Veggie Challenge?

All of my recent internet pokery has made me start to consider different lifestyles. I'm getting more and more intrigued by vegan cooking, but I can't say I could sign on for a lifetime of it (all those soy products frighten me, quite frankly). But vegetarianism? That's a possibility. I still really like meat (I cooked a lovely free-range, pasture finished sirloin tonight for Red's going-away feast), but it's really not as appealing as it used to be.

So I'm seriously thinking about conducting an experiment while my darling hubby is overseas. I'll try to go one week on a vegetarian diet. It's embarrassing to say this, but I've never been without some kind of animal flesh that long in all my twenty-eight years of life. Can I do it? Probably. Will I ridiculed by friends and family? That's also a "probably." Will I break my fast the next week by going to the health food store, buying a pound of grass-fed ground beef, and cooking myself a ginormous burger? Well, I might not eat the entire pound...

This is just an idea I have. I haven't decided whether or not to go for it, or exactly when I'll do it. But the germ of thought has been planted. Stay tuned.

VCTOTW: Pineapple Right-Side-Up Cupcakes

Continuing with my current trend, these are just as tasty as the last three types I've whipped up recently. They're fruity and slightly spicy, and that pineapple glaze on top is enough to make you sit up and sing (if you're a pineapple aficionado like me, anyway). I'm considering making the topping again later and serving it warm with the vanilla cake from Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires. Mmmm...makes my taste buds happy just thinking about it...

I only made a half batch this time, since Red is packing up to leave on Friday and Mom (to whose house the Munchkin and I are decamping) doesn't want a lot of sweets lying around. The recipe divided easily, and I'll probably repeat that experiment with the rest of my cupcake baking while the husband unit is gone.

Production Notes: I should mention that I subbed half the sugar with light agave nectar in the cupcake batter, and replaced the oil with apple sauce. And, of course, the base of the dry ingredients is half all-purpose, half whole wheat pastry flour. I also increased the amount of baking powder by half, which is something I'll probably do with the rest of the recipes in the book. For some reason my cupcakes have been turning out a little flat - maybe it's the applesauce, maybe it's the wheat flour - I dunno, but a little more leavening seems to be doing the trick.

Experimental chocolate chip cookies

The other evening, after I'd put Bean to bed, I decided to waste some time clicking through The Post Punk Kitchen's flickr pool (those vegans sure do know how to make tofu look good). There I ran across some pictures from one Ash-Mac, whose images are so luscious you want to lick your computer screen at times. I wandered from a lovely picture of chocolate chip cookies to her blog, where she detailed her process for making these dairy-free gems. Turns out she cribbed a few tips from a New York Times article about making the perfect chocolate chip cookies, which you can view here. David Liete promises that if you make large (six inch plus) chocolate chip cookies from dough chilled 36 hours or more, and sprinkle them with sea salt prior to baking, you will have a dessert experience fit for a king.

Inspired by Ashley, I attempted Mr. Liete's techniques with my old tried and true Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookies recipe (stolen from a newsletter produced in 1999 by the housing authority at the University of North Florida). These are most assuredly NOT vegan friendly, but after three batches of dairy free cupcakes, I was ready for a little butter and egg in my life once again. I mixed the dough on Friday night, mounded it into a saran wrap covered butter dough mountain, and let it sit until today. I formed the dough rounds with a one inch scoop, and then ground some ultra-fine sea salt on the cookies before popping them into a 350 degree oven.

The result? Well, see for yourself:
The taste of the cookies themselves was definitely good, but orgasmic? Nah, not really. The biggest improvements in my opinion were the sea salt and the lower baking temperature (Betty calls for a 375 degree oven). These yielded a soft, slightly salty confection. Maybe if I'd gone with the increased size, I would have gotten the chewy-crunchy melty sensations that made Liete rave, but I wanted plenty of cookies for Red to carry to work tomorrow. Maybe next time I'll do the giant ones, and try Jacques Torres' recipe as well. Until then, I'll just lower my oven a hair and dust my little beauties with some fluer de sel when they're raw.

