MoFo #9: Kittycakes
KITTYCAKES!
I made these cupcakes for my friend Sarah’s birthday last week. The cake is my basic lemon cupcake recipe topped with whiskey lemon buttercream and chocolate ganache. I’d like to make a dessert based on the whiskey sour sometime soon. Cupcakes are a dead giveaway, so I’ve been avoiding them lately when writing new recipes. There are so many other kinds of baked goods and dessert-y type things to make!
I got a little tub of fondant (Satin Ice. Vegan!) over the summer and have been playing around with it lately. I knew that it was difficult to work with, but I found even more quirks with the sugar dough! Fondant gets really soft and melty as soon as you start kneading it with your hands, then it has to dry before it will hold its shape. I’ve just been making little animals with it so far, mostly cats and unicorns.
Here’s another kittycake I made over the summer for another friend’s birthday. It’s a cinnamon cake with snickerdoodles all over it, and 24 kitties!
And some more cupcakes. These are lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream for an order. Those lemon slices are fondant painted with food coloring. Which is lots and lots of fun!
I really really need a week off (or a month! or another summer!) because there are so many things I’d like to make, and school is cramping my style in a really annoying way!
MoFo #8: Mini Pumpkin Apple Pies and Coconut Cream How-to
Blah, blah, blah here I go with the pumpkins again.
I decided to play around with the traditional pumpkin pie by introducing different flavors into the dessert and miniaturizing it. Now, I’ve made pie only a few times ever, so rolling pie crust and demystifying all the kinds of pie innards still has a bit of a learning curve. I started by reading up on pie crust. See, I really wanted to incorporate coconut not only in the pie, but also the crust by using coconut oil. During this endeavor, I came across this article. This writer bemoans the use of coconut oil for crust in favor of leaf lard, which she describes as the “veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat” and goes on to reminisce about the hint of bacon flavor in her pie crust and aroma of “pig”. I’m all about the combination of sweet and salty but, um, gross. I googled the author and she seems like a perfectly nice lady (see, this is how I get sidetracked all the time), but what the fuck? I really hope the search for goose fat, marrow, foie gras, and bear fat (ha) is at least a little bit facetious.
Despite the admittedly attractive prospect of using all sorts of animal fats described in painstaking detail for my pie crust, I used coconut oil anyway!
…It was okay. It wasn’t the greatest pie crust I’ve ever imagined making, but it was probably better than the storebought kind! I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the coconut oil’s fault though.
I pressed that dough into the cups of a muffin pan and decided to make mini pies. I had roasted some butternut squash the previous night and whipped up a pumpkin pie filling based on the recipe in Voluptuous Vegan (which is ZOMG delicious!) with some coconut involved. Pumpkin and coconut just go together, I think. Even in savory food! One of my favorite dishes in Milwaukee is the Thai squash curry at EE Sane.
The idea for these pies was to incorporate a variety of autumnal flavors in tiny little packages. After baking the mini pumpkin pies, I chopped up some apples and sauteed the pieces with cinnamon, Earth Balance, coconut oil, apple cider, and brown sugar. I was going to add some rum or red wine to give the flavors even more depth, but totally forgot when it was time. Next time!
After letting the apples cool and topping the pies with them, I whipped up some coconut cream with a few other ingredients and dolloped it on the pies. The first can of coconut milk I opened that day was too watery, but that was probably my fault! There’s a specific method to follow when making coconut cream because just a little bit of water will make it soupy instead of a whipped cream texture:
1. Let the can of coconut milk sit at room temperature for 2-3 days, untouched. Do not shake or move around!
2. Don’t use the light kind. It’s full of water, which means not very much cream, and you’re wasting your money when you could just dilute the full fat version. Voila, more coconut milk!
3. Move the can to the refrigerator. Let chill for several hours, ideally overnight. Coconut milk is expensive and making coconut cream is time sensitive, so you don’t want to fuck this up.
4. Take can out of refrigerator when it’s time to make the cream. Scoop out all the cream. STOP when you get near the water and only scoop out the cream that’s not touching the water. There might be some chunks of coconut cream casualties, but better to lose a bit of the cream than the whole can and have to start over. Yikes!
