Haiti Bake Sale Success! + Almond Apricot Cookies

 

The bake sale went far better than any of us could have hoped for. People were lined up waiting before we were even finished setting up! And we sold out early - every last thing! A nice reminder that there is a big vegan community here, it's just not very centralized (however this could change in the future).

The best part: we raised $3192.45, donated to the Humanitarian Coalition for their efforts in Haiti!

I didn't bring my camera, but here are some photos that other people took:

(that's me in the polka dot dress, probably feeling flustered because it was so busy!)

 

more people

  

  

  

Some of the stuff I baked :)

(baklava recipe coming soon!)

And a recipe to leave you with:

Apricot Almond Cookies

These are a cross between these vegan cookies that I get at the cafe I always go to for studying in, and the east coast oatcakes that seem to be available at every cafe in Nova Scotia but none here. The cookies themselves are big, thick, and chewy. Nom nom nom. And they don't skimp on the apricots, either.

1 cup quick oats
1 cup whole what flour
1/3 cup oat brain
1/3 cup flax meal
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup vegetable shortening (I use earth balance)
1/2 cup agave nectar
1/2 cup almond milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1 cup chopped dried apricots

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray or grease a cookie sheet and set aside. Mix together the dry ingredients (oats - baking soda). Then chop up the shortening and mix it in, smushing it with your fingers to blend as well as possible. Add the agave, milk and vanilla, mixing with a wooden spoon. Then fold in the almonds and apricots. Shape into small patties, place on cookie sheet, and bake for 12-15 minutes. Makes ~12 cookies.

New Year's Eve Dinner

Goodness, this is not a good start to the new year! I meant to post this much earlier, alas.

I made a small dinner for a dear friend and myself.

 

Buckwheat crepes with almond tofu ricotta, mushrooms and spinach, and some potato leek & dill soup as well. And a simple greens salad. Yum yum yum.

 

My friend followed me around with his camera while I cooked, I guess it made me feel less dorky to be taking pictures of our food. Here I am (in part), serving it up.

And for dessert, baklava! I used the recipe from Extraveganza, except I subbed half the walnuts for pistachios and omitted the lemon zest, adding some rosewater instead (did you know that pistachios and rosewater are my favourite?!)

Check out the nutty flaky deliciousness! Mmmm...

And there was also mulled pomegranate juice. No alcohol for us.

Christmas Buns

I’ve been cooking and baking up a storm since the winter break started, but a bit lazy on the posting part. But there’s more to come, I assure you! I few days before Christmas, I woke up craving cinnamon buns for breakfast (hey, it’s the holidays!). Fortunately I found Mihl’s recipe featuring (as you must already know, my favourite spice) cardamom! They were quick (apart from the rising time) easy to make, and delicious. After eating and sharing that batch of the little goodies, I decided to play around with the recipe and make another batch for my friend whom I was to see on Christmas eve. Here’s my modified version, which is lovely (if I do say so myself) but be sure to try the original recipe too!

Christmas Buns

Dough:

1 ½ cups flour

¼ cup whole wheat flour

¼ cup almond meal

1 teaspoon cardamom

1/3 cup margarine

½ cup almond milk

½ package active dry yeast

zest of 2 clementines or mandarins

Filling:

2 tablespoons margarine

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon cardamom

¼ cup dried cranberries

Melt the margarine in a small saucepan, add the almond milk, then remove from heat and allow to cool. Meanwhile, combine flours, almond meal and cardamom in a bowl. Add yeast to the still-slightly-warm saucepan mixture and let sit for 5 minutes. Then add the clementine zest and combine with the dry ingredients. Knead dough for 5-10 minutes, then transfer to a bowl, cover and let rise for at least half an hour.

When dough is risen, mix all of the filling ingredients together, except the cranberries. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and oil a baking sheet. Roll the dough into a rectangle (the bigger the better, but this stuff isn’t easy to roll out). Spread filling on top, then sprinkle with cranberries. Now roll into a log and cut into 10 pieces. Place rolls on the baking sheet and let rise for another half hour. Pop it into the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes. Enjoy!