VCTOTW: Brooklyn Brownie Cupcakes

These are my second experiment from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, and I must say that they are a rousing success. Brooklyn Brownie Cupcakes are nice, moist little morsels rich with black cherry preserves, lightly scented with bourbon, and chock full of (and smothered with) chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. The icing in particular is dangerous. I set the cooled cupcakes on a baking rack before I iced them, and I had a precautionary piece of parchment beneath the rack to catch any stray drippings. After I transferred the finished cupcakes to the fridge, I found myself scraping the chocolaty droplets from the paper and eating them with something close to ecstasy.

I also used these to resurrect an old technique that my mom used constantly back in the early nineties when both my folks (and consequentially, my brother and I) were on low fat diets (remember that? It was the anti-Atkins; lots of white starchy stuff and no butter, cheese, or creamy stuff). Anyway, I'd forgotten about those days until I ran across Isa Chandra Moskowitz's mention of how to lighten baked desserts by replacing the oil with applesauce or pureed prunes. I used the latter in these babies. You could taste them in the cake, but it wasn't a definite "geez, these are full of dried fruit" flavor; it was more subtle. Still quite tasty, though.

On that note, all of the cupcakes I make are half all-purpose, half whole wheat pastry flour. Got to sneak a little extra fiber in wherever I can, you know.

Vegan cupcakes rock my socks

When I got home from Illinois last week, I had some goodies awaiting me. One was a box from Target.com, containing two of my favorite shirts in the whole world (of which I now own every available color), and the other was from amazon.com. This one contained my new catnip, a glossy little book entitled Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. This and its sister publication (Vegan with a Vengeance) have occupied the space under my right arm for about five days now; I'm like a preschooler with a security blanket, I tell you. The only time I seem to put those books down is when I need to pick up my daughter. The world suddenly seems full of sweet, meatless possibilities.

With Red as my somewhat reluctant test subject, I got crackin' on some vegan desserts this past weekend. One was from VWAV, a sweet little love called Lemon Gem Cupcakes. They're faintly reminiscent of lemon bars with the glazed topping, and they were a big hit in the N. household (I have no pictures of these because Red scarfed them all). The others are the same as the gorgeous behemoth that adorns the top of this post: Dulce Sin Leche Cupcakes. They're made with coconut milk, a brown rice syrup caramel swirl, and a fake dulce de leche glaze sprinkled with shredded coconut. Delicious.

My first two vegan cupcake exploits have gone so well that I'm planning on working my way through the VCTOTW cookbook (plus managing the Coconut Heaven Cupcakes from VWAV, because I can't say no to coconut). I'm hoping to manage one recipe per weekend, if I'm lucky. The trick will be when Red has to leave on his next trip. Then I'll either have to dump my product at church, or eat the entire dozen myself...

Time to get back in the swing

It's been a little while since I managed to get to my computer, but I have some decent excuses - new baby and a trip to see the in-laws! Bean and I spent a pretty, breezy, very low humidity week in Crystal Lake, Illinois, visiting Red's family and friends. My daughter basked in the attention of her two cousins (Patrick, almost 6; and Christopher, 3 1/2), aunt, uncle, and of course, grandmother; and I basked in the unmitigated joy of not having to do any housework except for the occasional sink full of dishes.

The two best things about visiting Illinois in the summer are:

1) being able to breathe the air; in my part of Florida right now we're averaging ninety percent humidity, and since we're land-locked there are no nice sea breezes to stir things up. In Crystal Lake, I had a store clerk ask me if I thought is was a little muggy one afternoon. I'm still having aftershocks from the belly laugh that comment caused;

2) my mother-in-law's garden!
When she's not spoiling children delightfully rotten, my mother in law is working in the soil to make all sorts of magical plants spring to life. While her garden mainly consists of flowers, she also has some killer tomatoes coming in, a raspberry bush that makes me weep with envy, and some excellent little succulents tucked here and there in the flower beds. I'm like a kid at a touching allowed exhibit in a museum when I'm at her house in the warm months.

Crystal Lake was a nice break from the ordinary, but I must say that I'm glad to be back home, even if it is too hot to live and my soil is so sandy and acid that it barely supports a dandelion, much less a gorgeous spray of lilies. But Red is here, as are my patio full of veggie tubs, my books, and my kitchen.

Life is good.

Vacation and child-rearing have put me behind on my posting: I have a delicious recipe that I need to throw on the page and a long ugly step-by-step about my patio garden irrigation system (it seemed like such a good idea in the abstract, too). This is not including my plans for this weekend, which include a free-for-all with my new cookbooks, which will hopefully yield some photo-quality results. Yum, yum...

