Once upon another lifetime ago, I decided to ‘do my bit for the environment’ and adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. This lasted several years until eventually I gave it up as my interests in cooking and restaurants grew to the point where I wanted to be able to learn from eating/tasting everything at least once.

Chefs are often notorious for being quite vocal about their dislike of vegetarians and vegans. Sometimes you can’t blame them, when customers claim to be vegan right up to the dessert course, where they knowingly order the creamiest dish on the menu.

These days, my kitchen lifestyle choice is to cook with eggs and butter, in moderation, but I’ve always been interested in what vegan baking has to offer. Working under certain constraints sometimes inspires you to think more creatively.

When we were in New York late last year, I got a chance to visit the famed vegan/gluten-free bakery, Babycakes NYC. Inspired by the trip, I even bought their cookbook. Unfortunately, despite the many delicious things we tasted at their store, I couldn’t get the book’s recipes to work for me. For example, this Babycakes banana bread I made recently, with agave nectar, coconut oil and other expensive ingredients, looked better than it tasted.

Despite being discouraged, it didn’t stop me from wanting to try the vegan chocolate cake recipe in Flour by Joanne Chang. You can’t help but love the simplicity of the recipe (Essentially, combine wet ingredients with dry ingredients. Bake. Eat.) and the lack of having to seek out speciality ingredients.

This is by no means the best chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten. As a vegan (and low-fat!) cake, it is suitably moist with a pleasing chocolate flavour. A recipe worth attempting especially if you have long deleted eggs and dairy from your baking life.

Vegan Low-Fat Chocolate Cake :
(from Flour by Joanne Chang)

210g unbleached all-purpose flour
100g caster sugar
40g Dutch-processed cocoa powder
2 teaspoons instant espresso powder, or 1 tablespoon instant coffee powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
240g water
50g canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons unsulfured light or dark molasses

Position a rack in the center of the oven, and heat the oven to 175’C. Butter and flour a 6-inch round cake pan. [I used a slightly smaller pan and reduced the baking time by about 10 minutes]

In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, caster sugar, cocoa powder, espresso powder, baking soda, and salt. In another medium bowl, whisk together the water, oil, vanilla and molasses. Pour the liquid mixture into the flour mixture and mix together with a wooden spoon until the batter is smooth and homogeneous. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until the cake springs back when lightly pressed in the middle with a fingertip. Let cool in the pan on a wire rack for about 1 hour. Then invert the pan onto the rack, lift off the pan, turn the cake right-side up, and let cool completely.

Just before serving, dust the top with icing sugar. [I topped the cake with a vegan chocolate sauce instead]

Apparently we have a ban on cheesy 80’s music in our house. Wish he’d mentioned it before we agreed to move in together. Or perhaps you never truly know someone until you start living with them and discover their little quirks. Such as belting out Whitney Houston classics into a hair brush or eating ice-cream at midnight. That would be me, guilty on both counts.

I’ve discovered many interesting aspects about the boy over the years. Some things being more surprising than others. He :

-Has the annoying tendency to return from business trips with nothing but a load of laundry.
-Is very brand specific about his breakfast cereal and toothpaste.
-Doesn’t put toilet seat down.
-Needs regular feeding or will get grumpy and complain about feeling weak.
-Needs dessert (this last point actually works quite well in both our favours).

Forget chalk and cheese. We’re like chocolate and cheese. Seemingly disparate but surprisingly not such a bad combination.

Which is why when Alice Medrich described these tuiles being “as addictive as potato chips”, I somehow managed to put 2 + 2 = 5 and decided what was needed to garnish these tuiles were some crushed potato chips and a sprinkling of parmesan cheese. Potentially a bad idea in theory, but the salty potato chips and hint of cheese worked well together to enhance the texture and flavour of the chocolate wafers. These are also good dipped in caramel sauce.

If your stomach turns at the thought of chips and chocolate, make the tuiles with a different garnish, or dispense with the garnish altogether and enjoy them as they are. They have a lovely snap and true to Alice Medrich’s word, they are very addictive. The entire batch I made was gone in no time, because we kept reaching for just one more wafer.

So 2 + 2 = 5 = 0? Bad math, great snack.

Cocoa Bark :
(from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy by Alice Medrich)

4 tablespoons butter, melted and still very warm
100g sugar
20g natural (non-alkalized) cocoa powder, sieved after measuring
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 large egg whites
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon plain flour

Preheat the oven to 175’C. In a small bowl, whisk together the melted butter, sugar, cocoa and salt. Whisk in the egg whites. Add the flour and whisk only until combined. Let rest for at least 10 minutes or cover and refrigerate for up to 3 days.

To bake, use an offset spatula to spread half the batter onto each of two cookie sheets lined with silicone mats. Each sheet of batter should be about 9 by 13 inches wide and less than 1/8 inch thick. [Sprinkle each sheet with your topping of choice. I used crushed potato chips and grated cheese. You can even use nuts or crushed peppermint candies as suggested by the author]

Bake each sheet for 11 to 13 minutes until the batter turns a faintly darker shade of brown. Rotate the pan from back to front halfway through the baking time to ensure even baking. Cool completely on a rack before breaking the cookie into random shards.

Floods and heat waves aside, the year has started pretty well for me personally. In fact there’s almost nothing to complain about unless I need to vent over lacking any material that requires a grumble or two to be lodged on this blog.

I’m loving my new job and have been able to spend marginally more time with the bf. Plus one of my closest friends recently moved across the road and my brother is on the brink of tying the knot with his long-term girlfriend, hence a big family reunion is in the works. In terms of social math, this equates to feeble forays into reviving a near-extinct social life.

So unless butter and egg supplies dwindle, and my physiotherapist moves to New Zealand (oh wait, she did), it appears as though I have nothing to write about!

I’ve been experiencing a health food store kick recently. Mind you, it’s not quite the same thing as being on a health kick, because that would probably mean having to eschew these lovely sweet and chewy bars. A recent visit yielded some interesting ingredients including puffed quinoa and amaranth, black tahini and coconut butter which I used in a Babycakes NYC recipe (more on that in a future post). The puffed quinoa went into some honey bars that we enjoyed as breakfast and midnight snacks for the rest of the week..

The honey quinoa bars started life as..

Honey Hemp Bars :
(from Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy by Alice Medrich)

24g puffed rice or millet cereal [I used puffed quinoa]
66g hemp seeds
53g pecan or walnut halves, medium-finely chopped
2 tablespoons black (or white or tan) sesame seeds
47g raw pumpkin seeds [I used sunflower seeds]
2 teaspoons flax meal (ground flaxseed)
2 tablespoons dried currants [I used wolfberries/goji berries]
140g honey
1 tablespoon date paste or mashed dates
rounded 1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 150’C.

In a large bowl, toss the cereal, hemp seeds, nuts, sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax meal, and currants to mix.

In a small saucepan, warm the honey, date paste, salt, and vanilla, stirring and mashing until the date paste is dissolved and/or evenly dispersed. Pour the honey mixture over the dry ingredients and fold until all of the ingredients are moistened and sticky. It may seem at first that there is not enough honey, just continue to fold.

Scrape the mixture into an 8 inch square pan (greased and lined with baking paper) and spread it evenly with a fork. Using the back of the fork tines, press the mixture very firmly all over to compact and adhere the ingredients.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until the top is barely golden (if in doubt, take it out so that the honey does not get scorched). Cool in the pan on a rack. Lift the ends of the baking paper to remove the bars from the pan. Gently peel off the paper. Use a heavy sharp knife to cut bars or squares. May be kept in an airtight container for 2 weeks or more.