5. Whip up the cream with some powdered sugar and a bit of vanilla. Metal bowl is best because it keeps the temperature low.
6. Hate planning days in advance? Me too! Stick some cans of coconut milk in the fridge whenever you have the vaguest idea that you might want to make coconut cream sometime soon. Keep them in there for weeks, or even at all times.
Now go make some coconut cream! I love it!
Back to the pies. I toasted the squash seeds with some salt, cinnamon, and black pepper for garnish. The peppery salty crunchiness was the perfect contrast to luscious coconut cream and both pumpkin and apple pie, all in one bite. I’m definitely going to make these again and work out the kinks of the recipe!
Vegan MoFo #7: Ted Leo
Back in July, I saw Ted Leo & the Pharmacists in Milwaukee.
Ted and I became Twitter friends shortly before the show. Is Twitter friends the correct term? What I mean is, Ted followed me back on Twitter because of the lovely beautiful pretty haired Isa Chandra. I got all giggly and jumpy for approximately several hours, then I decided I was going to bake him something the day of the show.
I present you with the Ted Leo Cupcake, a chai latte cake with chocolate ganache and speculoos buttercream. Also, they actually do not have weed in them, much to the surprise of the 3+ people who asked why I was carrying cupcakes around at the show.
Prior to the show, I had a billion questions in mind about how I was going to get the cupcakes to Ted. Resort to stalking? Launch them up one by one with my bra (that was never an option!)? It would be way too ridiculous to just ask him like a sane human being, but sometimes I’m one for the practical approach, so that’s what I did. The security guard was a total d-bag, but Ted removed the disillusionment by contacting me! Then of course there was a technological debacle where my phone wasn’t sending Twitter DMs properly (isn’t that how it always goes?), but that soon resolved itself and in no time we talking and hugging and ZOMG-ing and I gave him cupcakes.
And he totally liked them! We reconvened after the amazing show he put on and even with the stars all up in my eyes, I was capable of that normal conversation thing! Ted Leo is incredibly nice and so personable. I was so fortunate to be able to meet him in person, and bake for him, and I hope to again sometime! I hear he really likes Peanut Chews.
Vegan MoFo #6: Rainbow Unicorn Cake
Unicorn rainbow cake! I rarely make full-sized cakes unless I have somewhere or someone to bring them to, but I really wanted to play around with fondant and painting with food coloring, so this cake went to school with me. After making grape soda cupcakes, I was really into the idea of making more soda reductions. While root beer extract is becoming more and more available nowadays, it’s still not the easiest item to find and it usually comes in very tiny bottles. If root beer could be made into a reduction, why use extract all the time? Root Beer Float Cake was in order.
I started out by boiling down the root beer. The idea of a reduction is to boil out the water, leaving a thick syrup and condensing the flavor. Turns out boiling root beer makes the water and the flavor escape. I was left with a sugar syrup that I could only tell used to be root beer by closing my eyes real tight and tasting the faintest hint of root beer. Or maybe I was just imagining that completely. It wasn’t root beer. Simultaneously, I was making a cream soda reduction for cupcakes, which unfortunately had the same results.
I added the root beer reduction to the cake batter anyway, as well as some regular root beer. It mostly just tasted like a chocolate cake with a tiny bit of root beer flavor from the not-reduced root beer. I was making a rainbow unicorn glitter cake, so sprinkles between the layers seemed necessary.
So this cake baking didn’t lead to a new recipe, but it was still tasty and I got to sculpt a very droopy unicorn for the top of the cake, in a hurry before class, oops. I resisted making this the title of the post today and I feel like I might start serving up bad puns if I keep writing, so I leave you with the phrase, Root Beer Sink Cake. Goodnight!
MoFo #5: Pumpkin Beer, Brunch, and Bread
Surprise! I’ve jumped on the pumpkin bandwagon. With countless varieties of winter squash popping up in every grocery store and farmer’s market all over the place, it’s pretty difficult not to put roasted squash in everything or make every kind of pumpkin baked good. This newfound squash fixation forced me to do something I’ve never done before: bake with freshly roasted pumpkin! Eff that canned sadness! When I learned that canned pumpkin is actually almost always squash, I started roasting squash like nobody’s business. It’s so much easier than I imagined. Glass baking dish filled with a shallow water bath, squash halves face down, then about 30 minutes in a 400°F oven. Butternut squash seems to be the easiest to slice through and has a nice smooth, sweet flavor.
