After reading through the fun and educational bits of my newest cookbook, "The Joy of Vegan Baking," I was itching to try a recipe. I flipped through to the cookies, thinking I'd find a simple recipe, and discovered the recipe for Raspberry Oatmeal Bars. Not only did they look delicious, but I also had all of the ingredients called for on hand.
Taking a handy hint from the cookbook, I measured out all the ingredients into separate small bowls first, then as I followed the recipe, added and blended the ingredients as called for. Though, I know, intellectually, it takes the same amount of time to measure ingredients anywhere in the process, I was amazed at how much more efficient this made me feel as opposed to measuring out ingredients as I went.
The recipe was really easy to work with, and I cleaned as the bars baked. The only thing I did differently from the recipe was to cut the bars in half again once I cut them into 8. The larger pieces were perfect for granola bar sized treats, but I wanted to share my creation with more than 7 people, and I felt that the smaller square treats were just sweet enough, while eating a whole serving from the original recipe might be overwhelming.
My co-workers were my test audience for my baking, and the result was that I had to bring three copies of the recipe to share. The recipe calls for raspberry preserves as its filling, though mentions any fruit spread/ preserves/ butter will work. I look forward to trying this recipe again to see what other delicious combination I can come up with. All in all it was a simple, but delicious recipe, and one where we could change the fruit filling to fit the seasonally. Of course, I'd serve up the more generous sized serving if and when we start our cafe.
*Since my learning isn't limited to the times when I bake with my friends, I decided to also report the times when I bake alone. I won't go into as much detail on these entries and will identify them as "Solo Missions."
Monday, February 22, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Stocking my Kitchen: Supplies
As time has goes on, I find that more and more I want things for my kitchen. Maybe this really means I am a baker at heart.
This past holiday season has been good to me, as I got many fun goodies for my kitchen for Christmas and my (January) birthday. The big shiny from Christmas was the new blender from my parents. This was actually a gift for me and my husband - our old blender, while still functional, had developed a crack in the plastic blender jar. It was used primary for making milkshakes, and you always lost some of the shake through the crack as the blades whirred away. The trick was to pour the milkshake into glasses as soon as you could, but that only minimized the mess. Our new blender is pretty, (and see how the jar is glass - it won't crack unless we drop that sucker):
My mother-in-law got me a "Perfect Brownie Baking Pan" (www.perfectbrownie.com), you know, the ones that have the divider that sits in the batter, giving you 18 identical all-edges brownies (or I suppose cake slices). My sister-in-law christened hers making brownies for Christmas dinner, and I was thrilled to see the other feature, where you place the pan on it's stand, and then the side of the pan slides sown and away, leaving you with just a tray of a dozen, divided treats. I can't help but wonder if the brownie recipe we tried last year would benefit from this pan. I'll have to try out that recipe, (or another brownie recipe) soon, it looks like a truly fun culinary toy.
In early January I treated myself to a belated-Christmas / early-birthday present (using book-store gift cards and coupons from the rewards program). I am now the proud owner of my own copy The Joy of Vegan Baking. And I am a very proud owner. I read all the non-recipe tid-bits in the book in the car when we took a day-trip. I was gushing over the information with my travel companions. I was chiming in and making copies of pages on different sweeteners in response to a conversation with my co-workers. I have nothing but good things to say about this book.
Then, for my birthday my sister got me a sifter and a pastry blender. Like me, she remembers the sifter my mom had, and how our hands were always sore from squeezing the handle to get it to sift. And to my delight she found a sifter that has a turning handle. I was able to use it right away in making my birthday cookie-cake, though the pastry blender had to wait to a different recipe to be used.
And while it's not new, I recently re-discovered a food processor in my pantry that my mom gave me a few years ago. And man, that thing is a big ball of fun and scary and useful all rolled into one.
I bought parchment paper the first time to make the cookie-cake as well, and while I've been baking this year, I find that as I go my wish-list gets longer. Luckily I shared some of my desires with my mother on a recent visit and discovered she had extras on had. From her generosity I scored from her a second set of measuring cups (a fantastic retro-green), and a 3-canister set that will be ideal for flour, sugar and, well, I'm still working on what will go in the third container. These are a pretty blue with a cool design on the side.
