Pumpkin Crème Brulee

There is a great restaurant in Richmond, Virgina called Ipanema. They are best known for their pies, but when Greg and I were there a few weeks ago I also got coffee crème brulee. Greg hates coffee, so he didn’t get to appreciate how nice it was. But after we got back I was determined to make a batch in a different flavor. I scanned a few cookbooks, and found a recipe for pumpkin crème brulee in Vegan Desserts. I have looked through Vegan Desserts several times, but I think is the first time I actually used it. Confession: I am a cookbook hoarder. I buy them all the time, and they pile up on my shelves and look adorable. But I don’t use them near enough. Hopefully MoFo will help me remedy this.
Anyways, back to the sugar. The crème brulee was really nice. The custard was like warm pumpkin pie with a nice crunchy topping. I think my kitchen torch was a little low on fuel, because I was having trouble getting the sugar to caramelize. I know that I could have broiled it in my oven. But the drawer was full of pans and I just couldn’t bring myself to empty it all out. I would definitely make this again if I were having people over for dinner, so that we could all have nicely plated single serving desserts.
Are there are things that you all use your kitchen torches for? I have used it to toast marshmallows and now for this dessert, but I feel like I need to find more ways to make it useful. Otherwise it's just taking up space that I could put another cookbook on.

Caramel Stuffed Apple Cider Cookies

There's no stopping these cookies. Someone who would rather have no other sweet than a chocolate chip cookie, declared that these were better than chocolate chip cookies. And it's true. They are apple-y and gooey in the best possible ways. There are two necessary ingredients that you might have to go out of your way for: Alpine Spiced Apple Cider and vegan caramels. Alpine Cider is an instant cider powder that I found mixed in with the hot chocolate mixes on the shelf of my local Target. I checked a few other places, but didn't see it at Safeway or Giant. You should just go ahead and buy a box, because I have a few more recipes that will help you finish the whole thing off. And while it tastes great in baked goods, I don't recommend mixing it with hot water to drink. Just buy yourself a jug of fresh, locally pressed cider and leave this for the mixing bowl.
The caramels are a different story. There are a few options here. I happen to live only a few miles from the vegan super-center, Pangea, so I drove over after work one weekend and bought a bag of Cocomel vanilla caramels. Also, Spencer's Market has the Cocomel caramel's on sale right now if anyone wants to buy them here! Pangea also has a store brand called VeganSweets that makes caramels, which are delicious but I think not quite as nice as the Cocomel brand. There is also Feed Your Face caramels, which would work really nicely. Lastly, you can just avoid buying them all together and make your own. I love making caramel using this recipe.


Caramel Stuffed Apple Cider Cookies
veganized from the Cooking Photographer

1/2 cup Earth Balance
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 packets of Alpine Spiced Apple Cider
1 Ener-G egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
7 oz of vegan caramel, chopped into third inch size pieces.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In your standing mixer, cream the sugar with the Earth Balance. Add in the cider powder and mix until combined. Then add the prepared egg replacer and vanilla. Add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until a thick dough forms. I used a small scoop to portion out the dough. I flatted a scoop of dough with my palm, placed a chunk of caramel in the center, and then topped it with another flattened scoop of dough. I then pinched all the edges together and rolled it the dough back into a ball. Based on the size of your caramels and your scoop, the batch size is variable. But I made 15 cookies.
Bake several inches apart for 12-14 minutes. If you bake them for 12 minutes they will be nice and soft the way I prefer my cookies, but if you bake them for 14 minutes they will be firm. It's up to personal preference.

The only downside with this cookie, is that for the most part my caramel dissolved into the cookie rather than staying a separate layer like I saw in the non-vegan pictures. This could potentially be avoided if you used a really dense homemade caramel? I haven't tried it, but if anyone does I would be interested to see their results. Also if you want a heavier, spiced cider flavor I would definitely add some cinnamon and cloves and what not to the cookie dough. The spice of the cider is definitely washed out by the intense appleyness.

Pumpkin Bread

When I started MoFo, I didn't really know if I was going to have a theme. But last night I realized that I unintentionally created a theme. It's fall sweets. Apple, pumpkin, a little bit of pear, and a lot of spice. I might get wild and throw chocolate in there. Because I just can't break chocolate's allure for a whole month. No shame.