Working with what’s in season isn’t always ideal when writing a cookbook because of the amount of recipes needed at odd times of the year, deadlines, etc, but I’m really taking advantage of pumpkin and apple cider season. Plus these deadlines are currently self-imposed. I’m milking (I mean “liberating the potentials of succulent winter squash”) this pumpkin abundance for all it’s worth.
The first roasted butternut experiment was the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World with a fluffy cinnamon buttercream, sprinkles, and gold lustre-dusted cinnamon stick garnish. I brought them in for one of my classes a couple weeks ago.
A few months ago I made pancakes with beer. It adds a lot of fluff to the texture and a beer bread flavor throughout the pancake. With pumpkin beer in season, I got inspired and decided to make Pumpkin Beer Pumpkin Pie Pancakes. Fresh roasted pumpkin, pumpkin beer, and an array of pumpkin pie spices give these pancakes the essence of autumn. They’re not too sweet, which lets the spicy flavors shine through. The beer flavor can be overpowering if too much is used, so here it just acts as a background of flavor to the pancakes, balanced with the other flavors.
So this one isn’t pumpkin or squash, but it was inspired by the Pumpkin French Toast at Blossoming Lotus in Portland, OR. This is Sweet Potato Pie French Toast with coconut whipped cream.
This really just started with an abundance of sweet potatoes at my disposal and some thick sourdough bread in my line of sight around brunch time, then I remembered the Pumpkin French Toast I’ve been dreaming of for the past few months. I got really interested in looking up drinks made with sweet potato (which led to reading a bartender’s book and googling the distillation processes and serving customs of a bunch of different fancy liquors) and came across the Sweet Potato Potato Pie Cocktail. This french toast has all the flavors of this warm, fuzzy season: sweet potato, rum, apple cider, and fresh spices, all topped with a dollop of coconut cream.
Pumpkin beer strikes again! Living in the city where pumpkin beer (and many other kinds of beer) is made, this stuff is everywhere. I decided to go with a traditional beer bread this time, but bake pumpkin beer and pumpkin into it, then bake as pizza crust! Topped with onions, bell peppers (which almost gave me food poisoning and were swiftly removed from the pizza. Don’t use the wrinkly bell peppers!), and a sprinkle of Daiya, it was perfectly delicious. Except for the quick wave of nausea when my whole life flashed in front of me after the psychedelic bell peppers. It was indeed quick, for no one’s allowed to get sick during Vegan MoFo.
Vegan MoFo #4: Vida Vegan Con Cooking Demos
Vida Vegan MoFo, huzzah! I’m lucky this post actually fits with the theme so I have a legitimate excuse to be blogging about Vida Vegan Con two months late (but wait, I posted a huge VVC post only a month late!).
Joni Newman and I did a cooking demo together at the Pearl District Whole Foods called Backyard BBQ with an Indian Twist, as part of the off-site cooking demo series at Vida Vegan Con. Our menu was Kofta Kebabs with Tangy Tahini Dipping Sauce and Rosewater Lemonade Cupcakes. This venue had a fully stocked kitchen with every appliance you could imagine, a full working stove and oven (well the oven didn’t work too terribly well, but whatevs!), and lots of counter space. And if any ingredients were missing…surprise, Whole Foods is downstairs! It was such a great set up and we could focus on the making food instead of running around checking to make sure we had everything prepare.
Joni and I had so much fun cooking together and talking with the people who attended. The demo lasted an extra half hour, at least! That’s unwritten rule #1 of cooking demos: engage the audience by making the demo into a conversation rather than just talking at them. Then it’s entertaining, everyone is involved, and friendship bracelets are exchanged by the end of it all! Joni and I decided we needed to quit our normal lives and roadtrip around the country with a food demo truck feeding vegans and non-vegans everywhere (who wants to buy us a food demo truck?!).