Hopefully I will catch myself up in the next couple of days, God and Bean willing. Stay tuned!

Oh, the sweet sun-ripened goodness...

Natural food? Nope, not for me.

Red and I were hanging out with the Munchkin over the weekend, and I mentioned Coca-Cola cake in passing. This earned me a blank stare from my spouse, which in turn sparked my culinary fire. I was going to bake a Coca-Cola cake, in all its processed-food glory.

I've always thought of this particular innovation as a Southern thing, though others might prove me wrong. This particular prejudice is probably connected to the fact that Coca-Cola cake appears on the Cracker Barrel menu on about an annual basis, but I digress. Anyway, I decided that Red's Yugoslavian childhood and Illinois adolescence were the reasons he'd never been exposed to this particular delicacy. So I immediately searched for a recipe (though I've eaten many a slice of Coca-Cola Cake, I'd never actually made one before.

So where did I find the perfect recipe? On an Irish dining blog, of course. Nigella Lawson, that most glamorous (and thoroughly British, therefore not Southern in the least) cook created it, but oh, is it tasty (and it's fun to make - see some of the process here). It's just like anything I ever ate at a church potluck - dense, moist and fudgy, with a crackly chocolate caramel icing that turns smooth on your tongue. Mmmm...makes me want to have another slice right now. Anyway, I cribbed the recipe from Jeff Farell's blog. So enjoy it here, but head over to see Jeff, too. He has some great reviews of restaurants in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which is a town really worthy of a visit if you're ever in that part of Europe. I've been there twice, and I'd go again tomorrow if I had the money.

One more thing - don't be afraid of the cola. You can't taste it, you won't get a caffeine buzz from the cake, and it wouldn't be the same without it. You don't have to use Coke, but you need some sort of cola flavor to complete the dish. It gives everything a nice caramel taste that's hard to beat. Take it from Red: he was extremely skeptical of the whole enterprise, but he's given it a forks-up. And he went back for seconds.

Nigella Lawson’s Coca-Cola Cake
From How to Be a Domestic Goddess (Hyperion, 2001)

Be warned that this is a European recipe - everything is metric. You'll have to haul out the food scale for most of the dry ingredients, and make sure to use the metric scale on your liquid measuring cups. And remember that British teaspoons and tablespoons are slightly bigger than the American equivalents (I didn't, which is why my cake is flatter than it should be). Or better yet, check out her book; I'm going to give it some serious consideration next time I have some spare cash and access to the local book store.

Ingredients for the cake:
200g plain flour
250g golden caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon bicarb of soda
1/4 teaspoon salt (a pinch if you don’t have unsalted butter)
1 large egg
125ml buttermilk (or 30g of yoghurt and 100ml semi-skinned milk)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g unsalted butter
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
175ml Coca Cola (or for a twist try vanilla or cherry coke)

Ingredients for the icing:
225g icing sugar
2 tablespoons butter (30g)
3 tablespoons Coca Cola (45ml)
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

You’ll need a 22cm springform tin lined with tinfoil as the mixture you’ll be adding is very watery.

• Preheat oven to 180C and put in a baking sheet
• In a big bowl toss in flour, sugar, bicarb and salt (if you’re using) and combine.
• In a measuring jug beat the egg, buttermilk and vanilla
• Get a heavy-based saucepan melt the butter, cocoa and Coca Cola, heating gently
• When the butter’s melted and combined pour into the dry ingredients and stir well with a wooden spoon then and the liquid from the measuring jug, beating until it’s well blended
• Pour it all into the springform lined tin and place on the warm baking sheet and bake for 40 minutes
• Leave to stand for 15 minutes in the tin and then unclip and turn out onto a wire rack
• Put some paper or similar under the wire rack as you’ll be putting the icing on here and it’s quite messy
• Sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and set aside
• In another heavy-based saucepan combine the butter, Coca Cola and cocoa and stir over a low heat until the butter melts, remove from the heat and add the vanilla.
• Spoon in the icing sugar, beating with a whisk as you do, until you’ve a nice runny icing
• Pour over and spread over the top of the cake. Leave it to cool.