baking

“C” is for “cookie”

wittychild

The Oscar the Grouch cupcakes I made a few weeks back went over well with everyone who tried one – and I was so excited by the way the grass tip created his fur.  I couldn’t wait to try other Sesame Street characters!  I was pretty sure that Cookie Monster was going to be next on my list, because I’ve always felt a strange kinship with him.  My grammar may be better than his, but honestly, the reason I learned how to bake was to feed my cookie addiction.

While searching the bulk food store for some chickpea flour, I happened upon bins of flavoured drink crystals, including a vibrant blue-raspberry.  It was fate.  Yes!  Now I absolutely had to buy some, and mix them into my frosting instead of/in addition to blue food colouring, and I had to make Cookie Monster cupcakes post-haste!  This was going to be great!

Not, perhaps, a spitting image, but certainly recognizable.  My fatal mistake (I realize now) was adding in the drink crystals along with some food colouring after I had mixed all the other frosting ingredients and already had a nice, fluffy buttercream.  I had thought because the icing was “wet” – as in, not yet dried and hardened – that the crystals would dissolve.  They did not, at least not entirely.  And they might be miniscule, but that didn’t stop them from clogging up my grass tip.  After six incredibly frustrating cupcakes, including several attempts to clear and re-clear the holes in the tip using a toothpick or just unscrewing the coupler and rinsing the silly thing out with water, I got fed up, switched tips, and did this:

It may look and feel like a cop-out, sure, but I’ve always liked blue-and-brown as a colour combination, so it’s not that bad.  They’re still whimsical, just in a non-licensed way.

Oh, and in case you were curious: the drink crystals did impart a lovely blue-raspberry flavour that is noticeable without being overpowering.  I’ve learned from my mistake, though, and next time they’re being dissolved in the almond milk first before being mixed in.

baking

A birthday without a cake…

wittychild

…is like pillaging without burning?  No, that can’t be right…

But I do have a theory that if I don’t make somebody a birthday cake (note: cupcakes, cheesecakes, and pies are all perfectly acceptable alternatives), I don’t truly care about them.  So for my dad’s birthday a few days ago, I made him the Peanut Butter Chocolate Dream Cake from Kris Holechek’s Have Your Cake and Vegan Too.

It’s a fairly standard chocolate cake with a peanut butter filling in between the layers and topped off with a chocolate-peanut butter ganache – garnish as desired.  The recipe was easy to follow, and the cake easy to assemble; if and when I do it again, the only thing I’ll do differently is grease-and-cocoa the pans instead of greasing-and-flouring them, to avoid that flour residue (since it’s not frosted all over, it does kinda show).

And yes, I probably will make it again.  Not only did the birthday boy love it, but it went over extremely well with my omnivorous coworkers, too.  Such is the power of chocolate and peanut butter together.

Cross-stitch and Embroidery, General Sewing

Christmas in July!

wittychild

A few weeks ago, I went to the cigar store with my lunch date to pick up a top-up card for my phone (this is important).  There was no harm in looking at the magazines first, was there?  This way, if I saw anything I wanted, I could pay for it all at once instead of having to queue up again after.  I squealed when I spied the Christmas ornament preview issue of Just Cross Stitch on the shelf.  It’s a harbinger of great things to come.

“Christmas already?” he asked, taking the magazine from me and turning it over in his hands, examining it.

“Of course!” I replied cheerily.  “If you want to be finished in time for Christmas, you have to start now.”

We perused this year’s offerings, looked at the magazines a bit longer, and I paid for my cross-stitch magazine, the latest issue of Macleans, and a Wunderbar, and we left.  Without the top-up card.  But we did have a Wunderbar, which was a definite plus.

I was right, you know.  You really do have to start stitching/crafting/creating early if you want to have any semblance of sanity left by Christmas.  Hmm.  I remembered a partially finished kit bequeathed to me by my chief cross stitch consultant, who had started it before deciding “Nuts to beadwork!”.  This would be a good time to finally finish it.

A cedar I didn’t know we had in the backyard made a wonderful Christmas tree stand-in.

This is one of the many Mill Hill beaded kits I’ve amassed over the years – I had completed a “Noel” one similar to this a few years back.  It’s supposed to be a poinsettia, although to me it looks more like a bold, Eastern European geometric design.  Also, I’m starting to think there could be a real market for partially-finished kits – with most of the cross stitch finished, this project just flew by as I added the beads and sewed it together.