I’m probably laughing about how I can’t figure out how to use this Kitchenaid. I just made jokes about all the stupid shit I accidentally did throughout the demo. It was entertaining! That’s unwritten rule #2 of cooking demos: make people laugh!
Rosewater Lemonade Cupcakes! Well these aren’t the EXACT Rosewater Lemonade Cupcakes from the demo, but they’re not made out of styrofoam and mashed potatoes or anything.
Friday morning before the conference shenanigans began, I had another off-site demo with KATU-TV, where I made Margarita Biscotti from my upcoming project. I decided I was going to become a ring-wearing person by starting out with this plastic apple ring, but it’s the only one I ever wear and I forget most of the time. But here it is!
The segment from KATU:
Yes, you can get vegan baking ingredients at normal grocery stores, and NO, cookies are not healthy!
Again, those are biscotti from a different day, but they’re the real deal! And again again, I’m super tired and it’s time for bed!
Vegan MoFo #3: Bloody Mary Biscuits
Bloody Mary Biscuits are a significantly better idea than the notorious Bloody Mary Cookies. With the beverage theme in mind, there was no escaping turning the Bloody Mary into an edible, even enjoyable, baked good. Fortunately, I’m no longer limited to cookies, so a savory option was the way to go. I love tomato breads and biscuits, so this wouldn’t be too out of the ordinary. A simple tomato biscuit loaded with traditional Bloody Mary spices and garnish. I added chopped olives and pickles into the dough as well.
Here’s when my intentions became questionable: bacon. Here in Milwaukee, Comet serves Bloody Marys garnished with bacon, and its the foulest thing I’ve ever witnessed. Not because of the flavor combination, but the fact that it’s non-vegan bacon, in a drink. So why not make a vegan version in biscuit form? I decided to make seitan bacon from scratch, using lots of liquid smoke, maple syrup, and various bacon-y spices, then frying up the dough. It wasn’t the best bacon-type thing I’ve ever had, but it worked in this application. Maybe I’ll try again soon now that I have some Upton’s bacon seitan in my fridge!
Verdict? The biscuits were really delicious! I enjoyed the olives and pickles studded throughout and taking apart the garnish I carefully crafted. They tasted more like pizza to me, so I’m going to reevaluate the spice combination and add other ingredients next time. I didn’t use vodka in these, but I’m probably going to next time to lend a flaky texture to the biscuits like vodka does in pie crust! I didn’t think of that the first time around and didn’t use vodka because it would have added no flavor.
Shooting the biscuits:
Sometimes I use window light for my photos, but I like studio work more, so I’ve been doing that for food photography lately. I have a Speedlite mounted on a light stand and connected to my camera with a cord, so it acts as a small-scale strobe set-up. This offers lots of flexibility for me around the clock, plus the natural light in my apartment is balls anyway since the windows are on the north side. I’m studying photography full time and do a lot of work in my apartment, so I spend a lot of time working like this.
I can barely keep my eyes open, so I’m going to end here abruptly. Thanks for reading! I’m out!
Vegan MoFo #2: Saga of the Grape Soda Cupcakes (and recipe)
While perusing the beverage aisle during a grocery trip with recipe writing in mind, I tossed a few bottles of grape soda* in the cart thinking I’d have big plans with it, eventually. The bottles sat on top of my refrigerator for about two months before I decided what to do with it. Everything just sounded so…gross. Grape soda cookies? Yuck. Biscotti? VOM. Donuts? It’s been done. Sorbet? I don’t really like making ice cream-y type things. Muffins? Pass the barf bag.
How would grape soda taste good in a baked good? It’s fruity, sickly sweet, and fizzy, and grape doesn’t really go with anything. One day, I broke it down with the transitive property. Grape soda=grapes. Grapes=wine. Wine goes with chocolate. I thought of the chocolate cakes and cupcakes I made with Merlot and Cabernet recently and decided to try something similar with the grape soda. The worst that could happen is that they turn out gross and I’d have an entertaining kitchen disaster post for MoFo.
