Cherry Pie

Last weekend I went out to my grandpa's ranch in Tygh Valley, Oregon to swim in lakes, ride ATVs, and take advantage of the overwhelming number of cherry trees on his property.



Recipe from here. No, collegecandy.com is not a website that I often consult for recipes. It just happens to have been the first website that popped up when I typed in "vegan cherry pie".

No pictures of the finished product, as it was cut open late in the evening and then finished up over breakfast. Pie and black coffee, Twin Peaks style.

I've been hearing that pie is the new cupcakes. I think I'm OK with that.

Vagina Thumbprint Cookies

I'm sure by now you've heard that I like to make vagina cakes.

Well, Abby and I made some vagina cookies.





We have big plans for these erotic sweets. I'll keep you updated.

Triple Chocolate Fat Pants Cake

Abby and I made this delightful cake last Friday night. The recipe was discovered in Babycakes, a bakebook that I actually find to be kind of annoying because it uses celebrities to sell the readers on all of its recipes. And what do I care if Pamela Anderson or Natalie Portman likes the cupcakes I'm about to bake? But Jason Schwartzman was right, the triple chocolate fat pants cake is amazing. Plenty of chocolate, coffee, and coconut oil. And the whole thing is topped with broken chocolate chip cookies. And guess what, kids? Vegan and gluten-free.



Mouthwatering delicious, seriously.

Vagina Cakes pt. 2

When you google image searches "vagina cakes", you will find pictures from my blog and my friend Jill's on the very first page. I'm pretty sure Jill has mentioned that most of the people who find her blog find it through that picture. I recently looked into which pages people come to my blog from. Sure enough, I get about ten hits a day because people want to see vagina cakes!

So, I made another vagina cake! I made it in honor of my friend Mel coming back to the USA (she's the one who made that awesome toothed-vagina cake last year).


I made a vanilla vegan cake with a little lemon extract. The frosting was colored with juice from beets I'd eaten for dinner the night before (again, my favorite food coloring). I added some toasted coconut for the pubic hair and it was ready to go.


It was pretty delicious. Sometimes I think I could go into the vagina cake making business.

Spicy Eggplant Stew..

...was as good as it looks. If you like the sound of it, here's the recipe.

*Cilantro is the one of the only foods I've ever felt an aversion towards, but lately I have been giving it a chance. I might only be eating it because I like the way it looks piled on top of soups and guacamole. Or maybe I'm learning to like it. I just can't tell yet.

Lazy Samoas

I keep telling myself I'm going to take a break from baking cookies. But then my mom went and bought me coconut oil...


The Lazy Samoas, like all of the cookies I've been making lately, come from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.

Cookies from scratch always taste better. No offense, Girl Scouts.

ATTN: Portlanders

I'm still not sure what i'm going to bake for the Vegan Bakesale for Haiti this weekend, but I'm pretty excited. According to Isa Chandra Moskowitz, $10,000 has been raised for Haiti through vegan bake sales worldwide. I think that's cool.

"Cookies Need No Introduction"

Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar has kind of invaded my life. Cookie making is nice cause mixing everything in a bowl and baking it for ten minutes is so easy. And vegan cookie making is nice cause my mom keeps saying she can't tell the difference, which is kind of an accomplishment.

I made the Chocolate Peanut Butter Pillows first.

And then last night I made Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles, which Buddy the dog really wanted to try. I don't usually tease my dog like this, I swear. I've kind of had a thing for Spicy Chili Chocolate Bars lately, and these are basically the same thing in cookie form.


Tonight I made the chocolate chip cookies. We ate them while playing speed scrabble.

Everyone was happy. Cause that's what cookies (and scrabble, and dogs) do. They make you happy.

Chocolate Avocado Cake with Avocado Cream Cheese Frosting

So, I'm 24!

It happened a few weeks ago. I ate some really good food and received some really nice presents and one of my very best friends came to visit. I felt like turning fourteen instead of twenty-four, so we made avocado face masks and later fell asleep watching Clueless on the rec room floor.


In addition to the avocado face masks, I decided to put some in my birthday cake. I know this sounds weird, but it's kind of amazing. Recipe inspired by one found here.

