Jananas

Over the weekend I made cupcakes for my friend Robot’s birthday. Normally when I make vegan cupcakes, I whip out my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I was lazy and the decision to bake was a last minute one, so I made easy vegan cupcakes.

Instructions for Easy Vegan Cupcakes

• buy a box of cake mix. check ingredients to ensure that its vegan (not all of them are).
• normally mixes call for adding some combination of milk/water, oil, and eggs. instead, replace these with an equal volume of A) sprite or some other ‘clear’ pop for white/lighter cakes, or B) coke or some other ‘darker’ pop for chocolate/darker cakes
• bake as you normally would

Done! Seriously, stupid easy and you don’t need to have any fancy ingredients in your pantry.

I made chocolate root beer cupcakes. The base is a chocolate cake mix and I used Dr. Pepper as the liquid. The icing your standard butter cream icing made with earth balance margarine (vegan of course), icing sugar, a touch of almond milk, and some root beer flavor.

Today I had a long list of ‘to do’s’ and managed to get through most of them (and then some!). One of the big things is playing with our dehydrator and trying out some raw foods. Right now I’m playing with recipes found online, but I have a couple of raw food cook books coming in the mail – I’m excited to try more stuff out!

Today’s adventures were apple chips and raw bread. First picture is the apple chips. Its most of a bag of organic Macintosh apples we picked up over the weekend, peeled and cored and cut into little pieces. These apples weren’t structurally sound, so when I tried to core them they just fell apart into sections. The end result was that I didn’t end up with perfect little apple rings. Rather I have a bunch of smaller pieces. Good news? They all fit into this jar!

Next up is some raw bread – I used this recipe as a baseline. I’m terrible at following recipes, so mine wasn’t totally the same. I ground up golden flax seeds myself instead of using ground flax (didn’t have any around). I substituted a banana for the apple, as I accidentally used all of mine in the above apple chip experiment. Things didn’t grind up as easily as I thought they would – although that’s probably just more about learning how to use our food processor more effectively.

I made myself a sandwich this afternoon using this bread – organic ham (hey, I’m not vegan!), spinach, and dijon mustard. This bread has an awesome wholesome taste and a dry enough texture that it easily passes for what we would normally think of as bread. Although that may be partly because over the last few years I’ve made the switch to organic, whole grain-type breads (you know, the extra small loaf kinds) and this bread is more in line with those.

I’ll definitely be making more of this!

For Christmas we got a dehydrator from my parents. It had been sitting in a box in the basement while we got Jason moved in and everything else sorted out. I’ve been reading Lisa’s Vegan Cookbook Critic blog lately and her fantastic cookbook reviews and food pictures inspired me to pull this out and get crackin’ at making awesome raw foods.

First up – cheesy kale chips. I used 1cup raw almonds (soaked), 1 medium carrot (no red bell peppers in the house), 1 head of garlic as we still have tonnes in the basement from this past summer, and 2-3tbsp of nutritional yeast. I blended it all together, although sadly my blender isn’t fantastic so we didn’t end up with a nice smooth paste. [note to self - buy a blendtec as a gift to self/household once I'm working and have a paycheque.]

I had 1 head kale, 1 of collard greens, and 1 bunch of spinach in the house so those all got washed, torn up, and coated with the above mixture. They were dehydrated over night at about 115F.

I took them off the dryer sheets this afternoon and put them out of reach so that they’d last until Jason made it home. 30 minutes after he arrived they were gone! Its an easier way to add healthy greens to your diet while satisfying that need for a crunchy snack. Have no fear, our second batch will be going in this evening.

My roommate picked up some lovely lavender tea this past weekend. I’m not a fan of floral teas, but it made me start thinking about shortbread. This afternoon I decided that it was high time to make some cookies.

First up, I steeped some lavender in hot water (just under a cup). I let it sit while I got distracted by doing other household things like laundry and putting away laundry.

I used a basic shortbread recipe.

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup butter
• 1/2 cup sugar (I used icing, as I wanted this to be more of a melt in your mouth type treat)

I mixed the butter and icing sugar and flour together by hand. At the very end, I added the loose lavender (not the liquid, which you’ll need to keep for a later step!) from the steeping. I rolled the entire mixed out into a log, wrapped it in parchment paper and refrigerated it.

Once it had cooled, I pulled it out and just sliced it into cookies. Way easier than rolling dough out and having to deal with the sticky and flour covered mess.

I laid the cookie rounds on parchment lined cookie sheets and baked them at a 300′ oven for 25-27 minutes (until brown).

The cookies on the own have just a hint of lavender. The real gem, though, is the lavender glaze I made for the top. I mixed about 1/4 cup of the liquid saved from steeping the lavender. To this I added enough icing sugar to thicken the tea up and whisked it until it was smooth. I spooned some of the glaze over each cookie to decorate and voila, lavender shortbread cookies! At the last minute I added some of the lavender tea to the glaze – its a little added touch that makes them delightfully perfect.

Oh, and did I mention that I listed a few more things on my Etsy Shop today? Go check ‘em out.

Tonight for dinner we decided to have crepes. Jason cooked up both sweet and savoury crepes (might as well make dinner and dessert out of the same meal). The savoury crepes had spinach with onion, fresh garlic that we picked up in Perth and some Bragg’s. They were nutty and flavourful.

For the sweet crepes, Jason added a little extra maple syrup and sugar to the batter. We used some of the apricot syrup we had from making apricot jam earlier this week. These were amazing, if a little messy. They would have been great with some vegan cream cheese, but we didn’t have any in the house.

This was the first time we’d tasted the apricot syrup. Its so good that when I make more apricot jam tomorrow, I’m going to sterilize some extra small jars and put the syrup in the hot water bath along with the jam so that we can enjoy it all year long.