Grape soda is far from the elegance level of wine, unless you buy really crappy wine. Which I do. But grape soda trying to be fancy could not fool anyone, so don’t even try. It’s one of those drinks kids spill on themselves and turn into a sticky mess with, so cupcakes is the obvious choice. They’re single-serving, cutesy, and I guess you could make a huge mess with them if you really tried.
*Or grape pop, as we call it in the Chicago suburbs, which I get so much shit for saying in Milwaukee.
I laid out all my ingredients, then faced the moment of truth and tasted the grape soda.
BLECH
UGH
NASTY
Sigh.
I could’ve sworn I just took a shot of cough syrup. I used to really love grape soda as a kid and this is not how I remembered it tasting, at all. My hopes were not high after this initial reaction, but what the hell, I jumped right in and started making the reduction. Instead of just adding straight up grape soda to the batter, reducing it concentrates all the flavors. A little bit goes a long way without having to add extra liquid. This also makes it so the buttercream can be grape flavored.
I made the cupcake batter, tossed it in the oven, and held my breath for 16-18 minutes. Then, because I’m not a vampire and need to breathe, I passed out and had to be revived, waking up to a chocolaty grape-y aroma. I promptly started making the grape buttercream. It was actually yummy! Oh, and none of that passing out stuff actually happened.
After frosting the cupcakes and decorating with straws, sprinkles, and star gummies (mentioned in yesterday’s kitchen tour MoFo post), it was the real moment of truth. I bit into a cupcake. It was deep and chocolate-y, then the essence of grape wafted through my taste buds. Success! THEY WEREN’T DISGUSTING! While suited more to a whimsical, child-like palate, the flavors are more complex than you’d think. Just don’t try to pass them off as fancy and sophisticated. They would be perfect for a casual get together or birthday party.
The final product:
Please don’t judge that unicorn on the mug for eating honey. For all we know, maybe honey is vegan in unicorn world.
Grape Soda Cupcakes
Makes 12 cupcakes
Note: You will need grape soda in the cupcake batter in addition to the 4 cups for the reduction, so don’t drink the leftovers just yet!
4 cups grape soda
1 1/3 cups flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup grape soda
¼ cup grape soda reduction
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup margarine
1/3 cup vegetable shortening
2 ¼ cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons grape soda reduction
Pour the grape soda into a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce to a low boil and let boil for 30 minutes, reducing the soda to ¾ cup. If you reduce it too much, simply reconstitute it to make ¾ cup. Set aside.
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Combine the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a stand mixer or mixing bowl. Stir until combined.
Create a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the canola oil, grape soda, ¼ cup grape soda reduction, vanilla extract, and apple cider vinegar. Mix until just combined.
Using a cupcake scoop, fill each cupcake liner a little more than halfway. Bake for 16-18 minutes, until the tops of the cupcakes are firm and a toothpick comes out clean. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.
While the cupcakes are cooling, make the frosting. Cream together the margarine and shortening in a stand mixer or with hand beaters. Gradually add the powdered sugar, sifting as you go. Once half the powdered sugar is mixed in, start gradually drizzling in the grape soda reduction as well. Mix until completely incorporated and beat the frosting for 6-8 minutes. Add more powdered sugar or grape soda reduction to adjust the consistency of the frosting if necessary.
Dip the tops of the cupcakes in grape soda reduction, then pipe or spoon on some frosting. Drizzle with ½ teaspoon grape soda extract. Repeat for all cupcakes. Top with sprinkles or other colorful candies and edible glitter. Serve!
That concludes the grape soda cupcake saga. Love ‘em or hate ‘em.
Now, in all honesty, I’m really stuck in a rut with recipe ideas right now. I have a list of drink ideas on my bulletin board and I walked around Whole Foods last night looking for inspiration, but I’m not super inspired at the moment. I would love if you guys posted some of your favorite drinks or favorite kinds of baked goods, or both, in the comments and maybe I’ll play around with the ideas and turn them into desserts!
And while we’re at it, what other parts of the cookbook writing process are you interested in reading about here this month? I have some recipes, recipe failures, segments on publishing, and more in the works, but I’d love to hear what you guys want to hear about as well!
Thanks for reading!
Vegan MoFo #1: Kitchen Tour
I’m suppose I’m fashionably late to starting MoFo on this blog, but here we are!