My Wish List (so far)
This past holiday season has been good to me, as I got many fun goodies for my kitchen for Christmas and my (January) birthday. The big shiny from Christmas was the new blender from my parents. This was actually a gift for me and my husband - our old blender, while still functional, had developed a crack in the plastic blender jar. It was used primary for making milkshakes, and you always lost some of the shake through the crack as the blades whirred away. The trick was to pour the milkshake into glasses as soon as you could, but that only minimized the mess. Our new blender is pretty, (and see how the jar is glass - it won't crack unless we drop that sucker):
My mother-in-law got me a "Perfect Brownie Baking Pan" (www.perfectbrownie.com), you know, the ones that have the divider that sits in the batter, giving you 18 identical all-edges brownies (or I suppose cake slices). My sister-in-law christened hers making brownies for Christmas dinner, and I was thrilled to see the other feature, where you place the pan on it's stand, and then the side of the pan slides sown and away, leaving you with just a tray of a dozen, divided treats. I can't help but wonder if the brownie recipe we tried last year would benefit from this pan. I'll have to try out that recipe, (or another brownie recipe) soon, it looks like a truly fun culinary toy.
In early January I treated myself to a belated-Christmas / early-birthday present (using book-store gift cards and coupons from the rewards program). I am now the proud owner of my own copy The Joy of Vegan Baking. And I am a very proud owner. I read all the non-recipe tid-bits in the book in the car when we took a day-trip. I was gushing over the information with my travel companions. I was chiming in and making copies of pages on different sweeteners in response to a conversation with my co-workers. I have nothing but good things to say about this book.
Then, for my birthday my sister got me a sifter and a pastry blender. Like me, she remembers the sifter my mom had, and how our hands were always sore from squeezing the handle to get it to sift. And to my delight she found a sifter that has a turning handle. I was able to use it right away in making my birthday cookie-cake, though the pastry blender had to wait to a different recipe to be used.
And while it's not new, I recently re-discovered a food processor in my pantry that my mom gave me a few years ago. And man, that thing is a big ball of fun and scary and useful all rolled into one.
I bought parchment paper the first time to make the cookie-cake as well, and while I've been baking this year, I find that as I go my wish-list gets longer. Luckily I shared some of my desires with my mother on a recent visit and discovered she had extras on had. From her generosity I scored from her a second set of measuring cups (a fantastic retro-green), and a 3-canister set that will be ideal for flour, sugar and, well, I'm still working on what will go in the third container. These are a pretty blue with a cool design on the side.
My Wish List (so far)
- better cake pans - currently have two 9"-round pans, one is usable, the other, I think I'd only use to heat frozen things in
- cake saver - A dinner plate and my large mixing bowl are my temporary solution
- candy thermometer - just want one, no particular reason
- double boiler -see above
- More measuring cups / spoons - Half achieved, Thanks Mom. Now on the hunt for more measuring spoons.
- kitchen scale - to prevent things like the
possibleprobable too-many-carrots problem with the carrot cake - immersion (hand-held) blender?? - Not sure I need this, but it would make mixing the Ener-G egg replacer and the flax seed in easier without losing stuff to the sides of the blender jar. I'd love to take Lila's for a test-drive before investing in one of my own.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
February 9, 2010 - Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese Frosting
This week we reinstated the long-stalled baking night. We've switched to Tuesday, as Thursday didn't work with our current schedules, but I'm sticking with the blog name, regardless. Lila and I met at my place, with my new prize of a book "The Joy of Vegan Baking." I had selected the Carrot Cake and accompanying Cream Cheese Frosting recipes, and had purchased the missing ingredients. I am kinda happy that my spice collection is growing with this effort - Ground Cloves and Ground Allspice are now part of my spice bragging rights.
I was worried about how to get "finely grated" carrots, thinking at first a zester would be in order. Lila pointed out that was probably *too* fine, and that zesting a carrot would take forever. When I was setting out ingredients, I had the fortune to look over the little blurb at the top of the recipe, where it recommended that the shredding blade on a food processor was a good way to grate carrots. And I have recently re-discovered that I actually OWN a food processor, have for years, just haven't used it yet. Boy-howdy, it is fast. The carrots were shredded in less time than it took us to figure out how to assemble the parts to make the blade work. The one problem with the processor (and this may entirely be that we somehow assembled it incorrectly, but magically in a way that still functioned) is that the grated carrots didn't seem to want to come out of the processor. Rather they preferred to hang out between the blade and the other piece we had in there. Once I realized this, I was able to fish out the carrots that stuck.