Spiced Rhubarb-Apple-Almond Bread Pudding

If you’ve found yourself with some slightly stale bread and don’t want to just throw it out, take a cue from Laura Matthias (author of Extraveganza, one of my favourite cookbooks) and make bread pudding! All you have to do is cube the bread and leave it out in the open air to dry out (if it’s not in the open air then it might mold, and no one wants that). Once you’ve collected enough dried bread, you can make a bread pudding with it. This is one that I made recently:

Spiced Rhubarb-Apple-Almond Bread Pudding

5 cups cubed, stale bread
1 ½ cups rhubarb, chopped
2 apples, chopped (I didn’t bother peeling them, but you could if you wanted to)
¾ cup demerara sugar
½ cup water
2 – 2 ½ cups almond milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon cardamom
1 good pinch each of allspice, cloves and nutmeg
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
1 tablespoon arrowroot
1 apple, sliced (for topping)
1 cup almond slivers or chopped almonds (for topping)

Place the bread in a casserole baking dish and set aside. Combine the rhubarb, apples, sugar and water in a saucepan. Simmer for 10 or so minutes, until the rhubarb and apples can be mashed easily. Place the saucepan ingredients in a blender and add everything except the bread and topping ingredients, blending until smooth (or you can put them in a bowl and blend with a hand-held blender, like I did). Pour this mixture over the bread and allow to sit for 30-45 minutes, preheating the oven to 350 degrees toward the end of that time. If all the liquid seems to have been absorbed by then, add some more almond milk and stir gently. Now sprinkle the top with ¾ of the almonds, arrange the apple slices on top of the almonds, and finish by sprinkling on the remainder of the almonds. Bake for about an hour.


I used rye bread for the pudding, which I think made it especially flavourful. While it can be eaten by itself, in my opinion it tastes best with either warmed almond milk or some vegan custard or vanilla sauce – delicious!

(Why is my custard sauce so yellow? I don't know)

A note on the sauce:

Not that you need a recipe for making custard sauce, but here’s what I do:

I heat about 2/3 of a cup of almond milk in a small saucepan until almost boiling. Meanwhile, I whisk 2 teaspoons of vegan custard powder and 1 teaspoon of cane sugar with a couple of tablespoons of almond milk in a small bowl until very smooth. Then I whisk the custard mixture into the saucepan and continue to whisk for a couple of minutes (or else it lumps up) and then I take it off the heat and stir in a couple of crops of almond or vanilla extract (and pour some of it over my bread pudding – there’s lots extra, of course)

Before I had custard powder, I made vanilla sauce – I basically did the same thing as above, only instead of custard powder I added 2 teaspoons of arrowroot. I also added probably twice as much sugar and a full ½ teaspoon of vanilla, and a small pinch of salt as well.

Roasted Green Pepper and Almond Soybean Dip

I've seen lots of recipes for roasted red pepper hummus and other spreads, but never one with roasted green peppers instead (although I'm sure they must exist). Since green peppers are so much cheaper to buy, I thought I'd try my hand at making a dip/spread with them for a change. They're obviously less sweet, but still make for a yummy dip (especially with raw vegetables like carrots or cucumbers). This one's adapted from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan by Dreena Burton.


Roasted Green Pepper and Almond Soybean Dip

1/3 cup raw almonds
juice of 1 lemon (2-3 tablespoons)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 can soybeans
2 green peppers, roasted*
1 clove of garlic, sliced
½ teaspoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
freshly-ground pepper to taste
¼ cup parsley

In a food processor, grind the almonds to a fine meal. Add all remaining ingredients except the parsley and puree until very smooth. Now add the parsley and puree briefly until incorporated. Makes About 2 ½ cups.

*To roast the peppers, remove the stem and seeds and then quarter them. Toss in a little bit of olive oil, then lay down skin side-up on a cookie sheet and broil for about 10 minutes, until the skins start to blacken (watch closely). Remove from the oven and slide the peppers into a bowl with a plate on top. Once cool, peel off the skins (they will come off easily) and you’re done!

Danish Braid v.2 – Rhubarb-Coconut-Pistachio and Almond

I still had the rest of that Danish dough in the freezer from the end of April, and I knew I had to use it soon. I was planning on making a nut-cream filling, but then I went to the farmer’s market and picked up some rhubarb, and it was practically hollering at me to use it in the Danish braid. And when rhubarb hollers at you, you gotta do what it says.

So I made two smaller braids with the rest of my dough, one was the (maybe) more-traditional almond cream with tosca-style almond topping, and the other was rhubarb-coconut (with a hint of orange) and pistachio topping.

