Orange Chocolate Chip Scones

Maybe it's just the cool weather in the mornings and the rapid approach of fall, but I have been craving warm baked breads for breakfast. These are orange chocolate chip scones. I'm not sharing my exact recipe, because I sell them in the bakeshop, I can give you a few pointers on making your own scones. I really like the recipes from Art of Dessert and Savvy Brown. I definitely suggest using canned coconut milk when making your scones. This is one time when you really want the higher fat content. I also think it's a great idea to grate your Earth Balance and then let it sit in the freezer for a few minutes before you cut it into the flour. This will help keep you from overmixing the dough. You don't want to eat tough, rubbery scones!
I can't wait to start rolling out more fall flavors in the bakeshop. Pumpkin, cranberry, apple! I feel like I always get really excited by the changing of the seasons. I love phasing in new fruits and vegetables every few months. It's always a nice change. Do you have any favorite fall baked goods or flavors?

Blueberry Cake Donuts

Last month I realized that it's a lot easier for me to deal with things in my life when I am baking. If I miss someone or want to thank someone, my gut reaction is to handle the situation through flour. I couldn't think of a more 'me' way to say goodbye to two of my favorite people except through a box of treats & a note left on our kitchen counter.
I have made this baked blueberry donut recipe from Nikki of the Tolerant Vegan a few times now. I find them to be one of my stand-by donut recipes. I have mentioned before that I prefer my donuts baked; I feel like it allows the flavors to really shine through. You don't wanna lose all that berry goodness in the taste of oil. And since they are really low in fat & contain fresh fruit, it's not terrible if you eat a few for breakfast right?! That's my kind of compromise.


If you aren't into blueberries or are just looking for a standard donut batter, this recipe will definitely work. I tossed a handful of mini donuts in a cinnamon-powdered sugar mixture. It was really great, and a nice cross between a cinnamon sugar donut and a powdered donut. You don't want to toss them too soon before they are going to be eaten, because any humidity or moisture the donuts come in contact with will dissolve the sugar.


I have a really long list of things to bake, but it's hard to get through it when I keep re-making so many recipes I have found. That's not a complaint. It's just a fact. What are your favorite recipes at the moment? Is there a cookbook you are currently swooning over? I have one that I will be sharing with you all soon!

S'mores Stuffed Cookies

I remember seeing a picture of a s'more stuffed chocolate chip cookie for the first time. My first thought was that's TOO much. But the longer I thought about it, the more that I realized that it's perfect. If I can put vegan nutella or chick-o-sticks in a cookie, than a s'more really isn't that different. People put oreos in cookies all the time, right?! And I know that I have made s'mores cookies before, but these are so different. A girl can't ever have too many marshmallows.



S'mores Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies
makes approximately 8 large cookies

1 cup Earth Balance
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 tbl Ener-G (beat with 1/4 cup water)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/4 cups unsifted flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
heaping one cup chocolate chips
2 whole graham crackers (Nabisco brand are honey free)
4-6 vegan marshmallows (I used Sweet & Sara, which are slightly larger than Dandies)
1/2 bar dark chocolate

Make your cookie dough first. Break each of your graham crackers into quarters. Cut your marshmallows in halves or leave whole, depending on the amount of gooeyness you want in your cookie. I made mini s'mores similar to the pictures here. Now it's time to wrap those s'mores in cookie dough! I found it easiest to use a large scoop to portion out sixteen pieces of dough on a sheet of parchment. I flattened all of those with my palm, set the mini s'more on top, and set another piece of flattened cookie dough on top. pinch all the edges together, and bake for 12-18 minutes at 350. The baking can be pretty variable depending on how thick your s'mores are.
Be sure to give these cookies plenty of room! They spread like nobody's business. I baked 4 per cookie sheet. I tried to make my cookies a little smaller than the 6-8" ones I had previously seen, but they were still at least 4-6".
Make sure you have plenty of almond milk handy to wash them down.

I'm gonna be honest here. I didn't find these cookies to be near as revolutionary as I expected them to be. I thought they were gonna alter my perspective on baked goods, and I was just a little underwhelmed. If I were going to do this again, I would probably use a sugar cookie dough like I did with the nutella cookies. The piece of chocolate along with all the chocolate chips in the cookies was just not my thing(I know. I can't believe I am saying it either). I also think that the taste & texture of the graham cracker get a little lost in the cookie dough. The texture gets a little moist during the baking, and the brown sugar in the dough sort of covers up the graham taste. So I think that if you used a sugar cookie dough and rolled it in graham cracker crumbs before you baked it, then you would have the real deal. Maybe someone will try it & let me know how it goes?

