthy Raspberry Truffle Brownies

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)!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows

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).

Oo La La's and the Peanut's Hand

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 :)

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.

In process and my new book!

Citrus Glitters and Charlie Our Kitchen Chicken's Butt

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!

Finished Orange Citrus Glitters

*By the way before this recipe I had no clue what “demerara sugar” was! If you know I am impressed! It is the raw natural sugar that has more of a rock-like texture and is all the rage right now. It can also be called Turbinado sugar. So now you’ve learned something today and can feel accomplished!

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 2^nd 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.

Flooded Sugar Cookies

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!

Shamed by Donte the concierge...

So I live in a building with a 24-hour concierge—yes, yes I know I’m SO fancy! There are three people who consistently staff the desk, they are all very nice (except for maybe that one who wouldn’t let a certain guest up last weekend!), but one in particular is very friendly…Donte. In the past, I have shared some of my baking endeavors with him, mostly because I had made too much and I didn’t want to eat them myself and he happened to be at the desk at the time. So the other day, I’m coming in from a long day at work and Donte calls out to me saying “Haven’t baked anything lately, huh?” Now to give him the credit he deserves, I am pretty sure he wasn’t saying this as a challenge, but I took it as one (I’m not THAT competitive, I swear). This resulted in two different baking efforts this weekend.

My first project was vegan peanut butter, banana, and chocolate muffin cakes (they are thicker than cupcakes but not quite as dense as muffins). I was inspired by a visit from one of my favorite people in the world and my best friend since I was 7—Shannon! She loves these three flavors and as far back as I can remember she and I have been putting peanut butter on reduced fat chips ahoy (evidence of this can probably be found in our “notebooks” of depression from middle and high school, which we had the pleasure of reading again this weekend), so I figured I would make these for her! But of course in true Lauryn fashion, I misread it and added the entire banana instead of saving three tablespoons for the filling. So, I used my creativity to make a new filling using peanut butter, a little coconut milk, and chocolate. I love this type of cupcake because you aren’t expecting the melty chocolate center when you bite into it! I used peanut butter frosting and melted chocolate to frost the muffin cakes, decorating them with the first letter of the names of those who would be eating them! Notice the absence of an S for Shannon, since I tried to do hers first and messed it up, turning it into a swirl instead. They seemed to be a huge hit and all 12 were gone by the end of the night…sorry Donte!

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!

Not So Salted Caramel Brownies

I have been feeling rather frazzled lately. Example, we had a delayed start to work on Monday, which meant I had two extra hours to get ready and I still managed to leave my wallet at home! My scatter-brained mentality is probably why I had so much trouble deciding on my next baking adventure. First these blueberry turnover pop-tarty thingys caught my eye, and looked super yummy and given Harris Teeter’s recent buy one pint of blueberries get one free, worked perfectly with my mission to turn myself into a giant blueberry from eating so many—think Violet from Willy Wonka, but nicer! Then I decided I wanted to try and make vegan peppermint patties because they are my favorite candy! After much vegan blog perusing (this new adventure is allowing me to hone my time wasting skills), I remembered my promise (to myself) to try making vegan brownies, to see if I could make them “gooey” and “fudgy” as all blog posts pertaining to vegan brownies claim they are.

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!