Posts Tagged ‘vegan’

I recently got the book Get It Ripe by Jae Steele. I’ve been looking forward to getting it from all the rave reviews I’ve read. This is more than just a cookbook as it goes into food choices (e.g. organic vs local), digestion, and even a cleansing and detox section.

As much as I like my refined sugars and other unhealthy treats, this book is a nice change from my usual habits and the recipes focus on whole grains and unrefined sugars. It also helps that the recipes taste good.

The banana chocolate chip muffins?

Definitely up there with the other muffins I make.

My 2 year old niece came over so we could bake cookies together. She’s allergic to eggs and dairy and I prefer feeding my niece treats that aren’t filled with unrefined sugar. This book is perfect for that. I chose the Flax Maple Cookies because there’s 6 ingredients and the instructions are so simple and straight forward.

I prepped all the ingredients beforehand so my niece could just pour everything into the bowl and I wouldn’t waste time measuring ingredients. She did well mixing the ingredients together, but once the batter came together she was too interested in tasting the dough to do the rest.

Verdict? She likes the cookies! My sister took home a bunch and the ones that were left here were eaten so quickly by R that I had to tell him to stop eating any more so I could take a picture of them.

Recipe here. There’s also a video for this recipe here.

I had some spelt flour on hand and for some inexplicable reason wanted to make muffins specifically using this flour. I’ve never baked anything with spelt except for some dog treats so I really don’t know why I had the sudden urge to make muffins with this.

I used a banana chocolate chip muffin recipe from Jae Steele’s book Get It Ripe. It’s a great recipe and it’s vegan to boot. No dairy means I can serve these up to my niece who is among the growing population of kidlets that seem to be allergic to something. There’s also no granulated sugar that’s used, just some maple syrup to sweeten the batter up. I used 70% Lindt chocolate chopped up and gave the muffin lovely big chunks of chocolate. If you really want something to stand out, ditch the chocolate chips and chop the chocolate yourself. It’s much much better.

This muffin is definitely a winner and gives me a reason to keep spelt flour in stock.

Recipe here.

Still doing the weekly reviews! I thought I posted the dish that’s in this post earlier this week, but I guess it didn’t go through. I’ve been trying to eat more veggies so my vegan books have been getting more use.

After loving Vegan with a Vengeance so much, I picked up Veganomicon without even looking through it. I have to admit that I don’t really use this book as often and had to make an effort to make something out of the book. I don’t think it’s as approachable as the first one and find a lot of the recipes require many ingredients or steps. I still regularly make items from the first book, but very few recipes I’ve tried in this book seem to repeat worthy. I have yet to make any of the desserts, so maybe that will change my mind.

The portion sizes in this book are rather large for me and what might serve 4-6 people would really be 8-10. This is another draw back for me as we only have 2 people in this household, but I wouldn’t hold this as a negative for the book, it was never meant to serve on a small scale.

Amazon is giving rave reviews on this book, so if there’s a must try recipe, please let me know!

I made Chickpeas Romesco from Veganomicon. The recipe makes a ginormous batch for 2 people. We ate this dish for what seemed like forever. I liked it, but R didn’t find it “flavourful” enough. I thought this could be a repeat recipe, but he nixed that idea saying I’ve made better things. This is a very hearty and saucy dish so be sure to serve this with some rice or even pasta.

Recipe here.

I have this habit of making people cakes for their birthday. No matter how stressful or frustrating the cake making process can be, I’m always happy with the end result and I try to learn from my mistakes.

My mom told me not to make cake because of some antibiotics she was taking, she couldn’t have any dairy. I told her not to worry and I started naming off some vegan cakes. The Ginger Macadamia Coconut Carrot Cake was picked from Vegan with a Vengeance. I wasn’t about to shell out $$$ for macadamia nuts and I didn’t have walnuts on hand so I used pecans instead.

I wanted to play with my new food processor so I used the medium shredding disc for the carrots. I found out that this is a bad idea for carrot cakes and the sort because the end product doesn’t hold together as well. The carrots should be finely grated. I shredded too many carrots so I saved it for another meal.

I’m a bit afraid of frosting with icing sugar in it. You always have to use a truckload of it and I’m too scared of using it all and making the frosting ridiculously sweet. I didn’t add all the icing sugar called for in the recipe so my frosting isn’t as firm. I couldn’t find Earth Balance which is supposed to be the closest thing to butter so I bought “I can’t believe it’s not butter”. It did not live up to its name.

Recipe Tags: cake, carrot cake, vegan, vegan with a vengeance
Posted in Cakes, Dessert 3 Comments »