Almond Cream Filling (only slightly altered from the Macadamia Crème recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance)

½ cup blanched, roasted almonds
scant ¼ cup almond milk
¼ cup powdered sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon almond extract
½ cup canola oil
1 teaspoon arrowroot

Grind the almonds in a food processor until as finely ground as possible. Add the almond milk and blend to form a thick paste. Add the sugar and extracts, and blend again. While continuing to blend, add the oil in a thin stream. Then add the arrowroot, and blend again. Transfer to a container and refrigerate until cold.


Rhubarb Coconut Filling

1 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped
1/8 cup water
¼ cup cane sugar (or less if you want a more breakfast-like Danish braid)
juice and zest of ½ an orange
1/3 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1 teaspoon arrowroot

Combine the rhubarb, water, sugar, and orange in a small saucepan. Simmer for 5-10 minutes, until the rhubarb can easily be mashed with a fork. Mash the rhubarb, add the coconut and cook for a minute or so. Add the arrowroot, mix it all together and remove from heat. Let cool, transfer to a container and then refrigerate until cold.

After letting the dough thaw in the fridge for a couple of days, I rolled it out to ¼ inch thickness and split it into two rectangles. I then followed the rest of my directions for making the Danish braid. The only thing different that I did was to add a topping. I used the Tosca Topping from Tofu for Two’s Tosca Cupcakes (will I ever tire of that blog? not any time soon) for the almond braid, and I followed the same directions, substituting chopped pistachios for the slivered almonds, for the rhubarb-coconut pistachio braid. After rotating the pan in the oven and turning down the oven heat, I pulled the braids out and spooned on the toppings, then put them bake in the oven until they were done (it took about the same length of time as it did for the larger braid). That was it! Not too much work for something so delicious.


Unfortunately the rhubarb-coconut pistachio braid opened up after I put the topping on. Maybe the weight was too much for it to handle? Oh well, it still tasted damn good.

And no, I don’t eat portions the size of the ones you see at the top! I’ve decided to bring half of both of them to the people at work tomorrow, so I won’t eat them all myself (and I’ll freeze some, too).

Happy 1st of June!

Naked Man Strawberry Cake with Almond Icing

Back home, when strawberry season lasted for only two or three weeks, my mom would buy me a ton of strawberries and I would get really excited eating them and trying to figure out what else to do with so many strawberries. This recipe (slightly modified over the years) was always made around this time. Now that I’m in Vancouver, I have a feeling I’ll be making this more than once or twice a year – the other day I got 2 lbs of strawberries for three dollars! Crazy!

You may be wondering about the name of the cake. Well, in this song by the Sugarcubes, Bjork is singing about this woman who finds an unhappy naked man in her flat, and he climbs onto the roof, so she pleads, “naked man, naked man, calm down! I-I’ll give you some strawberry cake”.

So if you find any suicidal naked men on your roof, I think this cake would be a pretty good way of enticing them down and giving them some hope. It’s definitely contentment-inducing, and it tastes like summer (to me, at least). It’s pretty healthy, as far as cakes go – not a fancy decadent cake, but it is not the place of every cake to be fancy and decadent. Makes a good afternoon tea cake, or a sweet breakfast. It doesn’t even really need icing – you could just leave it off, or try something like the crumble topping in this recipe, but with almonds instead of cashews.


Naked Man Strawberry Cake

1 ½ cups flour (I did half and half all-purpose and spelt, and it was great – next time I’ll try all spelt and see how that goes, but all-all-purpose works as well)
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2/3 cup cane sugar
¾ cup non-dairy milk (I used almond)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract or amaretto
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons soy yogurt
1 tablespoon flax meal (or other egg replacer to equal 1 egg)
1 ½ cups strawberries, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, stir together the flour(s), baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, combine the milk, vanilla, almond, oil, yogurt and flax, whisking really well (or use a hand blender). Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix gently (don’t over-mix). Fold in the strawberries. Pour batter into a lightly oiled cake pan and bake for about 30 minutes – if a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, it’s done.

Almond Icing

4 tablespoons earth balance margarine
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1/3 cup almond butter (smooth, not chunky)
3 tablespoons non-dairy milk (I used almond)

Blend all ingredients together. If it looks too thick, add a small amount of milk to thin it out. Spread over the cake once cooled.

This cake is quite excellent with extra fresh strawberries and/or coconut milk ice cream.