Tag: vegan

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

So Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny walk into a bar…

wittychild

Wait.  What?

Okay, so I’m not insanely early with this, I swear.  Just kinda, sorta four months late.  I think my inner monologue started something like this (perhaps abridged for the sake of time and space): “Oh, boy, I love doing Mill Hill beaded kits.  They’re so quick and cute, and if I start stitching now I’ll have this finished in plenty of time for Christmas…All right, now that I’ve got the stitching finished, all that’s left is to add the beads.  Ooh, they’ll twinkle nicely when this is hanging on the Christmas tree….Oh, well [bad word]!  There’s a bead stuck on my needle!  Hmm, maybe if I try pushing it back off the way it came…nope…”

One of the red beads got stuck (as in, super-stuck) on my beading needle.  Right over the eye.  I could neither slide it over the eye and down to its rightful place on the ornament nor slide it back off.  Considering that at this point I had already completed most of the beading and had, oh, three red beads to go, I was considerably unimpressed by this development.  So I calmly and rationally did what any psychologically normal person would do: stuffed the entire works into a drawer to be ignored until some to-be-determined point in the future when I felt like dealing with it.

A few weeks ago, I happened to bitterly mumble something about “that [bad word] bead”, to which my mom replied, “Why don’t you just take a pair of pliers and crush it?  You do have extras, right?”  Genius!  So, yesterday I took a pair of pliers and crushed the sodding little thing to bits, whereupon I cheerfully resumed my otherwise pleasant little project.  Here it is, with one of my mom’s potted plant-like things standing in for a Christmas tree.  Hey, foliage is foliage:

It’s called “Kitty’s Gift”, and I can see now that I need to trim the backing paper on it…but I’ve still got eight months or so.  She looks rather like my youngest cat, too.

Gratuitous cat shot:

(Yes, the cat, I got dressed up in time for Christmas.  The tree, not so much.)

Also on my list of Easter weekend homemakery, I made a pie from scratch for the first time.  Well, the crust is from scratch, at least.  I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of doing a scratch filling only to find out that the crust was going to be inedible, but…next time!  I used the Buttery Double Crust recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, and dumped a can of peach-passionfruit filling in between.  The edge of the crust turned out a little lumpy and imperfect, but I’m still satisfied for a first attempt:

My Pennsylvania RR Peach Passionfruit Pie.  One of the pies in the book shows a crust with little stars cut out; I happened to have a small locomotive cookie cutter handy so used that instead.

I could use more four-day weekends.  I get so much more done around the house than I do at work.  🙂

baking

Say it with baked goods

wittychild

I’m afraid I don’t have a terribly exciting story this time.  A gentleman I know very generously supplied me with four 1:160 scale automobiles from his personal stash.  I was extremely grateful, and decided to…say it with baked goods.  A very vocal peanut gallery was rooting for the cappuccino cupcakes from (you guessed it) Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which I prettied up with swirls of mocha buttercream and chocolate-covered espresso beans.

Although I’m not a huge fan of Michael’s, there is no denying that they stock some spiffy cupcake boxes.  The recipient was delighted with his unexpected sweets, and I had an excuse to bake…win-win!

(And yes, I do craft/bake/produce other things besides cupcakes, I swear!)

baking

Cheesecake is the national food of Ireland, right?

wittychild

All over the blogosphere, I’m sure, crafty types are posting some wonderful St. Patrick’s Day projects.  Green sugar cookies, or homemade Shamrock shakes…maybe shamrock-shaped earrings or a tutu with orange-white-green tulle, or a cross-stitched Irish blessing.  Me?  I made Oreo Cheesecake Cookies.

I saw the recipe on Brown Eyed Baker (http://www.browneyedbaker.com/), and thought, “Hey, these would be easy to veganize!”  And they were!  Tofutti may very well be the most useful mock-product ever.

And just so you know, there is just a little Irish in these cookies.  I wore this while I was baking them:

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone!

baking

Margarita Cupcakes – After Dark

wittychild

I remember now why I like quick, small crafty projects: instant gratification.  For example, right now I’m working on a rather large (14″ x 14″) needlepoint.  Although I’m genuinely loving every stitch, and it really is progressing at a reasonable clip, I still have nothing completed to show for my efforts.  Ditto my recovering project.  Waiting for my not-so-silent partner to hold up his end of things means I don’t yet have an awesome “finished” photo.  For someone who blogs about her crafty exploits, it can be frustrating.

