Rocky Road Fudge

My freshman year of college I told my mother that I didn't want a birthday cake. I told her that I had eaten a lot of cake in the last few weeks and was sort of over it. She set out to find a birthday appropriate cake alternative. I came home to find a 3 tiered fudge "cake". She had made batches of both chocolate and peanut butter fudge and let them set in cake pans. After popping them out, she stacked them up and stuck several candles in the top layer. There must have been 15 pounds of fudge. Even with the help of many friends I couldn't eat it all. I remember having plastic wrapped chunks of fudge in my freezer for most of the year. So maybe that is why I associate fudge with birthdays. Maybe it's because fudge is so rich and indulgent. Maybe it's because I refuse to let fudge just be fudge and feel compelled to make it even more elaborate.
Yesterday was a friend's birthday, and she is someone who I felt definitely deserved something extra special. Originally I set out to make both rocky road and turtle track fudge, but things didn't quite go as planned. I was trying to mix the marshmallows into the molten fudge by hand and I just wasn't quite quick enough. The fudge was starting to crystalize already, and I knew that I didn't have time to separate it into two bowls to add the different mix-ins. So I just went with rocky road for now. If history could repeat itself, I just would have made the fudge base in halves but now you can learn from my mistakes. Also, I don't have an electric hand mixer, but that would be really useful for this project. My fudge still turned out beautifully and everyone involved was content.


Rocky Road Fudge
base veganized from Kraft's Fantasy Fudge

3 cups sugar
3/4 cup Earth Balance
2/3 cup full fat coconut milk
12 oz semisweet chocolate
1 bag Dandies, halved
1/2 cup Ricemellow Creme
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup chopped almonds

Line a 9" square pan with parchment. Chop almonds and half of the dandies into small 1/4" pieces. In a heavy bottomed, large pan combine the sugar, Earth Balance, and coconut milk. Stir continuously over medium heat until it comes to a rolling boil. Allow to boil for 5 minutes. Stir in chocolate, vanilla, Ricemellow creme, and the uncut Dandies. You will need to stir quickly. I highly recommend an electric mixer. Fold in almonds and remaining marshmallows and pour into the pan. I reserved a few marshmallows and almonds for the top to add a little more visual appeal. Allow to cool for at least 2 hours before slicing into squares with a sharp knife. It's also best if you can find a knife without indentions on the side. You will get a much prettier cut.


I have made this fudge a few times before tweaking the recipes in various ways. One time I made it using 7oz of Smucker's Marshmallow topping, which is chemically vegan. It tasted great, but definitely was a much softer set & had to be kept in the fridge. I have made it with all Dandies. It tastes wonderful and has the same consistency as this batch. I haven't made it using only Ricemellow yet, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. I used a mixture because I had a jar of the creme that had been lurking in my fridge for a few months that I wanted to finish and already needed to buy a bag or marshmallows to make the flavor combination I wanted.
I will definitely be revisiting my turtle tracks idea too. I have caramel and pecans just dying to be swirled into fudge. I also wouldn't mind trying a moose tracks version. I am thinking chunks of peanut butter cups mixed in would be really ridiculous?! I should probably just turn all of my favorite ice cream flavors into fudge. Cookie dough? Nutty buddy? A girl can dream.

Chocolate Hazelnut Tarts

I sort of got in the swing of things with vegan MoFo. I spent almost everyday that I had off baking numerous things to document throughout the week. With that sort of obligation gone, I am a little afraid that I will let the month slip away too quickly without blogging. I decided to remedy this by giving myself another theme for the month, something I am really passionate about, chocolate. So while there won't be 25 posts about chocolate, I am hoping to get a solid handful in. Before I know it Thanksgiving will be here and I will be knee deep in pies at the bakery and come home only to collapse into my warm bed.