So there we have it: my second Christmas ornament of 2012.  Hey, if Hallmark thinks it’s time, that’s a good enough reason for me.

cooking

You put the lime in the coconut

wittychild

When I was just a wee tyke, the Grade 3 class in my school would learn songs from the Anne of Green Gables musical – Canada’s longest-running musical; who knew? – in music class, and as part of this curriculum, would actually get to make ice cream, just like they sang about*.  This was probably the most hotly anticipated moment of my entire educational career, particularly when my cousin, who was a year ahead of me, got to do it and I got to hear about it in greater detail than ever before.  For reasons I still don’t understand, her class was the last to do it, and I felt sorely robbed of the opportunity to waste valuable class-time making ice cream, of all the crazy things.

I eventually got over this snub, and really hadn’t had much of a burning desire to make ice cream since, because you can buy it at the store/I don’t eat dairy anymore/you can buy non-dairy ice cream at the store, too.  Besides, ice cream is just not one of those things I really crave too frequently.  But…every so often, in perusing a cookbook or website, I’d see an ice cream recipe and think, “Dang!”  Since we’re having a heatwave (a tropical heat wave), I finally took the plunge this weekend.

This product is particularly awesome for three reasons (besides the taste!):

1. It’s homemade (duh – who blogs about store-bought ice cream?)

2. It’s vegan

3. I made it without an ice cream maker

Yes!  Thanks to the Brown-Eyed Baker’s handy tutorial (found here), I was able to experiment with homemade ice cream without having to shell out for an ice cream maker that would sit and collect dust in the basement roughly 360 days out of the year.

Oh, the recipe?  Just a little gem from Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts, “Toasted Coconut Key Lime Ice Cream”.  I’ve fiddled with key limes exactly once in my life, decided they weren’t worth the trouble, and employed one standard lime instead to get the necessary juice and zest.  It yields approximately one pint once all is said and done, which was the perfect amount to slake that cold-n-creamy craving.  The texture was nothing short of velvety, and it tested very well with omnivores.  Although the coconut milk makes it rich, the tartness of the lime provides the perfect balance.

Oh, yeah.  This opens up all sorts of possibilities….

*”Ice cream!  Is anything more delectable than ice cream?  Why, even the most respectable eat ice cream!  It’s wonderful on a summer’s afternoon in June,” etc.

baking

Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a mousse out of my hat!

wittychild

I desperately wanted to bake this weekend – had a serious kitchen itchin’ going on – but it was so hot.  To make a long story short: yes, there is air conditioning in the house.  I absolutely hate it; it’s a battle royale over whether it goes on at all, and so its use is restricted to those days with crazy, 40-degree humidex.  I figure, I freeze my tuchus off six months out of the year or so, and so I can suck it up for a few steamy days because come February I’ll be wistfully reminiscing, “Remember how hot it was in July?”

Baking wasn’t going to happen unless I felt like waking up early and starting while the grass was still vaguely dewy.  So what about a cool, refreshing dessert instead?

I took the basic recipe for Chocolate Mousse Topping from (where else?) Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and added two teaspoons of raspberry extract to the works to give it a twist.  This ain’t your grandma’s Jell-o pudding!  And thanks to Pyrex bowls and the microwave,  I didn’t even have to turn on the stove to melt the chocolate in a double boiler!  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

I have a hunch – but haven’t tried it yet – that this mixture would be great frozen in popsicle moulds for creamy tofudgsicles, too.  The dollar store is definitely on my must-go list.

Summertime…and the livin’ is easy.

baking

Where the air is free, but the cupcakes will cost you

wittychild

There’s something about the last week of June that just brings with it a certain magic.  For kids, school is almost out for the summer (and I freely admit to watching “Kamp Krusty” the other day and bemoaning that I no longer get to enjoy that last-day euphoria).  For adults, the long weekend is imminent; an extra day off work to celebrate your country with barbeques and street fairs.