It was like carrot confetti in my kitchen for a while. And, even though I had already made two of the recipes, I finally christened my newest cookbook. A faintly orange spot now graces the carrot cake page. Using a half-cup measure to get to 1 and 1/2 cups, I realized I didn't know if carrots counted as a dry or a liquid. I also realized that grating them by hand would have made for less densely packed shredded carrots, and a kitchen scale has joined the ranks of things I desire for my kitchen (the recipe was kind enough to tell me 150 grams of carrots, if I'd had any way to measure that). As it stands, our cake may have ended up extra-carroty.
While I played with carrots in the Oskar, Lila chopped walnuts. With those two ingredients prepared, we measured out most everything else into separate bowls, with the exception of the spices. The amounts of those were small enough that having a separate dish for each would have been excessive. I used my new blender to mix the ground flax-seed and water until it was getting goopy in an egg-like consistency, and then blended in the oil from there. While I worked with the wet items, Lila prepared the dry items into a bowl. Once we had the wet and dry mixes ready, had the cake pan greased (new cake-pans are another thing on my growing wish list), and the oven preheated, we mixed the entirety of the ingredients, then pressed them into my old, on-the-verge-of-rusting 9" cake pan (my glass 9" square pan was in the dishwasher). I was careful to place the cake in the center of the lower rack, and then we cleaned up the ingredients, and measured out the sugar for the frosting.
I was quite excited when I received a sifter for my birthday, and the immediate use I got from it. Lila sifted the confectioner's sugar while I changed out the attachments on the food processor, replacing the grating blade for the cup and spinning blade. I added the cream cheese to the cup, measured in the vanilla, and then Lila added the sifted sugar. We learned (the messy way) that we should have added the sugar first. We lost a fair bit in the transfer, and had to make a best guess at how much to add once the mix was done. Again, my hand-me-down food processor is fast. We blended the ingredients for maybe 20 seconds. Maybe. And what we got was practically liquid. No spreadable frosting like we were expecting. It was more like an icing. Something to drizzle on, not spread. This would turn out to be a fortunate thing, though at the time we were disappointed. But lesson learned: if you want frosting, woman-up and mix it by hand. Food-processorize icings only.
We added some sugar to try to stiffen the frosting, and in vain I stuck the entire bowl in the fridge while the cake finished baking, and cooled. We checked the cake 5 minutes before time, and again at the given time, and again 2 minutes later. It was still kinda soft in the middle, but the edges were getting very dark and pulling away from the pan, so we removed the cake from the oven and placed the pan on a wire rack. After a while we decided to turn the cake over onto the wire rack to cool outside of the pan. That's when things got...interesting.
Our cake was very, very moist. It fell out of the pan. Well, two-thirds of it did, folding in on itself, and third stayed firmly stuck in the pan. We looked at what had become of our so-recently beautiful cake, and couldn't help but laugh. And take pictures. We scooped what we could onto a plate, and as pieces of the very moist middle fell out, we plopped them back in place, trying to create the illusion of a single cake. I pulled the liquefied frosting from the fridge, and we drizzled it over the cake-crumble. When we were done it looked sorta like a plate of cinnamon rolls. Sorta.
We tried the cake, and found it to be delicious, giving it a 8 of 10 points for taste. 2 of 10 for appearance. Lila said our trial was 50% cake, and 50% failure. I called it beautiful, in a tragic way. Between bouts of glancing at the cake and laughing, we tried to puzzle out what happened, and how we might avoid the same occurrence in the future.
Possible culprits and solutions: too many carrots; too little of the flax-seed mix getting in the actual mix (we had a fair bit stick to the edge of the blender, and not make it in the batter); put the oven rack in the center, or the upper rack, not the lower; use those cake-pan wraps that help keep the edges from heating faster than the center; add more flour; use a square pan, not round; try using the egg replacer instead of the flax-seed. Or Lila suggested we could try the recipe with a muffin pan, sans paper liners. As for the frosting/icing issue, I'm not to worried - we have made a successful cream cheese frosting for an earlier project, so I know we are capable.
Despite the tragic appearance of the end product, I had a lot of fun getting back into baking again. I have not laughed this much in a long time.
I was worried about how to get "finely grated" carrots, thinking at first a zester would be in order. Lila pointed out that was probably *too* fine, and that zesting a carrot would take forever. When I was setting out ingredients, I had the fortune to look over the little blurb at the top of the recipe, where it recommended that the shredding blade on a food processor was a good way to grate carrots. And I have recently re-discovered that I actually OWN a food processor, have for years, just haven't used it yet. Boy-howdy, it is fast. The carrots were shredded in less time than it took us to figure out how to assemble the parts to make the blade work. The one problem with the processor (and this may entirely be that we somehow assembled it incorrectly, but magically in a way that still functioned) is that the grated carrots didn't seem to want to come out of the processor. Rather they preferred to hang out between the blade and the other piece we had in there. Once I realized this, I was able to fish out the carrots that stuck.
