Tuesday 29 January 2008

Tales of joy and woe from the kitchen...

I'll start with a tale of joy- raspberry-choco cookies from veganomicon made diabetic friendly! I halved the quantity and tested this out to see if it'd work. I simply used diabetic jam, subbed the sugar for agave nectar, and used a little more flour (maybe 1/2 cup-ish) and kneaded the extra flour into the dough till it seemed dough-like. It was still a bit stickier than it normally would've been, but I just dropped it onto the baking sheet in tablespoonfuls and baked it for a couple minutes longer, and the resulting cookies tasted perfectly nice, so I'd call this a success!
Another happy tale- Pizza has long been one of my favourite foods, and something I thought I'd miss on going vegan. I didn't miss it much at all as it happens, especially with vegan pizzas around! This here is simple but delicious- Vegan with a vengeance's pizza dough and tofu ricotta recipe with my own pizza sauce recipe and some shrooms. <3

Now for the tale of woe- and this is what makes cruelty free kitchen different from most food blogs with their pretty pictures and sucess stories, here you get to read the fuck-ups and see when things get ugly, for your amusement...

They're lemon cupcakes. Explosive lemon cupcakes. With double the baking powder they should really have. How did that happen?

Well, I never had any self-raising flour so I tried to make my own by adding extra baking powder to plain flour(FWIW the rule is 3 tsp of powder per 8oz plain flour), something I've successfully done loads of times in the past.

But I was having a blonde moment and between the mental arithmatic of halfing things down to make a smaller quantity, must have got confused and used almost double the baking powder... eep!

I discovered my mistake on eating the batter and thinking it was overly bitter and remembered what I'd done... I looked at my cakes to discover they were rather explosive-looking. I tasted a little to see if the finished product was any better than the batter, but alas, they tasted bogging too. I hate wasting food, but if it provides my readers with a laugh I'll share all here...

2 comments:

J said...

I made the Chocolate Raspberry cookies from V-Con as well. They were delish and had a wonderful chewy texture. I brought some into work so that the omni's here can experience for themselves that vegan food is good and we don't subsist off of lettuce and carrots.

I finally got VwaV (just last night in fact) and that pizza crust recipe was one of the first ones to catch my eye. It is nice to see that someone has had success, I'll definitely have to give it a shot now.

I love that you share not only your baking successes, but also your mistakes! Not only is it amusing, but others can learn, well, not to do what you did! :-)

DJ said...

Those cupcakes are HILARIOUS - I have never had cupcakes trying to take over my oven in quite such a way, but I have certainly burnt my fair share to a crisp!