Thank heavens for cupcakes.  Who doesn’t like foodporn photos of cute, tender little cups of love?

And look!  With a different finish than usual!  I usually follow the prescribed decorating from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World; that is, a demure little layer of icing spread evenly on top while coloured sugar coyly mimics the salted rim of a real margarita.  (This can be seen in an earlier post.)  Somehow, though, the fluffy piped swirls and haphazardly sprinkled sugar just scream, “Fiesta!”  Perfect, since I’ll be taking four to a coworker who has just a) turned the big 6-0 and b) announced her rapidly approaching retirement.

Public opinion will determine whether this flirty new approach sticks.  I’m sure my test subjects can hardly wait.

baking

Why don’t you make like a banana and split…

wittychild

…into a dozen delicious cupcakes!  Muahahaha!

*ahem*

I had had a hankering for these for a while, and had slowly been acquiring the ingredients necessary to churn out a batch.  When soy yogurt – *bing* – magically found its way into my fridge on Friday, I knew I was in the clear.

These are Banana Split Cupcakes from Kris Holechek’s The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes, and oh, lordy, they can make believers out of omnivores!

The picture doesn’t do them justice.  A moist vanilla cake studded with chopped maraschino cherries and bananas, mini chocolate chips, and crushed pineapple…heaven!  I actually wound up with 16 cupcakes instead of the alleged 12, but this is my own fault for not measuring my mix-ins as precisely as I could have.  (“Eh…that looks like 1/4 cup.”)  I topped them off with a basic vanilla buttercream piped into approximations of swirls, and sprinkled a few chopped peanuts on top for good measure.  They make a nice contrast to the sweet of the cupcake and icing.

The best part?  My cherries were not quite as thoroughly drained as they ought to have been, and imparted a lovely pale pink colour to the batter.  It wasn’t my intention to make Valentine’s cupcakes – I used the heart-print liners because they’re seasonal, but it wasn’t a deliberate attempt or anything – but I wound up with them anyway.

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Paws up for birthday cake!

wittychild

What is it with Margaret Sherry and cute cat designs?  While flipping through a back issue of Cross Stitcher magazine on New Year’s Eve (is that a debaucherous evening or what?), I found the perfect design to turn into a card for my mom’s birthday.  While the red velvet pancakes were charring cooking, she opened a rather unassuming white envelope to find this staring back at her:

I used 18-count fabric instead of 14 as called for by the magazine to get it to fit in the card, and used random colours that looked close enough to those on the model – perfect way to use what I had laying around.  I love the concerned look on his face, and promised to use fewer candles on her birthday cake – if only by one.

(Please excuse the “arty” shot.)

I don’t think the cake could have been any simpler to make: a double batch of the basic chocolate cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, divided between two round layer pans, topped with a coffee-and-Kahlua’ed version of the chocolate buttercream frosting from the same.  Because I had serious doubts about my ability to wield a tube of decorating gel, I had the foresight to trace the words onto the top using a toothpick, and then follow the lines.  Hey, it may not be terribly skillful, but it worked.

And now that it’s all over, I get to breathe easy again, at least until Mother’s Day.

baking

Labour Day Classic

wittychild

I didn’t set out to make Rider cupcakes yesterday, really and truly I didn’t.  All I really wanted to do was to experiment with my new cupcake pan (sturdier and not prone to bending the way my shiny disposable aluminum ones are; the trade-off is that the darker coating wreaks havoc with my baking times and temperatures and results in what I feel are overbaked cupcakes.  Hence, experiment), using a familiar – so I knew what I should be getting – and preferably light-coloured cupcake recipe, that I might better be able to judge degree of browning.  What better than the basic vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World?  The liners I used weren’t terribly important; these were just going to be “practice cupcakes” for home.  Yet when my eyes lit on an open package of green and white gingham liners, an idea started to form.  Green and white liners….white-ish cupcakes….perfect snacks for the Labour Day Classic between the Bombers and the Riders!

