vegan chocolate cupcakes

Birthday cupcakes! I love this recipe, I cook it a lot, and it's very forgiving. I often add extra things and change it around, and it always seems to work out! Normally I make a big cake, but this time was cupcakes.

The little cupcake cups are from Cake Deco. Yay!

Vegan Chocolate Cake (or cupcakes!)

1.5 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup white sugar
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup oil (I use a nice olive oil)
1 cups water / juice
1 tablespoons vinegar or lemon/orange juice
1 teaspoons vanilla extract

This time, I used a cup of liquid comprising 1 tbspn orange pulp (from a boiled orange) and the rest of the cup full of water. I also added about 1tbspn choc chips, and I used 1 tbspn orange juice (instead of vinegar). Yum!

Directions
In a large bowl, mix the oil & sugar. Add in the rest of the wet ingredients.
Mix in the dry ingredients, and beat until just smooth.

Pour into cupcake cups, or a greased cake tin (about the size of a loaf tin).

Bake at 180C - cupcakes for 20 mins or cake for 40 mins.

This recipe is adapted from Grandma's Eggless Butterless Milkless Cake. Mmm.

cherry chocolate sundae

This isn't quite a true sundae, as it's not frozen. Chris gave me this lovely cookbook for Christmas - to encourage me to make raw things that aren't salad?


It's a great cookbook, I did a bit of research on Amazon, and this book (Raw Food for 1 or 2 people) is recommended by lots of people because it uses kitchen utensils most people have, rather than the dehydrator so many raw cookbooks use. I do find the cover design rather offensively bad, but don't let that put you off.

I've been intrigued by raw desserts for a little while now, and wanted to try the cashew vanilla cream.

Cherry Chocolate Sundae

One layer of halved & pitted cherries.
One layer of raw cashew cream.
One layer of chocolate sauce.

Raw Cashew Cream
I altered the recipe as I went, but basically you:
Soak 1 cup of raw cashews for an hour or so.
Then, blend them in a food processor with some agave syrup & vanilla extract.
Add additional water slowly as you go, and keep on tasting! Just keep blending until you get to a delicious, creamy consistency.

Chocolate sauce
Heat 1/4 cup soy milk in a double boiler, whisking in 1/2 tsp cornflour.
When the cornflour is in, add about 25grams of dark chocolate, and stir until melted.
Let it cool! That's it.

Sorry about the super 80s photo styling, by the way...

raw chocolate cake

The latest issue of lovely Peppermint magazine had a rather intriguing recipe for raw chocolate cake. Chris didn't object to having this for his birthday, so away we went!

This is the cake pre-icing...

The recipe is by Ani Phyo, you can see of super cute little video of her making on a talk show it here.

Essentially the cake is walnuts, cocoa & dates, which are blended up into fine crumbs, and smooshed together into a cake. It's good! The icing even has avocado in.

So, now I have become all inspired by raw foods, which taste delicious and make me feel good. And may be an antidote to Christmas food?

Vegan Afghan Biscuits

Yum! I love these cookies, chocolatey and crunchy, but they're normally very buttery, so here's my adapted version. I've been rather absent on this blog - my business has been super busy leading up to Christmas, but I do have some posts ready and have been eating some yummy things, hooray!

Vegan Afghan Biscuits

Ingredients:

BISCUITS
½ cup of olive oil
1/2 cup of castor sugar
1 tablespoon water
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
3 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup of unsweetened corn flakes (Kellogg's)

ICING
1 cup of icing sugar
2 Tbsp of unsweetened cocoa powder
3 Tbsp water
3 drops of oil (adds glossiness)
pistachios/flaked almonds (optional)

Preparation:
Pre-heat the oven to 180C.
Cream the oil and sugar. Add the water.
Sift together the flour and cocoa powder and mix into oil/sugar.
Fold in cornflakes (don't worry if they crumble).
Roll 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls of the dough into balls and flatten them slightly. Place onto oven tray lined with baking paper.
Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack.

Icing: combine icing sugar, cocoa powder, oil and water in a bowl. Mix well.
Spoon a little icing on each cookie and then decorate with flaked nuts.


A tip on the cookie dough -- you really need to roll and press the dough firmly into a ball because the cornflakes can make the dough a little crumbly. Just scrunch it all together!!

Vegan Double Choc Chip Cookies

Mmm. Yum. This recipe for vegan cookies has been kicking around my house for years & years. Adapted from a butter-y & egg-y recipe, you can add anything to it. Chocolate chips, nuts, dried fruit, coconut, the list goes on!

I used to make these with Nuttelex. However, due to concerns about Nuttelex's use of Palm Oil, and also the whole trans-fat thing (is it bad? is it not?) I just use oil.

Hooray! So these ones are for Chris's mums birthday, but of course I've snuck in a few already, just to be sure they taste okay!

Ingredients:
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil (I use olive oil, you can use whatever you like!)
1 & 2/3 cup self raising flour
3 tablespoons cornflour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbspn apple juice / water / soy milk
2 tspn vanilla essence
1 & 1/4 cups choc chips / walnuts / coconut

Preheat oven to 180C.

Okay.
Mix the oil & sugar together.
Add in the flours, & baking powder, and mix until the oil is distributed.
Add in the juice/water/milk & vanilla, and mix until the cookie dough is kinda like a crumbly, pastey dough, like this:

Then, add in the chocolate chips, nuts, coconut (or whatever you choose) and mix through. By now it should be slightly resemblant of breadcrumbs?

Roll it in to little balls, like this:


Then bake on greaseproof paper for about 15 mins, until the bottom of the cookies are lightly browned.

Note: the cookies will be super soft when you pull them out of the oven, but will crisp up as they cool.

Hooray! Yummy cookies!

This recipe makes around 30 small cookies. Yum.

cheater pastry pudding

This recipe is super easy, but requires puff pastry which I just bought at the shop (hence, cheater).

I was watching Masterchef a little while ago, and they made some sort of caramelised apples with french toast. I am yet to be convinced of the virtue of either eggy french toast, or a vegan alternative, so I came up with these to go with my apples.

Again, don't have any quantities in this recipe...

You'll need puff pastry, don't use a low fat version or they won't be nice & crunchy and puffy.

Take
1 sheet puff pastry (defrosted), and sprinkle on top:
Caster sugar (about 1 tbspn), &
Cinnamon, &
Nutmeg of clove powder, &
Dessicated coconut, &
Apple, just a tiny bit grated VERY finely (optional).

Basically the more you add, the harder it is to roll, but that's okay. Don't add much that is too wet or it won't be nice & crunchy when it's cooked.

So. Roll it all up (the pastry needs to be very non-frozen & very non-low-fat or it will crack).

Then with a sharp knife, slice it into rounds - each should be about 1.5cm thick.

Then, place on a baking tray and bake for about 15 mins or until they look golden and delicious.

Pre-cooking - sorry about the battered tray!

Post cooking - the darker ones are just upside down.

Serve with caramelised apples or something else yummy.

You can also make savoury ones of these, go for it!!