Raspberry Popsicles

Time between my blog posts keeps getting longer. I haven't stopped making sweets, but all my words have somehow slipped away, and so this little blog has gotten a little neglected in the last few months. When I first started blogging almost eight months ago things were so different. I was working on my phD and sitting in front of a computer several days a week. Now I am baking full time and rarely have time to read all the posts from people I follow with Google Reader. For the first few months the bakery was open, it only stimulated my desire to make new things. While it is exciting to work for people who want me to create organic and fair trade vegan sweets, I also found it a little limiting creatively. There were still so many things that I wanted to experiment with that I couldn't do in the bakeshop. I wanted to make things with the vegan M&Ms I finally got a hold of, and I have trouble holding back from anything that I can cover in sprinkles.
However, in the last few weeks the full reality of running a bakery has hit me. I have hired 4 assistants in the last eight weeks, three of whom have already had quit or had to be let go for various reasons. My fourth assistant started a few weeks ago as full time, but recently switched to part time. So I now only have twenty five-ish hours of help a week. The rest of the time it's basically my sole responsibility to do all the ordering, the tweaking of the recipes, the majority of the baking, developing new products, sourcing packaging for those products, scheduling deliveries of the baked goods, and all sorts of other little things that get slipped into the everyday flow of things.
There have been many thirteen hour days. There has also been a lot of sweat and even tears. When I allow myself to stop thinking about everything I still need to do and realize how much has been done since the doors opened in May, it's pretty amazing.
Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and let yourself enjoy something simple like these popsicles. Something you didn't have to spend hours making and that feels refreshing. The raspberries also are tart enough to counteract the sugar. Because no matter how badly I want to tell people that I have not overdosed on sugar, there are definitely days where I don't want to test another cupcake or cookie or cinnamon bun for a very long time.


Raspberry Popsicles
adapted from Family Kitchen


1.5 cup frozen raspberries
1 cup coconut water
1 cup apple juice
2 tablespoons agave nectar

Combine all ingredients in blender and puree until smooth. Freeze for at least 2 hours before snacking. Quantity will vary based on the size of your popsicle molds, but this made 8 for me.

Strawberry Biscuits

It has been such an intense week already, and it's not even Wednesday night yet. When I got home from work Monday, I was set on having the most relaxing night every. I ordered sesame tofu from a takeout place down the street, put on my PJs by 6PM, and spent a few hours catching up on a back log of blog posts I had been meaning to read and reading Game of Thrones. The relaxation took its toll, and I went to bed really early. Out of pure exhaustion I did something I never do and left my laptop and bag downstairs in the living room, because I could only carry myself and my blanket up the stairs. I woke up early Tuesday morning to go to work, after showering and heading downstairs to grab my lunch, I realized that someone had dumped all the contents of my bag on the couch and the canvas bag was missing. I went into the kitchen to grab another canvas bag and noticed that the rest were missing too. In my still waking up haze I thought someone had needed all the bags to grocery shopping and started to head towards the door. As I was unlocking the front door, I realized that my bike was missing. Some friends had been playing a late night game of kickball the night before and I assumed that someone had borrowed my bike to make it home. I also thought that maybe my housemates were playing a joke on me for going to bed so early yet again. It wasn't until I got in my car and went to grab gas money out of my wallet that I realized something was horribly wrong. My wallet was open, and all the money I had gotten from the ATM the night before was missing. I bolted from the car, went back inside, and realized the house had been pulled apart. Sofa cushions were overturned, shelves had things knocked off and pulled out. I went upstairs to wake up my other housemates. We started tallying up all the things that were missing. Among them were a few bikes, my laptop, an Xbox and several games, the money from my wallet, an ipod, a few bottles of alcohol, and a few other random things like running shoes and canvas shopping bags. We waited around for a few hours while we answered the police's questions and watched them dust for fingerprints.
It seems like they broke in through a window and unlocked the back door. They probably had a car in the alley behind the house. We eventually figured out that we had been robbed sometime been midnight and 2am when another housemate came home from the kickball game. He probably scared them off, which is why they left several things that they had moved but not managed to get out of the house. I spent most of the day thinking about how terrifying it is to have people in your house, while you and your friends/family are sound asleep. How easy it would have been to hurt any of us. How violated I felt. I spent most of the afternoon reading and trying to distract myself, I warned the few neighbors that I saw on the streets to check their locks and windows and texted a few friends who live in the same neighborhood as us.
I slept at my partner's house last night because I knew it would make me feel a little safer. This morning I came home, intent on cleaning up the house and baking something comforting. I had settled on strawberry biscuits and just finished chopping the strawberries. I realized that my flour jar was empty and started to look through some shelves near the back door for an unopened sack. I spotted a canvas grocery bag and grabbed it. There wasn't flour inside, but I had found my laptop! After a minute of staring at it in disbelief, I set it down and found the flour too.

These strawberry biscuits are really comforting and likely to make you feel like your day is getting better, but probably not as good as mine. I was too excited to take the time to cut the biscuits and re-roll the dough, so I just sliced them as one would scones. It worked for me.



