Extremely belated Christmassy cake/snack pics

I've just about recovered sufficiently from the trauma of the festive season to post these rather belated photos of my culinary efforts during said time. No, ok, that's a poor excuse for just having not got round to it yet.

This is only a taster of the various goodies I produced to see myself through the holiday (my family having not really caught on to the concept of veganism - in consequence I spent many a troubled hour planning and preparing my Christmas goods, lest I be forced to survive on slices of stale bread for the week). A brave few deigned to sample them and were, I hope, pleasantly surprised.



On the right, sprinkled delicately with icing sugar, we have my own variation on the mince pie, mince pie cupcakes - for which I adapted Isa Chandra's excellent jam doughnut (well that's not quite how she's put it, but I just can't bring myself to use the phrase 'jelly donut') cupcakes. It's a fairly basic vanilla cupcakes, with - and here's the genius - a dollop of mincemeat placed on top of the batter before they go in the oven. Like some kind of gastronomic wizardry, the filling gently sinks into the cake and winds up somewhere in the middle. Incredible, but delicious.

On the left, an absolute marvel that was pulled together with the addition of lemony cream 'cheese' icing - gingerbread cupcakes, again Isa Chandra's recipe. I wasn't sure about these when I first made them (my complex scheme involved making the cakes ahead of time and freezing them til the night before), my un-iced test cake being somewhat...lacking. Fortunately the icing on the cakes was, well, the icing on the cake, and topped with a few raisins came together to form a not only visually delicious but really rather tasty creation.



These immaculately wrapped golden filo parcels are a take on the Greek snack spanakopita - I'd made the recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance (I do have some recipe books not written by Ms Moskowitz and Romero, honest!) before, but less successfully, and faced with a much leftover filo pastry, spinach, silken tofu and a rare glimpse of that precious metal, the pine nut, I knew there was only one way to go. Having totally winged it I thought they came out rather nicely. My folding technique has definitely improved if nothing else.



This last one has nothing to do with Christmas, except that they were made in December, but I thought they looked so cute I wanted to publish them anyway. This is the pumpkin and chocolate chip cupcake recipe from, you've guessed it, Ia Chandra's Vegan Cupcakes take over the World. I adapted it a little and used raisins instead of choc chips - the first time I did it according to the recipe and although nice, along the the pumpkin (I used a Kuri squash, actually) they were just a little bit cloying for my taste. Raisins added a little more bite and a fruity zing. Cinnamon icing and sliced fresh banana on top for the extra je ne sais quoi.

Cracking the crepe conundrum

In October, I became the proud owner of a carbon steel crepe pan. Such a wonder this thing is that I cannot tell you - perfect pancakes, almost without fail, almost without oil. So why has it taken so long to blog about it? Not through lack of delicious dishes, that's for sure - possibly more through the embarrassment of having eaten very little else since its arrival.

But wonderful as it was to eat meal after delicious meal rolled into soft, fresh pancakes - vegetable curry with chutney, veggie sausage and tomato with white sauce poured on top, Isa Chandra's sweet potato crepes with coriander-tamarind sauce (the recipe that began the whole debacle) - for me, there was something missing from the equation.

I grew up in a house where, when frying pancakes, the aim of the game was thinness. Thin, crisp, golden brown pancakes (and to clarify, I use the word pancake here as in a British or French pancake, what Americans call crepes), wafery, crinkled at the edges, and not a hint of doughyness. It was this that eluded me. Mango, the non-believer, perfectly content with the crepes of average thickness that we were rolling off the pan week after week, told me again and again that it simply wasn't possible to get the same level of thinness in an eggless pancake. And I was almost ready to believe him. I was so close to giving in and settling for second best.