Chocolate Hazelnut Tarts
makes six 4" tarts

1 batch of shortbread tart dough from Vegan Pie in the Sky
1 batch of dark chocolate orange custard from Great Gluten-Free Vegan Eats*
1 cup of toasted hazelnuts, chopped

Make the tart shells. While they are cooling, make the custard. Pour into shells and allow to cool for 2 hours. Top with chopped hazelnuts and serve cooled. These also make really great parfaits. I will probably make this custard repeatedly with different flavorings and mix-ins!
* I omitted the orange from the custard and added 2 teaspoons of hazelnut extract. You don't need this, but it does add to the depth of the flavor

October Vegan Food Swap

This was the second time that I have participated in Cat of The Verdant Life's vegan food swap. I am really glad that it went as swimmingly as I had imagined again. My package came from from Leslie of Eat4Health. It might have been a little tricky for someone advocating healthy diets to compose a package for someone with as big of a sweet tooth as me, but she did great!


I got two chocolate bars, which I am tucking away to bake with. I also got several great snacks that I have been putting in my lunch box most days. I hadn't tried the edamame goji berry combination before, and was pretty pleased with the mixture. I love the strawberry fruit leathers. I have been trying to ration them to one a day, but it would be too easy to eat the whole box at once. I got two Builder Bars which I ate for breakfast the last two days with some fruit. I have a long, early morning commute, so it's always nice to have something that I can eat while driving that will also keep me full for a few hours. I knew that I like the chocolate peanut butter bar, but also got to try a chocolate mint one for the first time. I was glad that the mint wasn't too overwhelming like I thought it might be. My favorite part of the package was defeinitely the Enjoy Life Seed & Fruit mix. It was so good! I love their mini chocolate chips, so throwing in some pumpkin and sunflower seeds and dried apples and cranberries can only make it better. I am sure that it would be great in a trail mix muffin. But that would mean I would have to stop eating the bag a handful at a time in the very near future!
If you want to participate in the Vegan Food Swap, you can join here! This was the last swap for 2012, so you will have to check back in January if you want to join!

Gingerdead Man

Happy Halloween!! I have been holding on to this cookie cutter for a few weeks now, waiting for the right time to use it. And of course it's Halloween! These bad boys are a little spooky, a little gorey, and definitely tastey. I used Isa's gingerbread recipe but upped the spice content a little. Things gotta have a little extra bite on all hallow's eve! To be honest, I was pretty disappointed in the cookie cutter. I only got 2 pipeable stamped cookies out of the 9 I made. I am not sure if I just need a gingerbread that is a lot firmer or what. That cookie cutter is also giant. The cookies are bigger than my hands. And while I have pretty dainty hands, that's still a whole lotta cookie!
It has been a wild month. I can hardly believe that it's over. AND that I managed to post 31 days in a row! And made 27 different things! It's time to take a tiny break and restock my kitchen cabinets. The flour & sugar jars are both empty. I'm out of cans of coconut milk for the first time in many months. I used almost a whole jar of cinnamon! I hope that everyone else had as good of a time as I did. I'm excited to reach a few more round-up posts. Maybe I will even make one myself! What's been your highlight of the month?

Pomegranate Tarts

I was thinking about pomegranates a lot last week when I was making the panna cotta. I realized that while pomegranate juice was really expensive, I had recently gotten several whole fruits for pretty cheap. I looked up a few things on juicing pomegranates, and it's actually really easy! After I separated all the arils from the rind, I threw them in my food processor, then poured that into a fine mesh strainer. After squeezing the pulp for a minute or two I looked down at the measuring cup and was pretty pleased with how much juice I was able to get from the fruit. I reserved at least a third of a cup of arils for the top of the tarts, but from the remaining fruit I was able to get 3/4 cup of juice! That's so much cheaper than buying a bottle of POM.
These tarts are pretty simple. Once you have the juice it only takes a few minutes to make the filling. If you don't wanna go through the hassle of making tart shells, you could also buy pre-folded phyllo cups. They are most often vegan and are so, so convenient!