There are two pumpkin bread recipes that I always end up back on. They are very, very similar. There's only slight difference in flour choice, a touch of maple syrup, and a bit more spice. Isa's pumpkin bread will never fail you. But if you love your pumpkin bread to be a bit more nutrient dense and have a spice profile reminiscent of gingerbread, then this recipe is for you. I sometimes make things even more convoluted, and make Isa's recipe but replace half of the flour with whole wheat. I didn't do it with those loaf because I was running low on supplies, but I definitely suggest you top the bread with a handful of pumpkin seeds. It adds a lot of beauty and a nice crunch to the crust.
This is the kind of bread that you eat on a rainy morning when you woke up at 4am. This is the kind of bread that you eat when it's the last morning you have to wake up before a mini vacation, where you get to fly home to Tennessee for your friend's wedding. When you are stressing about how everything will get done at work in your albeit brief absence, and whether you have jewelry to match your bridesmaid dress, and if the electric bill ever showed up this month or not? This is the kind of bread that will comfort you, calm down for a few minutes to savor the cool morning, and urge you to treat yourself to a really fancy cup of coffee. I did it, so you probably should too.

As American as Apple Pie

I am not the wordiest or most eloquent blogger by any means. This is my first year attempting VeganMoFo, and I am hoping to gain a lot of from it. Aside from discovering all sorts of new blogs and great foods, I am hoping that this will teach me to blog smarter. That I don’t need to take thirty pictures of the same thing to find one I like. That I don’t have to write a soliloquy for every post. That sometimes simple is better.



The first time that I made the french vanilla ice cream recipe from Vegan a la Mode, I used Earth Balance rather than coconut oil or some other fat. The ice cream batter tasted so warm and buttery, that I knew even before churning it that I had big plans. I have had a huge amount of apples on hand the last few months, and they were just waiting to be roasted with spices. So after making a tiny portion of apple pie filling, I swirled it into the ice cream. I topped all of that with a creamy caramel sauce and a handful of crumbled graham crackers. It was a frozen apple pie a la mode. I couldn't have been more content with how it turned out.



Apple Pie Filling
3 small apples of your choice, I used Granny Smith
2 tbl brown sugar
2 tbl flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Peel and chop your apples into third inch chunks. In a large bowl mix the sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Toss the apples in the mixture, throw in a glass pan, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Apple Pie Ice Cream
makes one quart

1 batch french vanilla ice cream. Churned, but not frozen solid
1 batch apple pie filling
a few tablespoons caramel
a few crumbled graham crackers

After ice cream is churned, pour 1/3 into a plastic container with a lid. Spoon in several dollops of completely cooled pie filling, then repeat twice more. Allow this to freeze for 3 hours before scooping. Top with caramel and graham cracker crumbs.

September Vegan Food Swap

This was the first time that I participate in Cat of The Verdant Life's vegan food swap. I am really glad that it went as swimmingly as I had imagined.


My package came from Dianne of Veggie Girl. My favorite morning tea is Tazo Awake, so I was really excited to try to the Tazo Focus. The flavors were really nice. I took most of the bags to work to enjoy in the cool mornings. I was really interested in the Teecino as well. I knew of a few friends who drink herbal, caffeine free coffees, but hadn't ever given it a chance. The flavors were really nice, and I didn't feel the urge to add any milk or sugar like I normally do with coffee. It will also go really nicely with the marzipan filled chocolate, just sayin'.


I love Sweet & Sara's marshmallows, and am a huge fan of their rice crispy treats! I was really glad to find one in my little package. There was also a package of their rocky road bark. While it was pretty tasty, I am not sure that I would buy it for myself again. You just can't beat their rice crispy treats.
I haven't had a chance to try the powdered peanut butter, PB2. But I am definitely intrigued. I think I might try to incorporate it into some peanut butter cupcakes or frosting to see if I can make it even more peanut buttery! I also think it might be really nice on some savory tofu.
If you want to participate in the Vegan Food Swap, you can join here! You need to sign up by October 5th. And it will be the last one for the year, so you might as well join!