Until today. Yesterday, we made up a mix on the fly for brunch - I more or less melded two recipes from the Veganomicon and VWAV. The one in VWAV is tried and tested, but savoury - and today we were aiming for sweet, but the Veganomicon offering was over-complicated. So I took a little from each and winged it. Disaster nearly ensued. The first pancake stuck a little, refused to be turned, and wound up as a sticky, partially cooked mess on the plate. Mango thought the mix was too watery, and added more flour and a bit of oil. It worked after this, but the product was a little thick, though tasty. The mix went back in the fridge after we'd eaten our fill, and I brought it out again at dinner, after Mango had gone home. I decided to try to achieve the desired crispness. I turned the heat up under the pan a little more, used a little less batter, got some good swirly wrist action going - and the end result was in fact much improved. There were the beginnings of laciness at the edges, and a slightly more toothy bite to the outer layer.

But when I revisited the batter for the third time this morning - that's when the magic happened. I decided to go completely mad, and thinned the batter down a little more so it was almost back to the original consistency. By now the starch would certainly have swelled enough to be able to handle a bit less saturation. Again I turned the heat up higher than normal, wiped the pan with the barest coating of oil, and swirled in the mix. There it was - the delicate, almost translucent crepe I'd been hoping for. But could I lift it and flip it without incident!? Yes! Once the edges had begun to pull away from the pan, I gently slid the spatula twixt steel and crepe... Ta da! And the proof was in the eating. Crisp, wafer thin, spread with a little apricot jam and a few raisins - delicious.

Admittedly this isn't really an easily replicated recipe as it went through several alterations, but I think the key was in the long refrigeration - giving the ingredients time to bind, thereby gaining that all-important stretchyness. It's certainly going to be worth experimenting with! Now I know it can be done.

An Italian affair (or two)

It's been a tasty few weeks here at the not-so-Wednesday-anymore kitchen.

The week before last I discovered this recipe for stuffed pasta shells via one of the vegan communities I'm a member of on LiveJournal. I knew immediately that this was what I had to eat for my next meal. No substitute would be accepted. Except of course that I couldn't find any giant pasta shells at 6pm on a Saturday night. So I made do with medium-sized pasta tubes, maybe 3/4" long and just under 1/2" diameter.

Let me tell you now, these are not big enough. It was only vaguely entertaining trying to scoop tofu 'ricotta' into these little tubes - as though made for the task, I found some miniature spoons in our cutlery drawer (I believe they are in fact 1970's coffee spoons) which made it marginally less difficult. However I think we'd have been a lot less frustrated, and certainly fuller far quicker, with the proper shape and size of pasta.

We also messed with the sauce a little bit, being that we had no onions, but plenty of courgette. Plus we poured the sauce over the pasta prior to baking, instead of after baking as in the original post. Such heresy.

It was really rather good, however, and neither of us regretted the seemingly endless 15 or so minutes of pasta-stuffing whilst we were stuffing our faces with it. I won't bore you by writing the recipe out again, seeing as it's already up on the link.

This week I acquired my very own copy of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan With a Vengeance. Mango and I were both very excited - Isa is some kind of deity among vegan cooks, author of the magical and ubiqitous Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, amongst others. So this week, and on Wednesday no less, that's where we got our recipe.

Orecchiette with kalamata tapenade and cherry tomatoes

225g orecchiette (that means pasta. Any kind will do, really.)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium red onion, sliced thinly
450g cherry tomatoes (they are yummy but any tomatoes will do if you can't afford/don't happen to have cherries!)

Tapenade:
175g pitted kalamata olives
3 tbsp capers (I balked at the price but it really was worth it)
2 cloves chopped garlic
Handful fresh parsley
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried tarragon
pepper
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil

First, make the tapenade by chucking everything in a blender.

Put the pasta on to boil and then saute the onions and tomatoes in the oil for about 7 minutes (make sure you use a big pan - I didn't and had to swap over for the next step). Reserve 125ml pasta water before you drain it. Add the pasta to the tomatoes (hence the tip about the pan) and saute for a few seconds. Then stir in 250ml tapenade (we seemed to have about the right amount, though Isa says the recipe makes enough for double quantities) and the pasta water until it's heated through. Then eat it.

I'm just going to throw in a quote from the recipe blurb here, as I like it and it seems to apply to us pretty well: 'This recipe is for 225g pasta, which is supposedly four servings. If you are like most people I know, four servings = two servings, so plan accordingly.' We always think there's going to be too much food - and yet somehow we always manage to eat it...