In my dad’s case, he got the best of both worlds, since he decided to retire at the end of June.  I sighed, and told him what a lucky bum he was: it’s like graduating, only without the worries of university in the fall or finding a job.  Since he first announced his intentions, it’s been a running joke in our household that he’s going to turn into Oscar Leroy – with all this time on his hands, he’ll find all sorts of little things to complain about and generally become a crotchety old man.  Naturally, I thought this momentous occasion required some sort of festive dessert, although “crotchety old man” is really hard to convey in cupcake form.  (Just for kicks, try Googling “Oscar Leroy cupcakes”.  They don’t exist.)  So I did the next best thing:

It’s an Oscar, he’s grouchy…it’s not such a stretch, really!

I used the basic chocolate cupcake recipe (love it!) from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and made a massive batch of buttercream to do the fur and eyebrows.  I finally got to use my grass tip!  I had bought a tube of black icing from Wilton to do the mouth and pupils, but when I went to do the first mouth I realized that, colour-wise, it was difficult to tell the icing from the cupcake, and so just left the mouth unfrosted.  Note: the eyes and tongue are both marshmallow and therefore are not vegan, but I was under time constraints and this was the path of least resistance.  If you have a little more time, the frosting could be further split and coloured to pipe on eyes and tongue.

My dad loved them!  So much so, in fact, that he was inspired to wear his Oscar the Grouch t-shirt the next day.  Fashion inspiration from cupcakes…strange.

Up next….Cookie Monster cupcakes – a Muppet after my own heart!

P.S. Happy Canada Day, everyone!

cooking

Some like it hot

wittychild

I usually don’t bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore.  Oh, I understand the psychological appeal of a new, unsullied year to finally kick that bad habit or start a good one, but it’s just not my thing.  Most resolutions fail, due either to lofty goals, ill-defined goals, or zero execution plan.  For example, “I resolve to lose weight” is too vague.  “I resolve to lose 50 pounds” is ambitious – but not totally impossible, if it’s accompanied by a list of Hows, which it usually isn’t.  “I resolve to lose 20 pounds; to do so, I’ll cut out my daily can of soda and walk for half an hour four times a week” is manageable and well-laid out, but most people don’t demonstrate this foresight.

In my own case, “I resolve to become a gourmet vegan chef” is just…not…gonna…happen.  But I do have a bit of an addiction to printed matter, including numerous cookbooks.  I buy them, ooh and aah over the recipes, and then put them back on the bookshelf without actually doing anything vaguely domestic.  So, for the last couple years, I’ve had an “unspoken resolution” of sorts: I resolve will endeavour to cook at least one new dish per month.  The only catch?  It has to be “real food”, and not a cupcake or cookie recipe – something that can be eaten as a meal.  That’s only twelve instances of real cooking per year; who can’t handle that?  Some of my experiments have been…less than pleasing…but for the most part, this has been a really fun undertaking, and I’ve been motivated to try dishes I might not have otherwise.

I realized last week that I hadn’t yet tried a new recipe for June, but after flipping through a couple of books, it didn’t take me long to come up with a relatively cohesive meal plan.

Left to right: “Better Love Your Beans Bake” from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites, and “Curried Cabbage and Peas” from Appetite for Reduction.  And before you ask, no, I’m not a professional food photographer.  😛  The cabbage dish looks way prettier in person, with curried-yellow cabbage, plus bright green peas and orange carrots dotting it.

Cross-section of the bean bake:

It looks all rich and creamy – it is! – and cheesy – it isn’t! – but the topping is reasonably healthy, with a cup of puréed chickpeas making up the bulk of it, plus some nondairy sour cream, almond milk, nutritional yeast, and spices.  I’m a little obsessed with chickpeas, so finding a new way to use them in a recipe was A-OK by me.

A note on Hearty Vegan Meals: that books is full of recipes that will satisfy omnivores.  Quite a few of them call for deep-frying, which doesn’t thrill me, but I haven’t hit a bad recipe yet out of the ones I’ve tried.

The curried cabbage is hot-hot-hot – I could have halved the curry powder and been happy – but the bean bake worked wonders to temper it.

The best part?  I get total points for cooking something that everyone can enjoy.

baking

Free food always tastes better!

wittychild

I was sitting at work yesterday, minding my own business, when I thought I heard someone say “rhubarb” in the general vicinity of the kitchen.  Has Paul brought in his tasty rhubarb cake again? I wondered, and began a stealthy, nonchalant trek to see what was going on.  He had brought it in a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted in on the ground floor if there was more.  There was no rhubarb cake to be had, alas, but what there was, was free rhubarb (or deconstructed rhubarb cake, if you will).  In fact, its purveyor attempted to send me home with the entire garbage bag full that he had brought in.  I demurred, but decided that a few stalks  – or, ahem, sixteen – couldn’t hurt.  I had never cooked with rhubarb before (although I do enjoy eating it), but getting tons of it for free was like a carte blanche to try something new.