The Cake:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 6 Tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup soft avocado, extremely mashed (about 1 medium avocado)
• 2 cups water
• 2 Tablespoons white vinegar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 8-inch rounds and set aside. Sift together all of the dry ingredients in a bowl except the sugar. In a separate bowl, mix the oil, avocado, water, white vinegar and vanilla. Add sugar to the wet mix and stir. Mix the wet with the dry all at once, and beat with a whisk (by hand) until smooth. Pour batter into a greased cake tins. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick passes the test. Let the cakes cool in pans for 15 minutes, then turn out onto cooling racks to cool completely before frosting with the avocado cream cheese frosting.

The Avocado Cream Cheese Frosting:

• 1/4 cup non-hydrogenated margarine, softened
• 1/4 cup vegan cream cheese, softened
• 2 cups confectioners sugar, sifted
• 3 tablespoons very ripe mashed avocado
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice (to prevent the avocado from turning brown)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cream together margarine and cream cheese until just combined. Use a handheld mixer to whip, add the confectioners' sugar in 1/2 cup batches. Mix until smooth, then blend in the avocado, lemon juice, and vanilla. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.


Cover the cake in frosting and see if anyone can guess what it's made out of.

Peanut Butter Pie

I love tofu, but I didn't think it belonged in dessert until I made this pie. I have never made anything so delicious. And it's surprisingly easy to put together, so I've already made it three times this month. Even my tofu-weary father likes it.

I struck pretty closely to the recipe I found here.



Ingredients

- 12 oz. Extra-Firm or Firm Silken Tofu
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 1/3 cup powdered sugar
- 1/3 cup + 2 tablespoons agave nectar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup non-dairy milk
- 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
- 1 graham cracker crust (recipe here, or get a pre-made crust)
- peanuts, for garnish

Drain and rinse the tofu and squish out any excess water. Combine the tofu, peanut butter, powdered sugar, and 1/3 cup of the agave nectar in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth. Pour into pie crust and refrigerate. There will still be quite a bit of room in the pan; that's for the ganache.

Now comes the chocolate. Bring your vegan milk of choice to a gentle boil in a small saucepan. As soon as it boils, remove it from the heat and mix in the chocolate and 2 tablespoons of agave syrup until everything is fully melted and evenly combined. Let sit for 10 minutes at room temp until it solidifies. Take the pie out of the fridge and pour or drizzle the ganache on top. Add garnish if you'd like. Put in the refrigerator for two hours before you eat it. An hour in the freezer will also do.

See, it's eaaaasy. And delicious.

Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies

Molasses, fresh ginger, and just a little bit of cocoa powder. These cookies are DELICIOUS. This recipe was adapted from one that I found here.



Ingredients:

• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup vegan margarine
• 2 tablespoon grated ginger
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup unsulfured blackstrap molasses
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons boiling water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup organic granulated sugar

Directions:

In a medium-sized bowl, mix the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and cocoa powder.

In a large bowl, blend vegan margarine and grated ginger with an electric mixer until fluffy. Blend in the brown sugar and molasses.

Dissolve the baking soda in 1-1/2 teaspoons of boiling water in a small bowl and add to the wet mix. Beat in half of the dry mixture until combined and then beat in the other half until everything is combined.

Pat this all down flat on wax paper and refrigerate for about 2 hours.

Heat oven to 325° F. Hand roll dough into 1-inch balls and roll in granulated sugar to coat. Place on a greased baking sheet and bake 10 to 12 minutes or until the surface cracks. Make sure they cool for five minutes.

Eat them with spiked apple cider when it's way too cold to go outside.

Cooking for 7

Monday nights are my dinner night. I cook for the other six people who I live with, and in exchange I am served dinner for the rest of the week. It's a nice arrangement. Cooking dinner for seven isn't easy, though. And while my roommates stick to the stuff that makes sense for feeding a huge house, I tend to make kind of complicated dishes. Given the fact that I've only been cooking from scratch for a year, this can be difficult. I've been making these dinners since January, when I moved in, and last night was the first time I felt like "shit, I've got this." I made a vegan cheese sauce in five minutes. I tended to the stuff in the oven as well as the three pots on the stove. And dinner was only fifteen minutes late.

My favorite feeling is the one you get when you're finally starting to get the hang of something you always thought to be difficult. It's super exciting when this feeling comes sooner than expected (like, whoa, brewing kombucha is incredibly easy, and so is playing the ukulele), but it's also pretty exciting to see hard research and practice finally pay off after months and months or years and years of working on it. I've learned enough about food to cook without recipes sometimes, and I know that if I'm out of baking powder, all I need is baking soda and cream of tartar. Making dinner for seven? Sure. No big deal.