My theme this year is documenting the cookbook writing process from my 375 square foot apartment (not sure how big the kitchen is, but less than half of that!). I’ll go over recipe writing, recipe failures, photoshoots, organizing recipes, testing, some blurbs on the actual publishing process, and staying sane throughout it all while going to school full time, doing MoFo on my other blog as well, making progress on the book, and having something like a social life. Writing this book is going to be a little trickier. When I wrote the cookie book, I was living with my parents, a dishwasher, and lots of ingredients, and high school is EASY. Now, I obviously don’t have a lot of space or a car, and photography school is difficult and time consuming. When winter rolls around, the last thing I want to do is go on grocery store runs (bus rides) in the freezing cold. There will be lots of yelling of expletives when I realize I don’t have any powdered sugar, or spill something because I put it too close to an edge, which happens all the time! Luckily, I find myself spending the majority of my food money on flour, sugar, Earth Balance, or crazy baking supplies I want to try out. I don’t have the fanciest dinners most of the time because I HATE doing dishes, but I always do them because it would be gross if I didn’t. I don’t mind doing dishes when it’s cleaning up after baking because cake batter washes off bowls and utensils easily, but with food, that shit gets crusted onto pans and takes a lot of scrubbing to not smell like whatever was cooking. Lately, I’m a big fan of roasting vegetables on a sheet of foil (no cleanup!). But I digress.
The theme for the book this time is baked goods inspired by drinks, so when I have extra time at the grocery store, I’ll look through the soda and tea and coffee aisles at all the different drinks and think about how they would translate into a baked good. I’ve been doing the same thing at coffee shops and with drink menus at restaurants. When it comes to the baked goods based on alcohol drinks, sometimes including liquor in the baked good isn’t necessary, but when it is, planning out those recipes is going to be a whole lot easier now since I turned 21 last week. No more asking people to buy me a bottle of wine and then having to think about how to ration it for a batch of cupcakes so I don’t run out and have to wait until the next time I can get a bottle. And I always feel really bad whenever I have to ask people for favors! So what I’m saying is, the tequila can be free flowing during a baking session because I can just go buy more! Actually, not really. I screw up measurements when I’m not drunk so I don’t like to add fuel to the flame. And I’m not huge on drinking. One of the most exciting things about my birthday was “OMG, I could eat vegan bar food on a regular basis now!”
So for this series of MoFo, I thought I’d start out with a tour of my kitchen and baking supplies. I have two cabinets in my Barbie Dream Kitchen devoted to baking and cake decorating. I lucked out with this apartment since most studio apartments don’t have full kitchens, but mine has a kitchen area and dining space, which is important.
This is my kitchen table. Normally, I don’t sit at it for meals (that dining space was super important, huh?), in favor of the couch by my computer. But I do like to change up the table settings a lot because it’s really fun for me to find new plates, teapots, antiques, and stuff like that, then create a display. I’m also dealing with still life in the domestic space for my art photography work (which never sees the light of the internet) right now, so I’ve been creating new spaces and set ups in my kitchen a lot.
This is the kitchen area. The apartment building was built in the 1930s and it hasn’t changed since then. I even have an functioning icebox which I don’t use because I, uh, have a refrigerator. The icebox is the cabinet below the sink and to the right. It’s used to store bags of flour right now. The glass cabinets in the pillars are used to store my spice collection, mugs/cups/plates (which regrettably have the essence of curry now from being under the spice drawer. Looking to change that set up), teas, and cake decorating stuff in the other glass cabinet.
Microwave, Rishi Teas (local!): Chocolate Chai, Black Tea, Blueberry Rooibos.
Sugar and flour, coffee maker, more tea (and in the cabinet below), basil/cardamom/orange ginger/vanilla bean infused sugars made by my friend Stephanie, Emergen-C from earlier this month when I got strep twice, and wine and chocolate because I’m a fancy gal.