I substituted almond extract for the vanilla in the recipe since for some reason I have three bottles of the stuff in the cupboard, and found a lonely-looking lime in the fridge that seemed to be begging to be incorporated into the icing.  While almond-lime seems like – and is – an unusual combination, I thought the sweet and tangy might play off one another well, although my test audience remains uncertain of its status as the next power-combo.  It’s no peanut butter-chocolate, that’s for sure, but certainly not offensive, at any rate.  And I actually had enough icing left over for a 13th…what, too soon?  Okay…

While I realize that neither almonds nor limes are indigenous to the Land of the Living Skies, there’s also canola oil and wheat flour (101 varieties suitable for growth in Saskatchewan, according to the Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation, which also lists lemons and oranges as viable crops but not limes), so I feel like it’s at least somewhat representative.  And I can’t say for sure whether my culinary toying affected the outcome of the game, but, well, Riders 27 – Bombers 7.

Which of course raises the question: can a blue and gold creation pull things the other way at next weekend’s Banjo Bowl?

baking

You’re a cute l’il pumpkin, aren’t you?

wittychild

I don’t hate my job, per se.  I do, however, hate that the eight hours per day spent at work, plus travel/preparation time, is severely cutting into my crafty time.  Hmm.  Maybe I’ll enjoy it even more if I don’t get to do it all that often.  Or maybe I can learn to cleverly invest my paycheques and retire within the next two years, thereby freeing up all sorts of time.  Or not.  In the meantime, if they’re happy to pay me to hang out in the office, being helpful and productive and generally not screwing things up too much, then I’m happy to be there.

One thing I definitely love about my job, though, is the Bake Day Club.  There are about 20 or so of us now who take turns bringing in delicious home baking (or even purchased donuts; we’re not picky) every Thursday.  This week was my turn – my first time.  Eek!  It had come out some time ago that I do the whole vegan thing, so I was super determined to prove to everyone that I can bake just as well as they can, without the use of dairy or eggs.  I whipped up a pan of Cranberry Lemon Zing Oat Bars from Kris Holechek’s The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes – a crowd-pleaser if there ever was one – and these little gems:

Top-down shot:

How autumny!  (Thursday being the first full day of fall, of course.)  These are a variation on the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  I left the chocolate chips out, replaced them with ground walnuts, and added a little extra ginger, nutmeg, and cloves (about 1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon of each) to give them a spicy pumpkin-pie feel.  Oh, yes, and used mini-cupcake pans, obviously, instead of standard ones.  People kept asking if I had baked them from scratch, and no one thought to ask whether there was, you know, like, tofu or something in there, ick.  Yay!  Chalk up another victory for tasty vegan baking!

Despite the aforementioned time crunch and sad lack of craftiness, I have managed to finish a couple of UFOs (or does that make them FOs, now?).  Stay tuned….

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

What’s shakin’, Daddyo?

wittychild

So here’s the problem with parents: you stitch a card for one, and then the other one starts clamouring for one.  Okay, so not really – but I couldn’t not make a homemade card for my dad for Father’s Day.  I found a motif in an old issue of Cross Stitch Crazy that bore a vague resemblance to our youngest cat, Skeeter, and then changed the markings just a bit to make it look more like her.

That mocha-y colour around her face is the result of tweeding, my friends.  Oh, and the ball has blending filament in it for a little added sparkle.

She seems to approve:

(And so did he, for what it’s worth.)  Also under the Homemade Goodness category, I made the No-Bake Black-Bottom Peanut Butter Silk Pie from Vegan With a Vengeance. It didn’t turn out quite as it should have, I suspect – agar tends to behave unpredictably for me, and this time, although it firmed up somewhat, there was no way it would hold its shape once cut – but I calmly stuck the whole thing in the freezer and turned it into a really delicious dairy-free ice-cream-type dessert.  I miss ice cream cake sometimes, but this was definitely a worthy substitute.  How worthy?  It got devoured, and I didn’t get a picture.

baking

Some day we’re gonna marry and you’ll be my pineapple queen

wittychild

Nothing outstanding today, sorry.  This isn’t even the first time I’ve made them.  But summer’s rapidly approaching, and nothing is quite as refreshing as a Pineapple Right-Side-Up cupcake from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Aren’t they adorable?

They look all fancy-like but are actually ridiculously simple.  And straight out of the fridge…mmmm….that delicate blend of spice and fruitiness can’t be beat.  And who couldn’t use a little extra Vitamin C?