Pannenkoeken and Cake

After reading about them on Coppe and Adele’s blog (which is very nice, by the way, have a look!), I really felt like making some pannenkoeken. They’re like pancakes, but much thinner and simpler to put together. The batter, that is. The frying of the pannenkoek is the difficult part, in my opinion. I’ve never been very good at flipping flat and delicate things over in a pan, and most of my pannenkoeken usually end up looking like this:

In the end, I did get a couple good ones, though, so it wasn’t too bad.

Part of my problem was that I wasn’t sure how to make the batter – stupid, since Coppe posted a recipe that looks really good. But no, I had to try it my own way. My batter had what was supposed to be ‘homemade almond milk’ (a mixture of raw almond butter and water), applesauce, flour and a little salt. I guess it could’ve worked, but the batter was much too wet for the first few pannenkoeken and even after I had added flour, the texture wasn’t exactly right. Oh well, I had fun making them and they tasted good with some syrup. All of them were eaten, except one that fell on the floor while I was trying to flip it by throwing it in the air. Next time I’ll just try using a recipe!

Now, this post needs chocolate.

Yesterday, a friend came over to make Celine’s Sacher Torte. We doubled the recipe (making two cakes) and put them on top of each other with strawberry preserves in the middle.

We were happily spreading the chocolate frosting onto the cake, when we remembered the powdered sugar that should’ve been added to it. We decided to just leave it out and have a little more bitter, but still delicious frosting instead. It would’ve been nice to have the sugar in there, but I don’t think it mattered much.

More of a problem was that I think I forgot to add part of the flour to one batch, which resulted in a flat, poorly risen cake. We used it anyway and it didn’t taste bad at all, just not the way it was supposed to (and different from the other half). In any case, the upper half of the torte made up for the less-than perfect lower half. I’d love to try the recipe again and make the cake and frosting the proper way! If I do that, I’d also like to get some nice fresh red fruit for decoration. Now we only had strawberries from a jar, that looked so dull and depressing that we decided to just leave them off.

Altogether, the Sacher Torte was very tasty and made a nice dessert to that night’s dinner – lasagne! We made the Lasagne Marinara with Spinach from Veganomicon. I don’t have any photos to post, but I can tell you that I loved it. That cashew ricotta is fantastic. We sauteed some mushrooms and added them to the spinach. Best lasagne I’ve made! If it didn’t take so long to prepare (worth it, though), I’d be eating it all the time.

This post is very brown and I don’t like it. I’ll have to try to take some more colourful food pictures next. If all goes as planned, I’ll be having a little vegan High Tea this weekend, so I hope to be back with more baked goods, sandwiches and/or other tea-time foods then!

Indeed, muffins

I took the graham crackers that I made saturday and used them in another one of Celine’s recipes: Graham Cracker Muffins! I didn’t have enough crackers left, so I quartered the recipe and got four small muffins. They’re quite delicious!

I had a salad for breakfast. Weird? I don’t know. Anyway, it was good. It had arugula, slices of mandarin orange, toasted (burnt…) hazelnuts, cucumber and a dressing of almond butter, mandarin orange juice, lemon juice and a tiny bit of maple syrup. Oh, and little pieces of onion. Surprisingly tasty!

My lunch: penne with a tomato sauce with pieces of seitan pepperoni. I had some green bell pepper in there at first, but then I decided I didn’t like it and took it out.

Lastly, some cookies: the Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies from Veganomicon, with toasted hazelnut pieces (burnt again… will I ever learn? probably not.) and no chocolate chips, because I was all out of chocolate.

Now I’m off! I think my parents are about to start having dinner…

Oh, and if anyone’s still interested in the apple pie that I wrote about, my neighbour now sent me the recipe and I posted it here. Thanks, Anita!

Lots of Cookies!

Before I start blabbing about baked goods again, here’s two more of my regular meals.

First off, Celine’s Cumin Carrot Soup that she posted here. I made it earlier this week to have for lunch, and my parents had the leftovers as part of their dinner that evening. They both really liked it! And so did I. It’s very easy and fun to make, too.
(Also, notice the thick slices of homemade bread on the side. My parents finally got a bread machine!)

I know the picture kind of sucks, but this was too good not to be photographed. My mother was looking for a way to prepare brussel sprouts for dinner, so I suggested the Cornmeal-Masala Roasted Brussels Sprouts recipe from Veganomicon, and she decided to make it! She made the yogurt sauce with it, too. It rocked. I never thought I would love brussels sprouts so much. If you haven’t tried this recipe yet, go do it!

And now, on to the cookies.

For some reason, I’ve been a little obsessed with cookies this past week. It started with the chocolate chip cookies last week and after that I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I didn’t only bake them, but spent a lot of time looking for recipes online and in my cookbooks, too. In the end, I baked four batches of cookies. Here they come!

Behold, the Chewy Chocolate Raspberry Cookies from Veganomicon, only with apricot preserves instead of raspberry. I love the combination of chocolate and fruit in these and definitely want to try them with raspberry too!

These are based on the Carob-Coconut-Pecan Cookies from Vive le Vegan, with some slight alterations because I didn’t have all the ingredients. I substituted wheat flour for spelt, carob chips for chopped up chocolate and hazelnuts for pecans. I also left out the coconut extract, because I still haven’t gotten around to buying that. Still, these cookies were delicious. They remind me of coconut macaroons – only these have chocolate and hazelnuts, which makes them all the better!