Cake decorating cabinet. L-R, then top-bottom: India Tree sprinkles, Wilton Sugar Pearls (no confectioner’s glaze!), lustre dust, Wilton Food Coloring, a paintbrush, cupcake liners, cookie sticks and cocktail umbrellas, pastry bags, candles, apple cake toppers, Satin Ice fondant, balloons, cookie icing, gummy stars (yummy candy from Whole Foods, but I’ve used them on top of cupcakes), pepper mill (don’t ask), licorice scotty dogs from Trader Joe’s, squeeze bottle, pre-cut 8″ circle cake parchment, mostly broken food processor, mini cake pans, cake bottom things, and dinosaur cake/cookie boxes. I have a really random, kinda small collection and always looking for more stuff.
My oven. That tape measure reads 19 inches across.
KitchenAid, which I just got a couple months ago as a generous gift from my friend Jess who had an extra one!
I present you with the grossest sink ever. I clean it everyday but it still looks gross no matter what.
This is my recipe bulletin board. All the recipes written on the paper slips are color coded by type of dessert with the thumbtacks. There’s an “ideas” section, “recipes in testing” section, and completed recipes are denoted by the side of the paper the thumbtack is on. And a Vegan Milwaukee sticker on the weird circle-y thing on the wall.
I used to have a bunch of zines lined up on that ledge, but they kept falling onto the stove and that was not good because the pilot light is REALLY hot all the time. The last zine standing is Don’t Eat Off The Sidewalk, issue 2.
My baking cabinet. There’s lots of random stuff in there such as three kinds of rosewater, lavender buds, matcha, cacao nibs, cola extract, ice cream extract (I can’t get that bottle open!), agar, pomegranate molasses, pink salt…
Grains, spices (maybe I’ll move the rest of my spices into here!), sauces, nooch
Beans, canned goods, breakfast-y food, snacks
Refrigerator exterior, complete with a card signed from my landlady’s cats
Ted Leo ticket stub and magnetic letters
Top of the fridge. Glasses, plates, some zines (the rest fell off)
Inside of the fridge. You caught me on a day far away from my last grocery shopping trip. And I don’t normally have a giant box with a white chocolate biscoff cheesecake in my fridge made by Jess, but a girl can dream.
Veggie bin, chocolate bin including truffles from Canary Confectionery
Milks, grape soda from when I made grape soda cupcakes (which will be in one of these upcoming posts!). I also bought root beer and cream soda that day for cakes, which will also be a MoFo post.
Pots n pans
So, I hope you enjoyed this look into my kitchen. It’s nothing fancy by any means, but it’s where I’ve been baking and photographing for the past year almost. I even made deep fried yeasted donuts in here. Kitchen space shouldn’t be a limitation!
Cookie books and candyland zines in stock again! And Vegan MoFo!
I ordered a new shipment of books and they’re now up for sale in my online store! Signed and shipped directly from me with love and a rainbow glitter cupcake unicorn business card tucked inside!
I also printed new copies of my Vegan Candyland zine, so it’s available now too! Check out the recipes, pictures and insides here.
You can also order a discounted book/zine package!
Vegan MoFo is going to be in October this year. I’m going to be blogging from here this time (and maybe doubling up and doing some MoFo on Seitan Beats Your Meat!). I’m saving the reveal of more new book photos for a fun month of cooking, baking, eating, photographing, blogging, and connecting! I’ll be blogging about the cookbook writing process for a month, but not just final photographs of desserts. Photos and writing behind the scenes of photoshoots, organizing recipes, writing recipes, anecdotes about recipe fails, ingredients, and staying sane working in the kitchen of my 375 square foot apartment (with a tour, perhaps!) and going to school full time!
With some decent preparation, MoFo will be a piece of cake to pull off this year! It couldn’t possibly be more difficult than MoFo 2010! My book was released in November, preparing for and traveling to vegan events every weekend, going to school all week, and moving at the end of the month. Life is much quieter these days, now that Vida Vegan Con is over and I’m still trying to get into the swing of things with the semester starting. I’ve been getting enough sleep, bike riding a lot, and hanging out with Gnocchi in my cozy little apartment after school most days. I’m thinking of starting a YouTube channel of him eating things and doing other cute things.
That’s all I have for today, but my Vida Vegan Con posts should be up soon-ish! Well they have to be, since MoFo is quickly approaching. Stay tuned! I hope you’re all having a good week!