Pomegranate Tarts
makes three 3" tarts

1/2 batch of shortbread tart dough from Vegan Pie in the Sky
3/4 cup pomegranate juice
1/3 cup sugar
2 tbl cornstarch
2 tbl key lime juice
Prepare the tart dough, fill the shells, and bake them. While the shells are cooling, combine the pomegranate juice and sugar in a small sauce pan. Heat until boiling. While that is heating, whisk the cornstarch into the lime juice. Slowly whisk the lime mixture into the boiling pan. Whisk continually on medium heat until the mixture has thickened to a pudding like consistency. Fill tart shells and top with additional arils if so desired.

Pumpkin Swirl Cheesecake with Speculoos Crust

As the last few days of October are winding up I had to rethink what I was going to make a little more closely. I decided to combine a few of my things and make a pumpkin vanilla swirl cheesecake with a speculoos cookie crust. I always see pumpkin cheesecakes with gingersnap crusts, so I decided to tweak it and go with speculoos instead. I also have been trying to use more cookbooks, so I went with a recipe from Emily Mainquist's Sweet Vegan. I thought that I had all the ingredients, but when I started making the filling last night, I realized that somehow 2 of my 3 containers of Tofutti cream cheese had some sneaky little chunks missing. I ended up replacing the missing ~6 oz of cream cheese with vegan sour cream since the ingredients are pretty similar and the taste isn't too different either in my opinion. This might have led to my cheesecake setting a bit more softly than with all cream cheese, but no one seemed to mind. I also added a half tablespoon of vanilla bean paste to the vanilla cream cheese filling, and at least an additional teaspoon of cinnamon to the pumpkin cream cheese filling. I think pumpkin pie is pretty boring, so I was happy to know that this works & would be a fun substitute for the upcoming holiday dessert table.


Speculoos Cookie Crust
enough for an 8-9" cheesecake
13 ounces Speculoos Cookies (one & a half packages)
1/2 to 3/4 cup Earth Balance cinnamon spread
Crush the cookies to crumbs in a food processor. While those are being pulsed, melt the Earth Balance in the microwave. Pour over the cookie crumbs and mix with hands until the butter is fully incorporated. Start with 1/2 cup of melted Earth Balance. If the cookie crumbs still aren't wet enough to hold together when you squeeze it in your hands, then add the remaining spread. Press into the pan's bottom and up the sides. Bake as directed for your preferred cheesecake filling. If you want to use the regular spread, it will be just as good, but the kick of extra spice is really nice here, so I would add a half teaspoon of cinnamon to the cookie crumbs.
After the cheesecake baked I let it set overnight, then topped it with dollops of coconut whip cream and halves of the remaining speculoos cookies leftover from the crust recipe. I was glad to have so many people home from the storm so that I wasn't tempted to eat more than one slice of this cheesecake! Do you have a favorite cheesecake recipe? This is the first one I have ever made. I have never been a huge cheesecake fan until recently. Now that I found a nice springform pan at the thrift store for $2 I feel a lot more compelled to try a few recipes!

Halloween Cookies

It feels like Halloween has come a little early this year. I did most of my celebrating this weekend, watching scary movies with a bunch of friends. Things have gotten a little spooky today as people are preparing for this hurricane. Everything seems to be shutting down tomorrow. It's going to be a ghost town, but I'm ready to snack on popcorn and play a few board games. Hopefully things don't get too bad.
If you have power, then you should consider making some super simple Halloween cookies like these. The ghost to the left is a standard sugar cookie that I have shared my favorite recipe for numerous times. For the regular sugar cookie dough, I also used pumpkin and leaf cookie cutters. The black cat cookie to the right is a new one to me, it's from Hannah's Vegan Desserts. It's a chocolate cookie with a bit of black cocoa powder. The black cocoa lends the cookie a very oreo-esque taste and gives it it's dark coloring. I also used the chocolate cookie dough to make a few bats and tombstones. I searched around for a witch's hat, but to no avail. I should start searching a little earlier next year. On an unrelated note, I think this is either the third or fourth time that I have used one of Hannah's recipes this month. Maybe my MoFo theme should have been working my way through Hannah's anthology.
I hope everyone stays safe for the next few days. It's better to prepare for the storms and stay safe then to regret it later. So stock up on the cookies and almond milk while you can!