VeganMoFo 2014 and a carrot cake

(Nederlandstalige versie)

As you may know, today is the first day of the Vegan Month of Food. Every year, hundreds of bloggers spend a month writing about everything related to vegan cooking and eating; click here or here to read along. Many participants choose a overarching theme for the month and I had a couple of ideas, but in the end I decided to just post about anything I would blog about normally, only more frequently.

These are a few things you can expect to see here this month:

• Food from stories — so far I’ve got two dishes inspired by Game of Thrones / ASoIaF planned for this week and a few from Harry Potter for the next;
• A weekly cooking diary with photos of my market purchases, hopefully with ideas for cooking with seasonal produce;
• Updates on the cooking resolutions I posted last year — by now I’ve tried to cook a lot of these foods at least once, but I’ve only blogged about a few of them.

I also want to start adding Dutch translations to my main English posts. A lot of Dutch readers are probably used to blogs being in English, but I got a message requesting this a while ago and I enjoy writing in both languages.  I haven’t found an ideal way to combine multiple languages in one blog using my free WordPress account, so for now I will just create an extra page for each post and add a link in the upper right corner.

Oh, yes, the cake. The beginning of VeganMoFo calls for a celebration (not that I need an excuse to bake a cake) and carrot cake was one of the things on my food resolutions list.

I more or less followed this recipe from VegWeb with 3 tablespoons of ground flax seeds and 9 tablespoons of water for the egg replacer and cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg for the spices. The topping is an almond cream with lemon juice, powdered sugar and a pinch of salt. It came out a little bit dense (I had to improvise a little in terms of baking equipment, which may have been a contributing factor) but it’s been disappearing pretty quickly over the course of the evening, so I’d say it’s a success.

Good luck to everyone participating in VeganMoFo and happy reading!