The highlight of last night's dinner: Sweet Roasted Vegetables. They're covered in cinnamon, ginger, and maple syrup. So they're kind of like french toast vegetables.

Sweet Roasted Vegetables

Ingredients:

2 lbs. Root vegetables (I used carrots, parsnip, celeriac, and turnips)
2 lbs. Potatoes
10 cloves of garlic
Olive Oil
Maple Syrup
Cinnamon
Fresh Ginger

Directions:

Set your oven to 400° F.

Cut the ends off of a bunch of root vegetables. Dice the roots so that the wedges are about 3/4 of an inch. Peel as much garlic as you think you can handle. Leave these whole. Cut potatoes into one inch wedges.

Oil a pan with olive oil and then drop in all of your vegetables. Cover them in olive oil; make sure they're drenched. Grate some fresh ginger and place it in the pan. Drizzle maple syrup over the whole thing, and sprinkle some cinnamon on top.

The vegetables need 35-45 minutes in the oven, and they should be turned over after twenty minutes. They're done when you can stick a fork through them.

I'm feeling awfully domestic, so I think I'm going to go balance myself out with some basketball.

street treats

I just got back from my very first road trip. Three friends and I took two weeks to drive to Austin, TX and back. Where did we find the money for gas? We sold vegan cupcakes outside of bars in downtown Bellingham for the month leading up to our departure!

I wish I had photos of the fabulous outfits we wore while selling cupcakes, or of the Birthday Boys and Girls who were excited to find that we were carrying candles on us. But it's normal to forget to take pictures during some of the best nights of your life, right?

I did do a little bit of documenting, though. Here is Forrest decorating his Marbled Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes using the Professional Frosting Decorating Shot that I picked up at a thrift store recently. I feel like a cupcake doctor every time I use it, and it makes frosting look fabulous.



We carted the cupcakes downtown on our bikes. This proved to be difficult at times, but was really fun and quite a crowd-pleaser.



And here is my favorite of the cupcakes that we sold. Chocolate with Oreo Frosting! I based the recipe off of the one that I found here.


We made about $500 off of cupcakes in Bellingham, and sold some in Austin as well, which brought our grand total to $550.

This kind of success will definitely make one think about going into the cupcake business.

Tofu Omelets!

Joel and I made them twice last weekend, and when I woke up this morning I was craving them again. Did you know that black salt has a sulfuric taste that is reminiscent of egg yolks? I am quite excited about the discovery. This recipe is from Vegan Brunch, but you can find it online here.

breakfast for ladyfest

I've never actually been that into coffee cake, but I decided to make some for the potluck breakfast a group of ladies and I hosted for Ladyfest B'ham last weekend. I've been kind of crazy about Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan Brunch ever since getting it in the mail in May. I've always wanted to say that I've tried every recipe out of a particular cook book...I think it might actually happen with this one.


This coffee cake was SO GOOD. I followed Isa's basic coffee cake recipe, and then added some banana and blueberries to the batter. Bananas kind of do wonders for egg-less baking. The cake was extremely soft. And the breakfast was delightful! As was the rest of Ladyfest B'ham, which I plan to cover in this neglected blog very soon.

weekend eats

This last Sunday tasted really good.

Highlights include banana chocolate chip pancakes.


And a tempeh reuben.


Let me show you the reuben one more time, just in case the picture above didn't accurately portray how delicious this sandwich was.

The recipe came from Vegan With a Vengeance. It reminded me of something they'd serve at Hillside Quickie.

Vagina Cake Contest

In honor of International Women's Day (March 8th), I participated in Bellingham's annual Vagina Cake Contest. I'd been admiring the vagina cakes at IWD for the past couple years, so this year I decided to join in on the fun. And seriously, this is fun. There's nothing like crafting delicious baked goods into vaginas.

I made the best vegan frosting. I found the recipe here. I added color by mixing in a couple teaspoons of beet juice. The color was very vagina-esque, and it did not taste like beets. I'm pretty interested in using juices from real food for food coloring right now. Beats the stuff with Red 40 in it. Speaking of Red 40, did you know that it's been banned in pretty much every country that I would like to live in?


Here are the cunt cakes! I used crasins for the clits, which I think worked pretty well. Although some of the cranclits were half the size of the vulva. Oh well. The nice thing about making vagina cupcakes instead of a vagina cake is that you are able to present the reality that not all vaginas look the same. Some cranclits are bigger than others, and that is OK.


Here's me with the finished product.


The Vagina Cake table. Mel's cake, complete with a toothed-vagina, was my favorite.