It was like carrot confetti in my kitchen for a while. And, even though I had already made two of the recipes, I finally christened my newest cookbook. A faintly orange spot now graces the carrot cake page. Using a half-cup measure to get to 1 and 1/2 cups, I realized I didn't know if carrots counted as a dry or a liquid. I also realized that grating them by hand would have made for less densely packed shredded carrots, and a kitchen scale has joined the ranks of things I desire for my kitchen (the recipe was kind enough to tell me 150 grams of carrots, if I'd had any way to measure that). As it stands, our cake may have ended up extra-carroty.
While I played with carrots in the Oskar, Lila chopped walnuts. With those two ingredients prepared, we measured out most everything else into separate bowls, with the exception of the spices. The amounts of those were small enough that having a separate dish for each would have been excessive. I used my new blender to mix the ground flax-seed and water until it was getting goopy in an egg-like consistency, and then blended in the oil from there. While I worked with the wet items, Lila prepared the dry items into a bowl. Once we had the wet and dry mixes ready, had the cake pan greased (new cake-pans are another thing on my growing wish list), and the oven preheated, we mixed the entirety of the ingredients, then pressed them into my old, on-the-verge-of-rusting 9" cake pan (my glass 9" square pan was in the dishwasher). I was careful to place the cake in the center of the lower rack, and then we cleaned up the ingredients, and measured out the sugar for the frosting.
I was quite excited when I received a sifter for my birthday, and the immediate use I got from it. Lila sifted the confectioner's sugar while I changed out the attachments on the food processor, replacing the grating blade for the cup and spinning blade. I added the cream cheese to the cup, measured in the vanilla, and then Lila added the sifted sugar. We learned (the messy way) that we should have added the sugar first. We lost a fair bit in the transfer, and had to make a best guess at how much to add once the mix was done. Again, my hand-me-down food processor is fast. We blended the ingredients for maybe 20 seconds. Maybe. And what we got was practically liquid. No spreadable frosting like we were expecting. It was more like an icing. Something to drizzle on, not spread. This would turn out to be a fortunate thing, though at the time we were disappointed. But lesson learned: if you want frosting, woman-up and mix it by hand. Food-processorize icings only.
We added some sugar to try to stiffen the frosting, and in vain I stuck the entire bowl in the fridge while the cake finished baking, and cooled. We checked the cake 5 minutes before time, and again at the given time, and again 2 minutes later. It was still kinda soft in the middle, but the edges were getting very dark and pulling away from the pan, so we removed the cake from the oven and placed the pan on a wire rack. After a while we decided to turn the cake over onto the wire rack to cool outside of the pan. That's when things got...interesting.
Our cake was very, very moist. It fell out of the pan. Well, two-thirds of it did, folding in on itself, and third stayed firmly stuck in the pan. We looked at what had become of our so-recently beautiful cake, and couldn't help but laugh. And take pictures. We scooped what we could onto a plate, and as pieces of the very moist middle fell out, we plopped them back in place, trying to create the illusion of a single cake. I pulled the liquefied frosting from the fridge, and we drizzled it over the cake-crumble. When we were done it looked sorta like a plate of cinnamon rolls. Sorta.
We tried the cake, and found it to be delicious, giving it a 8 of 10 points for taste. 2 of 10 for appearance. Lila said our trial was 50% cake, and 50% failure. I called it beautiful, in a tragic way. Between bouts of glancing at the cake and laughing, we tried to puzzle out what happened, and how we might avoid the same occurrence in the future.
Possible culprits and solutions: too many carrots; too little of the flax-seed mix getting in the actual mix (we had a fair bit stick to the edge of the blender, and not make it in the batter); put the oven rack in the center, or the upper rack, not the lower; use those cake-pan wraps that help keep the edges from heating faster than the center; add more flour; use a square pan, not round; try using the egg replacer instead of the flax-seed. Or Lila suggested we could try the recipe with a muffin pan, sans paper liners. As for the frosting/icing issue, I'm not to worried - we have made a successful cream cheese frosting for an earlier project, so I know we are capable.
Despite the tragic appearance of the end product, I had a lot of fun getting back into baking again. I have not laughed this much in a long time.
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