Today, I decided to make graham crackers using Celine’s recipe for Chicky Grahams. I like using cookie cutters, but a lot of recipes I use don’t require them, so I was happy to look up my pig-shaped cookie cutter for these! This was also my first time eating (and making) graham crackers. I like them!

Lastly, the Big Crunchy Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance. I was in a hurry while making these, but managed to get them all into the oven in time. This recipe makes a LOT of very big cookies. I liked the taste, but think that they’re really too sweet. Maybe I added too much sugar? Anyway, I’ve only had positive reactions about these from other people so far, so it’s probably just me. I had expected them to be more salty instead of sugary. Apart from the sweetness I do really like them, though, so I would still make them again. Just with a little less sugar!

I think I’ve had enough cookies for now, but I have a feeling I will move on to baking muffins very soon. I’m glad to say that my spring break started yesterday, so I have no school for a week… perfect.

Apple pie…

Look what I got today!

It’s a delicious piece of apple pie made by my neighbours, who veganized their own recipe so I could eat it too! Isn’t that cool? They gave us half a pie, so there’s still some left for tomorrow. I love it.

I did some baking myself too:

These cookies are so nice to make… I used a recipe posted on a Dutch forum here, which was easy to do and turned out very well! The cookies ended up being much bigger than I had expected, but that was no problem at all. They were eaten pretty quickly by my parents, my friends, my grandmother, and, of course, myself.

Today, I tried Paulina’s Two-minute Chocolate Brownie Cake, but I didn’t get a picture, because I suck! And now it’s already dark so I can’t really take one either… But that’s OK – Paulina’s picture looks much better than mine would have done anyway, so go over to her blog to check it out!

As Paulina says herself, the banana does add a specific taste to the dessert. I don’t mind, though – I love the combination of chocolate and banana! It was very interesting for me to make, too. I had never made something cake-like using the microwave before, so I was surprised by how quickly the batter turned solid in there. So yeah, I’m glad to have tried this.

As much as I love all those baked goods, I do also eat normal meals. I have the feeling those aren’t as much represented in the pictures I post online, though. That’s because I usually find them less interesting. Most of the time, the meals I make are very simple, like this one:

It’s a tofu scramble, consisting of: garlic, onion, tofu, the tofu scramble spice blend from Yellow Rose Recipes (minus the garlic powder) along with some other spices, chickpeas (crushed and mashed a bit), kale, tomatoes and kalamata olives. Basically, whatever I had on hand. Oh, I also sprinkled some nutritional yeast on top, but that was after I took the picture.

It’s only february, but it feels like spring is on its way. In any case, the sun is shining more and that is great because more sunshine = better pictures, so maybe I’ll be able to take some nice photos of actual meals soon, too, so you don’t think I live solely on cookies and cakes.

Muffins, Waffles and Raw Cookies

To celebrate my grandmother’s birthday, we had a nice family brunch here today. My mother and aunt did most of the cooking, but I made two things as well: muffins and waffles.

I bookmarked this recipe as soon as I saw it because it sounded so good: VeggieGirl’s Apple-Cinnamon-Oat Muffins. It’s just perfect! It combines [edit: haha, I said "combinates"] lots of lovely flavours in one muffin, resulting in a delicious treat, that’s not even unhealthy. I added a small change: I didn’t have dried apple, so I used raisins instead. This recipe reminds me of the apple pie my mother always makes – it also has apple, cinnamon, oats and raisins. I think I’ll be making these muffins again and again an again, as they’re not hard to make and I’d like to have some on hand whenever I need a quick snack.

The other thing I made was entirely different, but also a nice addition to the brunch, the waffles! These are the Chocolate Chip Brownie Waffles from Veganomicon. When I first read the recipe I thought brownie part made it a bit too, well, unhealthy, I guess, for a breakfast, but this morning I decided I just had to try it. So I did. Recipes always end up yielding more waffles than I expected, but this one really made a huge load. I probably still have half of the batch left, so I put them in the freezer for future indulgence.

Anyway, the brunch was pretty nice, I think everyone enjoyed the food and was very full afterwards.

Lately I’ve been seeing more and more pictures of raw dishes, and I’ve been reading about raw recipes on various blogs. This got me interested and made me want to try one of the recipes myself. When Paulina mentioned that Kristen sends out the recipe for her ‘Heavenly Cookies’ in her newsletter this month, I immediately subscribed and made the recipe as soon as I received it. The first time I used peanut butter (which isn’t raw, so not as the recipe was intended, but still good!), as that was the only nut butter I had. I let my mother try one of the cookies and she was really enthusiastic about it – I don’t think she expected a raw treat to be that simple but still delicious. This made me want to make the recipe again.

So the next day, I went and bought some raw almond butter and made the cookies again, this time a bit smaller than the recipe suggests, as my parents and I agreed that they are very filling. I’d like to try some more raw recipes soon, as I love that they’re so quick and easy to prepare without the cooking. Maybe I’ll buy a book with good raw recipes the next time I need a coobook, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

I should stop neglecting this blog the way I am… sigh.