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find a rhubarb recipe (that’s not pie, because it’s hot out and I’d prefer cooler temperatures to fiddle with pastry) in a vegan cookbook.  Hello!  It’s not kumquats, or something equally exotic, but a springtime farmer’s-market staple.  Fortunately, Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts came through with Spring Fling muffins.  And since I had the day off today, I was up and baking first thing in the morning while it was still reasonably cool.

Yum!  I love the streusel-y topping, and the little extra crunch that the sugar gives.  The recipe said it made 12, but I’m not sure what sort of oversized muffin cups the author used, because I got 15 nicely-sized muffins out of the deal.  (Not complaining…now I have more to share with an eager test audience.)

I thought the watermelon cupcake liners were a nice touch, as their main purpose seems to be to send mixed signals about what kind of fruit is inside.

baking

You can’t spell “fibre” without… “brief”?

wittychild

This is probably the kind of thing that could get my citizenship revoked, but I hate Tim Horton’s.  Oh, sure, they used to be good, back when their donuts were actually baked on-site, fresh, in each individual store, before these dark days of par-baked pastries that are frozen and sent to the stores to be “finished off”; back when they focused on being a half-decent coffee and donut shop instead of expanding their lunch menu to include sandwiches that probably taste better from Subway, salty-yet-flavourless soups, and institutional-sized vats of (shudder) beef lasagna casserole.  Unfortunately, flash-frozen donuts and subpar lunch items seem to be the order of the day, and I no longer have any interest in them.  Also, their coffee smells like cat pee (and I live with both cats and Tim’s drinkers, so trust me on this one).  But I digress.

I had some oat bran left in the cupboard from my last adventure with the Applesauce-Oat Bran muffins from Veganomicon, and thought I ought to bake some muffins this weekend.  Last time, I made them pretty much according to the recipe, and added raisins.  This time, I had planned to add some dried cranberries, when my mom reminded me that there were oodles of fresh blueberries in the fridge.  Lightbulb moment!  What about a cranberry-blueberry-bran muffin, much like the ones found at the above-mentioned national treasure of a coffee chain?

Ha!  Tim’s can suck it!  Not only did these come out beautifully, they have almost half the calories of one of those flash-frozen abominations (based on a rough calculation using calorie counts for my individual ingredients, divided by twelve muffins).  I followed the recipe for the most part, increasing the cinnamon by 1/2 tsp and swapping out the cardamom for 1/2 tsp ground ginger.  I also added just a touch of molasses to give them a deeper flavour, and then folded in 1/3 cup dried cranberries and 1/2 cup fresh blueberries.  Now that’s a satisfying 174 calories!

But don’t worry – I haven’t gone totally health-food on everyone.  It was my turn for Bake Day at work last week; check out the margarita cupcake redux:

The minis are so cute; the public loves them; I may well spend the rest of my days making margarita cupcakes to slake the desires of friends and co-workers.

General Sewing

“Polka dot?” “Not again!”

wittychild

[cue polka music]

It’s been unseasonably chilly here the past while.  I wore sweaters to work twice last week, and it’s the last part of May.  This is the Northern hemisphere, and I expect warm spring days, darn it!

Can I will the nice weather to show itself by sewing a summery skirt?

(Modeled by the always-lovely Dolores.)

I made this using Simplicity 5564, View E (or F?).  I’ve attempted this pattern a few times in the past with varying degrees of success, but this is the first time I’ve ever managed to get the waistband right.  In the past, I tried the waistband and then decided “Forget this!” and simply folded over the top of my skirt “tube” to make a casing for some elastic.  Besides the easy on-and-off factor that comes with an elastic waist, leaving the waistband off makes the skirt shorter and more flattering; as it is, it’s just a touch matronly looking – but still cute, and suitable for the office.  Or maybe I just need to grow another couple of inches.

The fabric is a lovely, stretchy knit that I fell in love with at Fabricland, and which instantly brought to mind this pattern.

Now I just need sunny days and warm breezes…