Vegan Strawberry Biscuits
recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen


2 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup evaporated cane juice
1 tablespoon baking powder
6 tablespoons Earth Balance
1 cup chopped strawberries
1 cup full fat canned coconut milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Combine dry ingredients. Cut in Earth Balance with two knives or a pastry cutter. Toss strawberries in flour mixture until evenly coated. Pour coconut milk over the dry and slowly fold until just mixed. It's important to not overwork the dough. On a lightly floured surface, press out the dough to less an inch thick. Either cut with a bench scraped into wedges or with a cookie cutter to make round biscuits. Brush tops with additional coconut milk and sprinkle with Turbinado. Bake for 15 minutes, or until the biscuits are golden brown.

These are not the sweetest biscuits. The Earth Balance makes them taste quite savory. I also added a half teaspoon of salt to cut the sweetness even further, but I am not sure that I would do that again. If you like sweet breads, I would definitely play with the sugar ratio a bit more. I've had a lot of success at making cream scones with just coconut milk, so that might be another option to take. It will also make the process a few minutes faster since you won't have to cut the Earth Balance into the flour. If you want to attempt that I would add an extra quarter cup of coconut milk to the dough.
I hope that no one else is having the sort of week that I am. But it's a good reminder that we can all be a little more careful. I'm going to finally get renter's insurance and back up my hard drive for once. Last night we installed a new heavy duty lock on the gate to the alley and took a few minutes to check the locks on all the windows. Stay safe and if you are having a rough day, maybe these biscuits will help turn it around for you too.

Peaches & Cream Popsicles

It's been so hot lately. With the temperature reaching ninety plus degrees a few days in a row, I finally understand the phrase "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." The sun shining in the bakery's glass windows acts like a green house, and when combined with the heat from the ovens, it's impossible for the air conditioning to have much of an effect. So when I get home from a long day of heat, the last thing I want to do is turn on the oven and bask in it's warmth. Instead, I break out the blender and make popsicles!
I bought my first set of popsicle molds last summer but never really put them to use. I remember making popsicles from some juice I had squeezed but didn't want to drink all of immediately. Over the winter I created an ever-lengthening list of flavors that I plan on making throughout the summer. The first was peaches & cream. It's really so easy, that you don't need a recipe, but I will give you the guidelines that I followed. The nice thing about popsicles is that unlike most baked goods, it's pretty hard to screw them up!

Peaches & Cream Popsicles
makes ~6 popsicles, varies by size of molds

10 oz frozen peaches
6 oz yogurt (I used Whole Soy peach yogurt)
1/4 cup milk of choice (I used vanilla almond milk)
1 tsp vanilla extract

Combine peaches, milk, and 4 oz of the yogurt in a blender. Mix until desired consistency is achieved. I blended mine until it was smooth, but feel free to leave small chunks of peaches if that consistency is desired. In a small bowl, whisk vanilla extract into remaining yogurt. Spoon the peach mixture into the molds until they are half full, then add a few teaspoons of vanilla, then top off with peach. Using a chopstick or skewer, slightly swirl the layers into each other.
Let freeze 3 hours before attempting to remove from molds. Run each popsicle under warm water before attempting to pull them out. Alternately, if you don't have popsicle molds use small paper cups and cut them off once frozen.


What's your favorite popsicle flavor? Do you prefer your popsicles really fruity and simple or do you like creamy flavors?

Chai Shortbread Tea Bag Cookies

I have a serious obsession with cookies lately. All I want to do is make incredibly intricate cookies full of swirls and patterns or shaped by hand or with my a few neat cookie cutters. I have seen pictures of these tea bag cookies floating all around the blogosphere for a few months now. They have been on my to do list since I originally saw them, but I was waiting for the right occasion. One of my friends moved away last month. As someone who likes tea a lot, she likes it even more than I do.
So I broke out the chai spices, the black tea, and got to work with my bench scraper. The recipe that I used for my cookies was decent, but not the best. The cookies didn't have near as much flavor as I was hoping for, even though I added extra spices, vanilla bean, and a few teaspoons of ground tea leaves to the dough. I only chilled the dough for an hour because I was pressed for time, so if I were to try it again I would definitely let it sit for 24 hours to help the flavors develop more. I also suggest melting the Earth Balance, steeping chai tea in it, and then allowing it to cool & resolidify before making the shortbread dough.


After your dough is chilled, you roll it out like any other cut out cookie dough. You have a few options of the cutting process. You could either trace a tea bag on a bit of parchment and cut it out to use as a template or free hand the process. I went for the latter option. You can use a knife, but I found a bench scraper to be the easiest tool to work with. After cutting each tea bag, I poked a hole in the top with a Wilton #5 round tip. I did this largely because I was worried that the cookies would swell a bit after baking and my string would not fit through the holes. If you have thin baker's twine, than you can easily get away with a #3 or #4 if you want them to look a bit daintier.
After baking, I dipped the cookies in dark chocolate thinned with a teaspoon of coconut oil. I threaded my string through the holes and made tags with a bit of fancy paper I had left over from some other craft project.


Overall I definitely think these cookies were a success. They didn't taste exactly like I wanted them too, but their cute factor was an overwhelming win at her going away party. Do you like getting really crafty in the kitchen or do you prefer straight forward baking? Have you seen any other adorable baked goods lately?