Vegan Cake

All right. So, in my quest to stay (mostly) vegan and still eat good desserts, I'm seriously loving the cookbook, Vegan with a Vengeance (by Isa, from the PPK). I especially love the Lemon Gem cupcakes, made nice and tart with lots of lemon zest in the batter.
There's an anniversary party coming up soon, and two of the kids can't have soy, milk, or eggs. So, I'm going to have to experiment with making some vegan, soy-free cakes.
I figure I can accomplish this by using rice-milk or almond-milk instead of soy, but I'm a little curious about the small amount of soy-protein in Earth Balance (my vegan butter substitute that is even better than, um... butter).
This is going to be a challenge.
Seriously, I'll need an award for this.
I'm also wondering if chocolate cake is the way to go, or to transform the lemon-gem cupcakes into a sheet cake. They're cupcakes, so the batter is light and fluffy and frothy; maybe I can add some density to it somehow.
Anyway. Chocolate, or lemon?

Converts and disasters

I swear I've been cooking things since March. Good grief, it's been a while.
So my family went veggie for a while, but this has ended in what I call, eh, disaster. My sister, Grace, was the first to go. She called one day and after much "ehhhh"s and "ummmmm"s said that she'd broken down and gone carnivorous.
"How, exactly?" I said, my eyes squinted with the squint of cynicism.
She'd apparently eaten a chicken nugget. Well, four chicken nuggets. And a burger. And some bacon.
"I fell off the wagon," she said.
"No. You fell off the wagon, rolled down a cliff and burst into flames." I was trying to be positive, you see.
"Meh," said Grace, sounding depressed yet relieved.
All I could think was, thank Gordon I didn't buy her that subscription to the 'Vegetarian Times'.

Anyway, hope you're all having a lovely autumn. I made a ridiculously good potato soup two weeks ago, and a pretty good apple pie. I shall get back into the swing of things and post photos from now on! I swear it!! Arrgghhh!!!

Chocolate pudding (plus: a frightening experiment with whole-wheat flour and a breadmachine)

Well, we always need dessert, right? Right! So I made this chocolate-peppermint pudding. I had tried the recipe before, but the amount of cornstarch hadn't seemed quite right, and since our microwave is a pain I used the stove top instead and (eeekk!) burned some of the chocolate.
Do not give up. Do not give up.
So I tried it again last night, and (shock and awe) it was actually pretty good. I added more cornstarch than before, which made it a touch too sticky, so I added a bit more soymilk to compensate. The texture wasn't, you know, like this stuff, but it was good.
(And a note to all you adventuring types: it says 1/8 teaspoon of peppermint extract. Do not use more than that.
It's dangerous stuff, people. I added 1 tsp. to my hot chocolate once and felt like I'd just been bludgeoned with a peppermint patty.)

All in all, good chocolate, good peppermint, good recipe, good pudding, good dessert, happy Hooded Chef.
As for this:
One day!! One day!! One day, I swear to Gordon, I WILL MAKE WHOLE WHEAT BREAD!! AAAaaaarghhhHHHhh!!!!
I'm gonna go lie down now.

Soup, a tasty soup!

So, since it was rainy, icy, cold, and just generally sad looking outside today, I spent the day cooking. First off: soup!
I tried the 'Dirty Little Secret Soup' recipe for my first attempt at making soup. I love the FatFree Vegan blog, and I thought I'd start with a recipe from there. I had to alter it a bit, since I only had a little bit of veggie stock left. I just put some water in the pot and then some celery, garlic, and onion in and let it cook awhile.

It was a little, er, soupy for me, so I added a pot of rice.


The soup turned out okay, but we were short on a lot of stuff and it was hard to get the seasoning just right. Still a recommended recipe; you just have to be inventive.

The first post: pie

Apple pie is just about perfect in every way: there are a million different options of what to have with it (ice cream? coffee? milk? cool whip?), and it's surprisingly easy to make. A homemade pie is no more difficult than opening a can of pie filling and putting it in a premade crust, and afterwards, you won't have that "did I just eat dessert? I don't remember..." feeling.
When you have some real pie, you remember it.
And then you'll eat too much and you'll regret it, but oh well. That's your own fault, you pig.

Last night, bored with the usual two-crust pie, I saw a picture in my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook of a fruit pie where they used cookie-cutters and just laid them in a design on top.
And behold: PIE!!!!

It was very good, proven by the fact that I ate way too much of it for dessert and way too much of it for breakfast. This is a basic two-crust apple pie recipe, but try the cookie cutter trick if you want. It just adds some, er, cuteness.
(This recipe is from this wonderful cookbook.)

Pastry

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (if you don't have ap, you can usually substitute cake flour)
3/4 tsp salt
2/3 cup shortening
8-10 tbsp water

Stir the flour and salt together. Cut in the shortening, using either a fork or, preferably, a pastry blender.
Add a tablespoon of water to the flour mixture, fluff it with a fork, and try to keep it aside in the bowl. Do that, one tablespoon at a time, until all the flour is moist. Divide the flour mixture in half and roll each half into a ball.
Roll dough into a circle (about 12 in. in diameter). Wrap the pastry around the rolling pin and carefully unroll it onto a 9-in. pie plate. Try not to stretch the pastry too much. Make sure the pastry is about level with the edge of the pie plate.

Filling

6 cups thinly sliced apples (I like Granny Smith apples, and if you cut the slices thin enough, there's no need to peel them)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp ap flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/3 cup dried cranberries ('Craisins' are great for this)

Mix the flour, sugar, and spices in one bowl, and then add the apple slices and cranberries. (I coat the apples by pouring the whole mixture back and forth from one bowl to another; it works quite well.)
Transfer the mixture into pastry-line pie plate.

With the remaining ball of pastry dough, roll it into a circle wide enough to cover the pie plate. Put it on top and crimp the edges of the pastries together. Cut slits in the top pastry.
To make sure the edges don't get too brown or, worse yet, burned, use aluminum foil. Take a long enough sheet of it, cut it in half, fold/crimp the edges together around the pie plate, and fold/crimp the ends together. Fold the top down slightly over the pie.

Bake in a 375 degree oven for 40 minutes. Take off the foil, and bake the pie for another 20 minutes.
Remove from oven.
Devour.