Everything But the Kitchen Sink

Sometimes there are things that I just want to say in some sort of public forum, but I didn't know how to classify it or whether I should bother to put it on this blog. I decided that it is aftebrall my blog, and if I want to tell people about things I enjoy, than I shouldn't worry about whether it fits in the narrow classification of 'baking blog' that I had originally intended to pursue. So I decided to create a title for this sort of thing that would let people know if they wanted to avoid it or not. I get that there are blogs people follow just because they are interested in hearing about recipes or clothes or life issues, and maybe you want to skip the rest. So here is "everything but the kitchen sink" since it's my favorite ice cream flavor, but also true to the fact that these things won't involve me filling the kitchen sink with dishes.


Last week I tabled for my work at DC VegFest. While VegFest has always been a success, I would definitely say that this has been the best year yet. It was at Yards Park, which is one of the most beautiful places I have seen in DC. We gave out a few hundred pounds of BBQ Beyond Meat for folks to sample. If you haven't heard of it yet, it's the new best faux meat. If you're into that kind of thing. My kind of thing is the sweets. And I did spend $20 at the Vegan Treats table on donuts & cannolis. Never a bad choice. I normally fall into the trap of buying all their beautiful miniature cakes because I can't stop looking at them, but I always regret it because I would just rather eat a cannoli than a piece of cake.


Also at VegFest this year was Vegan Cuts. If you haven't heard of this phenomenal website, you should definitely join. They have amazing deals on things like Emmy's Organics macaroon sampler packs and reusable glass straws. I bought a subscription to their monthly snack box. I can't wait to get my first package in the mail!
Is there anything else new and exciting in the vegan world that I should be aware of? Besides the impending tidal wave of blogposts from Vegan MoFo? I signed up for the first time. I am pretty excited/nervous/overwhelmed.

Coffee & Donuts Cupcakes

I was making donuts for a bake sale for a few months ago and had a bit of batter left over from several batches. I make a few mini donuts to check their quality, but then realized that they had much more potential than being a half pint donut. A few minutes later,I was whipping up a batch of mocha frosting. Pipe that onto a dark chocolate cupcake with a hint of espresso powder, top it with a sprinkled donut, and you have what I deemed "the breakfast of champions." Hopefully, Kurt Vonnegut approved.



Chocolate Cupcakes
recipe adapted from VCTTOW

1 cup almond milk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon ground espresso
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
2 teaspoons coffee extract
1 teaspoon chocolate extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder (Valrhona if you can find it)
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 350. Curdle the milk with the vinegar. Add the espresso, sugar, oil, & extracts. Whisk rapidly. Sift together dry ingredients in large bowl. Add met and mix until combined and smooth. Fill liners 3/4 of the way and bake 16-20 minutes.

While your cupcakes are cooling you want to bake your donuts & make your frosting. If you are a great multi-tasker, you could even bake your donuts and cupcakes at the same time. If you are gonna attempt this, I recommend prepping all your ingredients first. I do the dry ingredients for both items, then the wet. In this instance, I scooped my cupcakes while I was melting the butter for the donut batter. Then I tossed the cupcakes into the oven while I was making the donut batter and filling the pans. By the time you are finish with that they will both be ready to pull out of the oven at roughly the same time. Just be sure to put your donuts in the oven gently so that your cupcakes don't fall!


Mocha Frosting
very minorly adapted from Sweetapolita

1 cup Earth Balance
1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 teaspoons coffee extract
5 oz quality bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped, melted and cooled
1/4 cup almond milk

Beat together the Earth Balance and powdered sugar. Add the extracts and mix again. Slowly pour in melted chocolate while the mixer is on. Add almond milk to desired consistency. You may not need all of the almond milk, but you could need a bit more. It's up to your preferences and a lot of little factors, like humidity and what not.


These cupcakes sold out so quickly that I was shocked. Everyone kept crooning over them and taking pictures on their fancy phones. I was all pink and my cheeks hurt from grinning. It felt so good that I made another batch to box up for a friend's birthday. I baked them in blue polka dot liners, put them in a pink polka dot box, and wrapped the box with baker's twine & tied a candle into the center of the bow. Major cute factor. Basically what I am saying is that these cupcakes will impress everyone. You can't lose.