Tag: food

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Happy Mother’s Day!

wittychild

This year has been a far cry from last year’s adding French knots and framing on Sunday morning.  For once, I actually came prepared for Mother’s Day.

Besides the towel that I posted last weekend, I stitched up a little card for Mumsie:

It was a free kit that came with a recent issue of Cross Stitcher magazine.  The kit included googly eyes that looked freaky-deaky (the mama koala looked merely surprised; the baby looked like a strung-out Keane kid), so I added French knots to give a somewhat more natural look.

And you can’t have Mother’s Day without dessert, can you?

This is a variation on the raw strawberry cheesecake from The Post Punk Kitchen.  I made the filling as per the recipe, but used the vanilla cookie crumb crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky instead.  I’m not normally a cheesecake fan, but this wasn’t bad – light and mousse-ish, with a nice strawberry flavour.

The cake, incidentally, made a lovely finish to our breakfast of cocoa-Kahlua pancakes from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites.  Dense and chewy, they were like eating brownies for breakfast.  Yum!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

baking

It’s a marshmallow world in the…spring?

wittychild

A normal person would, much in the style of Charles Emerson Winchester III, do one thing at a time, do it very well, and then move on to the next thing.  My approach is somewhat more chaotic, and I have found myself with one Mother’s Day project on the go, one yet to be started (eep!), one baby sampler due early summer started, and one anniversary present due late June started.  Everything is slowly getting done, bit by bit, but thanks to my own special brand of multitasking, nothing is really getting finished.  Thank goodness for long weekends.

I did, however, manage to steal a bit of time to try my hand at homemade marshmallows.  These are not vegan, alas, as my experiences with agar agar have been somewhat unpredictable and I actually wanted these to work; if anyone knows a good gelatin-to-agar agar equivalency rate or other vegan option, I’d be thrilled.

That said, they turned out perfectly!  I used Alton Brown’s recipe (found here), although I used nearly 2 1/2 Tbsp of vanilla instead of the recommended 1 tsp to enhance the flavour.  They do get a little sticky if left at room temperature, despite the powdered sugar/cornstarch coating, so I’ve been keeping them in the fridge.

Some of them have extra “skin tags” because I cut them once in the pan, then turned them out and re-cut on the bottom, and some of my cuts didn’t quite line up perfectly – but that’s purely cosmetic.  I’ve never used a candy thermometer before or attempted anything quite like this, but if I can manage, anyone can.  They are vanilla-y, soft, and smooth, and I can’t wait to make s’mores out of these babies!

Oh, yes: Happy Nabokov Day!

baking

Tequila and lime juice and salt…oh, my!

wittychild

When I kicked off my five-day weekend (technically, Labour Day should only afford me a three-day weekend, but yay for vacation time!), let me tell you, I had plans, baby.  Big plans.  It was going to be a veritable orgy of creativity around my place.  But you know how it is: the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.  Oh, I did get a little cross-stitching in, and started a mock-up of a Lolita dress, but neither of these creative endeavours yielded anything I could complete and post here, proudly proclaiming, “I made this!”  That all changed today when, with my trusty copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World! in hand, I turned out these babies: Mucho Margarita Cupcakes.

Aren’t they festive?  I think the coloured sugar around the edges is my favourite part.  This is the second recipe I’ve tried from that book – having inhaled the pumpkin-chocolate chip cupcakes with cinnamon icing before I could get a picture – and I cannot say enough good things about it.  This is twice, now, that I’ve managed from-scratch cupcakes that a) rose properly, b) cooked through properly, and c) didn’t burn.  Highly recommended!